July 4th, 2025, when we think of the pilgrims, who came to the American continent from England to start a new life and a new country, we think of Puritans and Calvinists. But how many of us know that one of the largest landowners in the state of Virginia, a personal friend of Benjamin Franklin and George Washington, an ancestor of Robert E. Lee, was a pious Orthodox Christian? His daughters as well?
Meet Colonel Phillip Ludwell III, possibly America’s first Orthodox convert—the founding father of American Orthodox conversion. In this video, British historian Nicholas Chapman gives more detailed, fascinating information on the life of this “pious man, filled with zeal for the Orthodox Church” and his descendants. This is something Orthodox Americans can be thankful for.
In this video below (posted to the YouTube page maintained by the Russian Orthodox Cathedral of St John the Baptist), Mr. Nicholas Chapman, a renowned British historian and editor at Holy Trinity Seminary Publications in Jordanville, NY, offers fascinating insights into the life and legacy of one of the first known converts to Orthodoxy in colonial Virginia. Colonel Philip Ludwell III was the grandson of the first royal governor of the proprietary colony of North Carolina. Most of his family were nominally Anglican, as was expected of established Virginia gentry during the period, but some were Non-Juror Jacobites who refused to recognize the regime change of the 1688 Protestant Glorious Revolution which saw the Catholic Stuart James II abandoned in favor of his Protestant son-in-law and daughter, respectively, William of Orange and Mary II. Ludwell became Orthodox in 1738 as a young man while in London, where the Russian Orthodox church there, frequently attacked by local Protestants, attracted a considerable number of native English converts amid a mostly Alexandrian Greek congregation. Returning to his home country of Virginia, Ludwell would become a luminary in the pre-revolutionary colonies. He was the wealthiest man in Virginia, which was the wealthiest of the North American colonies, but had he made his conversion public, he could have faced capital punishment, as the Church of England (Anglicanism) was the established faith in colonial Virginia and any religion outside Protestantism was illegal. As one of the King’s ministers, his conversion was technically treason.
