The struggle within the Episcopal Church (TEC) in the United States over theology, polity, and morality is a paradigm for how ecclesiastical bodies in general have tried to handle divisive issues of sexuality, doctrine, and authority. Ronald Caldwell's study of that struggle within one diocese of TEC, South Carolina, is a paradigm within that paradigm. His exhaustive survey of the events, personalities, arguments, decisions, legal battles, conventions, and church politics that led to the schism there helps us see the larger struggle within TEC in meticulous, sometimes mind-numbing detail at the local level. Drawing upon more than two thousand primary and secondary sources, Caldwell provides us with what will surely become the definitive history of what went on in South Carolina and how, as of 2017, there came to be two entities each claiming the right to call itself the Diocese of South Carolina, though one identifies itself with a group of independent breakaway churches in the Anglican Church of North America (ACNA, which so far has no standing in the Anglican Communion) and the other with TEC.

As a historian, Caldwell marshals in exquisite array all relevant available material, from minutes, diaries, letters, convention records, news stories, archives, phone calls, emails, and so forth, to tell the story of how one of the earliest dioceses in the Protestant Episcopal Church, founded in the late eighteenth century, was the scene of one of the most virulent attacks on the authority and teachings of the Episcopal Church at the turn of the twenty-first century. While maintaining the objectivity of an historian, Caldwell assembles documents that reveal the reasoning and often duplicity of many in the diocese who strove to cut its ties to TEC following the ratification of the election and subsequent ordination of Gene Robinson, an openly gay man, to the episcopate of New Hampshire in 2003. Caldwell helpfully notes a trinity of interlocking issues on which the dissention within TEC hinged: polity, theology, and morality. While the relative weight of each shifts somewhat during the struggle, the dissenters (calling themselves orthodox and their opponents heretics) claimed the authority of the historic theology of the Christian church, the absolutely unchanging condemnation of homosexuality, and the polity of an institutional structure that they hoped would allow the orthodox to repeal and replace those churches that had veered into heresy.

Caldwell also offers a schematic axis on which to lay the contestation within the church: an axis of vertical versus horizontal approaches to these issues. The orthodox rely on a top-down vertical authority which focuses on what God demands of those who would submit themselves to transcendent truth through doctrine, liturgy, and especially the authority of the Bible, taken in an almost fundamentalist way. Their opponents have a more horizontal orientation, seeing the work of the church primarily as an active reaching out to others to advance the causes of justice, inclusiveness, healing, and compassion, which includes affirmation of homosexuality, the treatment of which had moved many in the church into the area of what Caldwell somewhat unhelpfully calls “moral neutrality” (97), and eventually of rites of the church which would sanction gay marriages.

One of the many strengths of the book is Caldwell's repeated reminders that the events of the early years of this century hauntingly parallel events that occurred in the same state that helped precipitate the Civil War. It is no coincidence that the dissenters in the Diocese of South Carolina invoked notions such as “nullification” of the canons and actions of TEC just as their forbears had done with respect to the laws binding the states into a single union. Without accusing the dissenters of nostalgia for slavery, Caldwell notes the diocese's historic reluctance to fully embrace a racially inclusive policy. Its leaders' revolt against TEC comes against a background of resistance to integration, including a tardy and never wholehearted acceptance of women as priests, and to revisions in the Book of Common Prayer.

What lies at the heart of Caldwell's compelling narrative are the attempts by conservatives among the self-styled orthodox to repudiate the canons and resolutions of TEC without openly acting, until late in the story, to publicly remove themselves from TEC. The election of Mark Lawrence to the episcopate of the diocese led to a number of acts that were never openly acknowledged. While sympathetic in some ways to Lawrence as a person, Caldwell stops just short of claiming he was intentionally duplicitous in his dealings with TEC and especially its presiding bishop, Katherine Jefferts Shori, as well as his intentions to take the diocese out of TEC.

As a history, Caldwell's book is about as good as one can get in dissecting and laying out the story of a diocese in conflict with the larger body to which it was affiliated. What the book, as history, cannot get into are a series of questions that its narrative nevertheless evokes. Why, for example, did the conservatives focus so much on sexuality? Why were they so obsessed with homosexuality about which Jesus and the early church said virtually nothing, while ignoring divorce, which Jesus explicitly condemned? (Perhaps dealing with those questions requires a psychologist, not an historian.) Why were they so committed to an ecclesiastical authority structure that often precluded a definitive resolution of moral positions that they thought were so clear-cut? Why did they not just embrace the Southern Baptist Church, or biblical fundamentalism generally, whose moral position on homosexuality is much closer to theirs than the “liberal” TEC? Why work through the cumbersome structures of the Anglican Communion (which ultimately have no dispositive authority over local provinces and dioceses) rather than convert to Rome, whose authority is virtually absolute and not dependent on the democratic gathering of representatives whose views change from time to time? That Caldwell does not deal with these questions is no criticism of his work; that he gives us reason to ask them is one of its great virtues.