When Barbara Harris became the first female bishop in the Episcopal Church, consecrated as suffragan (assistant) bishop of Massachusetts in 1989, she was, as a black woman, an unlikely candidate for the distinction.
To be sure, African Americans had already risen within the Episcopal hierarchy. At the time, the dean of Washington’s National Cathedral was black, as is the current presiding bishop of the church. But the ordination of women had only recently been sanctioned and, indeed, remains controversial within the Anglican communion, of which the Episcopal Church is the American branch.
Still, Harris’s appointment made history. Upon hearing of her death last week, at 89, the (female) Episcopal bishop of Washington, D.C., remembered that Harris’s promotion was “earth-shattering in terms of what we knew was possible.”
Harris also personified the pivotal role that social and political activism play in today’s “mainline” Protestant churches. The daughter of a Philadelphia steelworker, Barbara Clementine Harris attended neither college nor seminary and was briefly married and divorced in the early 1960s. Her early working life was largely spent in public relations. She was president of one of America’s first black-owned PR firms and, after joining the Sun Oil Company as a community relations specialist, rose to head Sunoco’s public-relations department.
It was the civil rights movement, however, that propelled Harris toward ministry. Long active in Philadelphia’s Episcopal diocese and local historically black churches, she served for years as a lay prison chaplain, traveled frequently to the South to register black voters, and in 1965, marched alongside the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.
By the early 1970s, as Episcopalians were grappling with the issue of women’s ordination, Philadelphia was the place to be. When, in 1974, a group of women were ordained in an unofficial ceremony at Harris’s parish, she was cross bearer in the procession. Two years later, the ordination of women was officially authorized, and in 1980, Harris was herself ordained and served at a small parish in nearby Norristown, Pennsylvania.
Between then and her appointment as suffragan bishop in Massachusetts, Harris became a well-known speaker and writer on church-related topics. As publisher of The Witness, a small Episcopal journal, she lamented in 1984 that the church’s time and energy were wasted on theological disputes and “nonissues like irregularity versus validity” while “real issues go unaddressed — justice, power, authority, shared mission and ministry and wholeness in the body of Christ.”
In that sense, Harris’s elevation to the hierarchy was a personal, and to some degree political, triumph. Lineal successor, post-Revolution, to the Church of England in America, the prestige and influence of the Protestant Episcopal Church in its heyday far exceeded its size, which never exceeded 3.4 million members. Innumerable presidents, from George Washington to George H.W. Bush, were communicants, along with such establishment laymen as J. Pierpont Morgan and other captains of finance, industry, culture, and politics. The Episcopal clergy, it used to be said, were “well-bred, well-read, and well-fed.”
That was then, and the life and career of the Rt. Rev. Barbara Harris not only symbolized the modern evolution of her church, and other mainline Protestant denominations; she tirelessly promoted it. Impatient with arguments about theology and orthodoxy, she concentrated her considerable energies on issues of race, sexuality, criminal justice, and the environment. Nor was she reluctant to respond to criticism. She took pleasure in deriding “Podunk Episcopalians” who, she said, feared “mitered mamas” such as herself, and widened the gulf between liberal and conservative Episcopalians — and liberals and conservatives generally.
Politics, she preached, was an instrument of religion: “The temptation we have is to play it safe, don’t make waves,” she once told a congregation. “But if Jesus had played it safe, we would not be saved.” Her confidence, however, came at some cost to the church she served. When Bishop Harris died last week, the number of Episcopalians in America was historically low (1.7 million) and declining, and parishes were closing at accelerating rates.
Philip Terzian is the author of Architects of Power: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and the American Century.
