Algernon Sidney Crapsey (1847–1927) was an American Episcopal clergyman who in 1906 was defrocked after a celebrated heresy trial."Adelaide Crapsey." Britannica Academic, Encyclopædia Britannica (Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 18 Sep. 2016).
Family Algernon Sidney Crapsey was born in Fairmount, Ohio on June 28, 1847. His maternal grandfather Senator Thomas Morris left Virginia because he opposed slavery to help settle Ohio. Morris was an Abolitionist. He served one term in the United States Senate. Crapsey "identified deeply" with his grandfather Morris, who was to him "a seer, a prophet, a hero, and a martyr."
Crapsey's father was a lawyer whose office was in nearby Cincinnati.
Early life When his father got into financial difficulty, Crapsey quit school at age eleven and took a job in a dry good store. When, after two years, his father recovered financially, Crapsey returned to school, but because he was the oldest boy in his class, he felt uncomfortable and quit school again and took a job in a hardware factory. After a co-worker called him "worthless," in August 1862, at age fourteen, Crapsey joined the army during the American Civil War. However, he was given a medical discharge the first winter after his enlistment and sent back to his home in Fairmount, Ohio.
Both at home and at his father's law office, Crapsey was bored. However, there was a library in the same building. Crapsey took advantage of the library to educate himself. He read Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, Washington Irving, Thomas Babington Macaulay, William Makepeace Thackeray, William H. Prescott, and the Bible. One evening in Cincinnati, Crapsey attended a service at Christ Church. He later looked back on the experience "as the hour of his conversion."
In 1863, Crapsey took a job as storekeeper in a salt yard in West Virginia. By the beginning of 1864, he was back in Cincinnati. He found a job there as a bookkeeper in a printing company. To improve his qualifications for the job, he attended night classes. Nevertheless, Crapsey was fired. His next job was in the Dead Letter Office in Washington, D.C. for six months.
Crapsey's uncle persuaded him that there were more opportunities in New York City. He found a job as bookkeeper and cashier in a print shop.
Ministry in the Episcopal Church
While working in New York City, Crapsey attended services at Christ Episcopal Church. The Rev. Ferdinand Cartwright Ewer was the rector. This was another turning point in Crapsey's life. Ewer influenced Crapsey to seek ordination in the Episcopal church. To receive the education required for ordination, he attended St. Stephen's College, Annandale, New York for two years. He then attended the General Theological Seminary in New York City for three years, graduating with a degree in divinity.
Crapsey was ordained a deacon on June 30, 1872, and a priest on October 5, 1873."Crapsey, Algernon Sidney" in An Episcopal Dictionary of the Church: A User-Friendly Reference for Episcopalians (Church Publishing, Inc., 1999). 129.
After ordination, Crapsey worked in St. Paul's Chapel of Trinity Church in New York City.
During his time in St. Paul's Chapel of Trinity Church, Crapsey married Adelaide Trowbridge, whose father was a Catskill, New York newspaper man. The couple had nine children.
St. Andrew's Mission The father of one of Crapsey's seminary friends persuaded Crapsey to leave St. Paul's Chapel to serve in St. Andrew's Mission, Rochester, New York. So Crapsey, with his wife and three small children, moved to Rochester. On June 1, 1879, he began his work in St. Andrew's mission, located in a mostly Roman Catholic neighborhood.
In St. Andrew's, Crapsey and his wife entered into the lives of the people. During the first summer, Crapsey had classes for the children in which he taught them about plants and how they grow.
For the women, Mrs. Crapsey organized women's groups. For the men, Crapsey organized the St. Andrew's Brotherhood. The organization did charitable work and promoted religious education. The Brotherhood grew to three hundred members, but not all were members of St. Andrews. The Brotherhood was as a "Mutual Benefit Society." Payments were made to sick members, to the widows of members, and to the members who lost their wives.
In addition to his work with the Brotherhood and traditional parish duties, Crapsey led retreats for the Sisters of St. Mary, an Episcopal religious order in Peekskill, NY. He lectured at black Episcopal churches, urging members to stand up for their rights. In Rochester, Crapsey was one of the founders and the first president of the Citizens Political Reform Association, which worked for civic improvement in the face of the poverty caused by the Depression of 1893. He visited people in asylums and prisons.
Together, the Crapseys established the first training school for kindergarten teachers in Rochester. They also began a night school with classes in "domestic science and mechanical arts."
In 1897, Crapsey published a book entitled A Voice in the Wilderness.A Voice in the Wilderness In it, he made five statements affirming his orthodoxy:A Voice in the Wilderness. He reaffirmed the vows which he made at the time of his ordination. He professed his belief that the Holy Scriptures are the Word of God. He professed his belief, explicit and implicit, in the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds. He professed his use and veneration of the Sacraments as the means of union between the soul and God. He said that he was ready to follow the Bishops and others who are set over him in the Lord.
