Clergy In Colonial America: A Peek Into American Religious History
Bruton Episcopal Church in Colonial Williamsburg. (Photo by Paul McCarthy)
(ANALYSIS) And now for something completely different!
I spend a lot of my time on this Substack providing analysis of survey data, which makes sense because I am a social scientist and all. I think that’s the primary way that most of us are introduced to the world of data analysis — we are given a link to download the GSS, pointed toward the codebook and told to get to work.
But there’s all kinds of other data out there that can help us understand the world around us. I’ve tried to do a bit of that in a few posts. I wrote about the content of resolutions adopted by the Southern Baptist Convention, the average pay of a member of the clergy and the enrollment trends in a bunch of Christian colleges and universities.
Well, the Association of Religion Data Archives posted an absolutely fascinating dataset called “Clergymen in Revolutionary America (1763-1783).” It’s exactly what you think it is — a big spreadsheet of clergy in the colonies. That’s awesome. The data comes as a result of the efforts by Lewis Frederick Weis in the 1930s to collect this information. It resulted in the publication of two books, “The Colonial Clergy and the Colonial Churches of New England” and “The Colonial Churches and the Colonial Clergy of the Middle and Southern Colonies.”
The summary of the data is as follows:
Weis listed every colonial minister, along with the church or churches pastored by that minister between the founding of Jamestown and the end of the Revolutionary War in 1783, although this dataset is limited to the Revolutionary era (1763-1783). Weis also listed the location of the churches, the ministers' years of service, educational degrees held by the minister, and their denominational attachments.
The reason that the ARDA has this data is through the efforts of David Clemons, who digitized those earlier records as part of his dissertation project.
There aren’t a ton of variables here, but I think this offers a fun little peek into the world of colonial religion through the lens of 4,156 clergy records.
To read the rest of Ryan Burge’s column, click here.
Ryan Burge is an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, a pastor in the American Baptist Church and the co-founder and frequent contributor to Religion in Public, a forum for scholars of religion and politics to make their work accessible to a more general audience. His research focuses on the intersection of religiosity and political behavior, especially in the U.S. Follow him on X at @ryanburge.