This dissertation places a discussion of Anglo-Catholicism squarely in the center of recent debates about late nineteenth-century religious and intellectual life in the United States. Anglo-Catholics developed a distinctive spirituality, and used that theological base to create a thoroughgoing critique of American culture and politics. The dissertation presents Anglo-Catholicism as a challenge to preconceptions about the relationship between Protestantism and Catholicism in American culture.

American Anglo-Catholicism was neither a direct importation of English tractarian thought nor identical to the High Church party of the Protestant Episcopal Church. Patterns established in the Church in the earlier decades of the nineteenth century enabled later Anglo-Catholics to pursue Catholicism without threatening the Church itself. Many practices Anglo-Catholics claimed as their own had been introduced in the United States even before the Oxford Movement made them notorious. Tractarian ritualism meshed with and transformed lingering strands of Transcendentalism to create a Catholic romanticism.

This Catholic sensibility was not otherworldly and anti-modern but anti-individualist and anti-authoritarian. The spiritual careers of three important Anglo- Catholics, Vida Dutton Scudder, James Otis Sargent Huntington, and Ellen Gates Starr, followed a course of seeking, conversion, and dedication to a spirituality which was both fully personal and fully social. Anglo-Catholics often joined together in religious communities and separatist parishes and so challenged the norms of the Episcopal Church and the authority of middle- and upper-class culture.

The dissertation traces the ways in which Anglo-Catholic spirituality was made political. It describes varying levels of radicalism, but finds that, in general, Anglo-Catholics were more likely than other Episcopalians to pursue socio-economic change. Anglo-Catholic social thought is compared with the Social Gospel. Anglo-Catholics critiques sometimes paralleled, but remained quite distinct from, mainstream social Christianity and Progressivism.