Frederick Kinsman And Cancel Culture

A visitor found the photo above of Kinsman as a student at St Paul's School in Concord, NH. This is actually a key part of his background, as he makes clear in Salve Mater that the Kinsmans were a pominent Ohio family, There's a Kinsman Road and a Kinsman district in Cleveland. That Frederick would attend St Paul's School, one of the St Grottlesex group, and become an Episcopal bishop are indications of his and his family's high standing in society.

Kinsman's literary product as a Catholic is complex, and with much of it available to me due to the generosity of a visitor, I'm finding it deserves detailed reading and reflection. Reveries of a Hermit is an example. About half of it is the closely reasoned apologetic I've discussed here, but there's a Part II which is about the same length but more difficult to parse. It sets out to be an essay on three saints connected with the ancient city of Ephesus, but in the middle, there's a chapter on Birchmere, Kinsman's estate in Maine, where he lived in seclusion with his parents and sister following his resignation as Bishop of Delaware in 1919.

This chapter gives some biographical insight into how his conversion to Catholicism affected his personal life.

In 1919, a change in religious, or rather ecclesiastical, convictions which had hitherto deternmined my course in life, involved abandonment of occupation and environment which had formed framework and background for life to the age of fifty, and a series of fresh starts for what years might remain. The claims of my family were, in some ways, paramount in determining future courses, chiefly the condition of my father, who was helpless with paralysis. Birchmere was our only, and the only possible, home, and owing to my father's condition, it was evident that he and I at least must live there all the year round. (pp 200-201)

Kinsman's father, who had been a prominent Cleveland judge, passed away in 1921. This is the only reference I've found in some amount of searching to his illness; no obituaries have so far come to light despite the family's prominence. One working hypothesis so far is that the effect of Frederick's conversion and resignation as bishop was far more cataclysmic for the family than any had anticipated, and I would not rule out his father suffering a stroke in consequence.

The evidence in the Birchmere essay suggests that Kinsman was shunned by his former associates and friends, to the extent that we would now call it canceled.

The middle half of my life was a crowded time, full of interests, varied experiences, congenial companions. I was socially inclined, could have intercourse with many people of many kinds, and was most fortunate in those with whom I had close association. The change of 1919 ended this. Henceforth, I was to be separated from all but a few old friends, alienated from many -- though the alienations have lessened with years. (pp 203-204)

Kinsman's 1944 obituary in a St Paul's alumni publication suggests, however gently, that many of his schoolmates felt he lost his mind in 1919. I suspect the degree to which the society in which he swam seems to have regarded his conversion as something like outright betrayal came as a great surprise, both to him and perhaps more to his family, who may have been shunned just as much.

The visitor who sent me a copy of his Americanism and Catholicism (1924) expressed some puzzlement about Kinsman's direction in that book. I've been through it once, and I need to reread it. I think it's an attempt on his part to think through what seems to have been an unexpectedly angry reaction to his conversion -- an Episcopal bishop in the early 20th century was an unquestionable pillar of respectable American Protestant society, and for him to renounce that position in favor of Irish, Italian, and Slavic immigrants would have amounted to betrayal of their core values.

It's worth noting that the next Episcopalian bishop to resign and convert to Catholicism was Jeffrey Steenson, almost a century later. The impact of Steenson's resignation was imperceptible; it wasn't news outside the speicalized Anglican and Catholic press. I think this is largely because, as Kinsman himself predicted, Main Line Protestantism in the US has run its course, and its cause has merged with more general Agnosticism. To cease to be a Protestant is simply no longer an act of betrayal, which it was in Kinsman's time.

But this is not to say that the Establishment no longer exists, that it no longer has great power, and that it no longer takes vicious revenge on those it perceives as betrayers.