Great Awakenings: Five Things to Know About the Bishop Behind Trinity’s World Premiere Concert Opera

Commissioned in honor of America’s 250th anniversary, Great Awakenings: John Henry Hobart and America tells the story of a leader whose vision for the church resonates today.

As thousands of visitors flock to Trinity’s churchyard each year to find Alexander Hamilton’s grave, only a fraction will notice the name on another tombstone just steps away. John Henry Hobart (1775–1830), the seventh rector of Trinity Church, is buried just down the path under a beautiful marble sculpture, and he was arguably as important to building the religious and civic life of his young country as his neighbor was to its founding.  

Hobart became Trinity’s rector, and concurrently, the bishop of New York in 1816. In that role, he transformed America’s Anglican church as it navigated its break from England during the fraught time following the Revolutionary War. “It is no exaggeration to say that Hobart saved The Episcopal Church,” says the Reverend R. William Franklin, XI diocesan bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Western New York. But while he is credited with ushering in a pivotal era in this country’s history, Bishop Hobart remains little known.

On Sunday, May 31, at 4pm, Trinity will bring the story of this pivotal leader into the present as its Choir teams with Downtown Voices and NOVUS, Trinity’s new-music orchestra, to perform Great Awakenings: John Henry Hobart and America, a concert opera commissioned from acclaimed composer David Hurd to mark the nation’s 250th anniversary. With a libretto by Christopher Dylan Herbert, a former baritone in Trinity Choir, the piece tells of Hobart’s mission to not only shepherd but expand The Episcopal Church in a blossoming nation. (Hurd, an organist and composer who is himself renowned in The Episcopal Church, will also join with NOVUS to perform Appalachian Spring Suite for 13 Instruments, a depiction of frontier life written a century later that similarly evokes the hopefulness of new beginnings.)  

We asked Rev. Franklin, who is in large part responsible for bringing this work to the stage, why Hobart’s early vision feels especially relevant in the year of America’s semiquincentennial.  

This forward-looking bishop remains an inspiration for today’s young clergy.
For the General Ordination Exam, candidates were asked to write an essay on who they think might inspire our new presiding bishop. To our delight, many were about Bishop John Hobart! Born in 1775, Hobart knew the boldface names of the era, including Alexander Hamilton. I amuse myself with the notion that at some point, Hobart must have been with Hamilton in a “room where it happened,” as both a new country and a new church were taking shape. If the founding fathers Jefferson, Adams, Madison, and Franklin were the articulators of democracy in the new nation, so Hobart was a founding father of democracy in the new church.  

When the General Board of Examining Chaplains were reading the exams, one chaplain asked, “Hobart is buried inside Trinity Church, not far from Alexander Hamilton. We have a Broadway musical on Hamilton. Why don’t we have a musical on Hobart?” The idea quickly took hold! The stars aligned. The Holy Spirit was surely present. And so we have a concert opera!  

Though Hobart leaned into tradition, he was able to embrace the new world unfolding around him.
At a moment when the church is again asking who it is and how it serves, Hobart’s vision — a church both rooted in tradition and boldly engaged with the world — feels strikingly urgent. The Episcopal Church that he inherited was fragile — cut off from England, short on clergy, without a seminary, and struggling to define itself in a republic that had rejected everything it once stood for.  

Anglicans were drifting, while other denominations were growing quickly. The evangelical movement especially was surging, attracting new members with its informal liturgies, congregational singing, and emphasis on involvement in secular political life. It emphasized a one-time conversion experience and enforced a strict moral code: no alcohol, no horse racing, no dueling, and no dancing.  

Hobart recognized that The Episcopal Church had to define itself clearly in response. So he leaned into the high-church liturgy and a democratic structure of two governing bodies: the House of Deputies and the House of Bishops, both of which would be elected by the people. This shaped a church that looked like the democracy around it, and offered something different: freedom from rigid creeds and social codes, no demand for a dramatic conversion, and a welcome embrace and appreciation of science, art, music, and beauty. Under Hobart’s leadership, the church expanded from a denomination for Manhattan elites to one that welcomes people of all classes, races, and regions.

Really, Hobart is as irresistible a protagonist as Hamilton was.  
Hobart was known as “the cute bishop”: He was short, baby-faced, and nearsighted to the point that, even with his thick glasses, he had to preach from memory because he could not read his own texts. He even powdered his hair to look older, which earned him undying ridicule in the New York press. Still, nothing deterred him. “Zealous” hardly describes the man’s enthusiasm to build the church. In a diocese stretching from Long Island to Lake Erie, with few roads and no railroad, Hobart traveled relentlessly on horseback, sometimes to the point of collapse. He quadrupled the clergy; planted a church in virtually every village, town, and city in New York; and confirmed 15,000 new members, shaping New York into a model of the new American Anglicanism.  

And like Hamilton’s, Hobart’s flaws highlight his contradictions.  
Bishop Hobart struggled to realize the values he preached. In the end, his vision of “We the people” stopped short of political engagement, steering him away from early abolitionist crusades and keeping him silent in the face of slavery. Pressed to speak out against slavery, he refused. He feared division in the fragile new church and that it would not survive the loss of financial support tied to the slave economy. Similarly, he supported the Indigenous Oneida tribes but did not protest when they were forcibly removed to Wisconsin. His legacy is not easily resolved. He was expansive and constrained, visionary and somewhat compromised. His story is another reminder that history, like the present, is shaped by people who are never only one thing.

Hobart’s legacy lives on.
In 19 years of extraordinary leadership and vision, Bishop Hobart worked to make New York the model of the new American Anglicanism. He founded what is now Hobart College. He was one of the founders of the General Seminary. He ordained the second Black priest in The Episcopal Church and the first in the Diocese of New York; he consecrated the first Black church in New York. He reached out to the Oneida people, sending them a catechist and having the prayer book translated into their language. In Great Awakenings, we celebrate the enduring legacy of a bishop who built a church for his time and emboldens us to build a church for ours.  

Reserve your spot for Great Awakenings: John Henry Hobart and America on Sunday, May 31 at 4pm at Trinity Church.