While at St. Andrew's, the Crapseys lost two daughters. Ruth died of undulant fever in 1898 at age eleven and daughter Emily died in 1901 at age 24 of appendicitis.Susan Sutton Smith, ed., Complete Poems and Collected Letters of Adelaide Crapsey (State University of New York Press, 2016), 4.
The twenty-fifth anniversary of the Crapsey's coming to St. Andrew's was on June 1, 1904. The congregation had a special service to celebrate the occasion and gave him gifts. A Rochester newspaper extolled Crapsey as "a power for good in the community for 25 years."
Crapsey published a book in 1905 entitled Religion and Politics.Religion and Politics It was based on a series of lectures in which Crapsey "advocated that the church become involved in social reform."
Opposition to ecclesiastical authority In his autobiography, Crapsey says that he had been a heretic from his tenth year. "A heretic," he says, "is one who thinks and gives voice to his own thought," and has difficulty submitting to authority. Crapsey characterizes himself as a "Humanist," who took God for granted. His allegiance to Jesus was based on His humanity more than on His divinity.
Crapsey pictured himself "as a simple parish priest, primarily concerned with the welfare of his parishioners." However, he was not satisfied with "the dogma of the church" and he felt it is duty to speak publicly about this fact.
Crapsey wanted to be elected a bishop, but, when he was not, he declared himself a "prophet." From his perspective this office was more important than that of a bishop, and it lifted him above "mundane denominationalism." Rather than accept the truth and historicity of the Bible merely because they were part of the "historic Christian faith" as received by his church, turned to "developments in scientific research" and to "higher criticism" of the Bible. Crapsey was "proud to acknowledge his heresy" because of his "rebellious, yet ethical heritage demanded it."
Conflict with Bishop Walker There has been a broad agreement in the literature on the subject that the action against Crapsey was the work of Bishop William David Walker as "a strong-willed bishop" and of "conservatives" in the diocese. However, in his article "Algernon Sidney Crapsey and the Move for Presentment," Stephen Todd Neese documents Crapsey's "incessant public exhibition" and his "prodding the diocese" until it finally resulted in his trial.
In 1885, Crapsey was feeling "discouragement," both because of "a sense of personal failure" and "a disillusionment in the Christian Church as a whole." He described his disillusionment in a sermon at a Presbyterian Church in Rochester. This occasioned Crapsey's first run-in with Bishop Walker because Walker had specifically forbidden Crapsey to preach in a Presbyterian Church.3
In 1901, Crapsey published a tractate with the title "The Law of Liberty: The Nature and Limit of Religious Thought." In the tractate, he wrote, "a free thinker has for ages been feared and hated by the officers of the church." Furthermore, a man who "gives himself over entirely" to a sect "no longer asks himself what is true." Crapsey observed that this is the "sad condition" of most of "the Protestant clergy." This was true in his opinion because "theological schools" teach "a fully formulated system of beliefs."Crapsey, "The Law of Liberty: The Nature and Limit of Religious Thought" (1901) in Tractate[s] on the Causes and Remedy of the Disunion of Christendom (1901), 3, 40.
In December 1904, Crapsey began a series of Sunday evening lectures at St. Andrew's, which ended on February 18, 1905. As the lectures became "more unorthodox" they attracted greater notice in the press and by the diocese. He called the final lecture "Religion and Politics." In the lecture, Crapsey specifically questioned two articles of the Apostles' Creed. He said that "the Virgin Birth" and the "resurrection of Jesus" were legends, not facts. He implied that Jesus was "wrong about various teachings," and he "denied the deity of Christ and the validity of the supernatural." Because Crapsey believed in his "own merit," he did not need "the redemptive atonement of Christ," which orthodoxy held to be required. The lecture was reported in newspapers nationwide. Bishop Walker demanded a retraction, but Crapsey refused.
After the lectures ended, Crapsey continued to promulgate his views by publishing them the following summer in a book entitled Religion and Politics.
On September 2, 1905, the New Outlook published an article by Crapsey under the title "Honor Among Clergymen". In it, Crapsey quoted the Pastoral Letter of the House of Bishops issued after its meeting at the Episcopal Church's General Convention of October 5–25, 1904. In Crapsey's quotation, the Bishops said that any person in the Church "who has lost his hold on eternal verities" should "in the name of common honesty, . . . be silent or withdraw." Crapsey replied, with implied reference to himself, for "any true, brave-hearted man . . . silence is impossible and withdrawal is treason." Furthermore, he said that "unless the prophet is ready to face the doom of the prophet, he should not undertake on the prophet's office." Thus, by now Crapsey had taken issue not only with Bishop Walker, but with the whole House of Bishops.
The Committee of Investigation had done little until Crapsey's New Outlook article propelled it into action. The chairman invited Crapsey to meet with it on September 5, 1905. Crapsey replied that he would meet with the committee if he could bring two or three of his "friends among the Clergy" who believed and felt as he did about the matter in hand. The committee rejected Crapsey's request on the basis that its mission was "to ascertain facts," not to engage in "a theological debate."