This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
The Church of England had been the established church of several American colonies before 1776, but the Revolution stripped that status away outright: a church whose liturgy prayed for the British crown could not go on doing so once its own members had rebelled against that crown, and every state that had established it disestablished it within a generation. Samuel Seabury, elected bishop of Connecticut in 1783, ran straight into the resulting difficulty. English bishops could not consecrate him at all, because as an American citizen he could not swear the oath of allegiance to the crown that an English consecration required of him.
Seabury turned instead to the non-juring Scottish Episcopal Church, a body with no such crown allegiance to demand, and was consecrated at Aberdeen on 14 November 1784 by three of its bishops, giving the American church its first bishop by a route that owed nothing to Canterbury. With Seabury and the Pennsylvania bishop William White both now in place, the American church organised itself formally at the General Convention of 1789, adopting its own constitution and its own Book of Common Prayer.
What this changed for Christianity's spread was the creation of a fully autonomous, self governing Protestant Episcopal Church, established by no state and no longer dependent on the Church of England even for its own bishops. Seabury's unconventional consecration in Scotland solved, at a stroke, the very problem that had prevented an American Anglican church from having any bishop of its own at all.