Rush advocated Christianity in public life and in education and sometimes compared himself to the prophet Jeremiah. Rush regularly attended Christ Church in Philadelphia and counted William White among his closest friends (and neighbors). Ever the controversialist, Rush became involved in internal disputes over the revised Book of Common Prayer and the splitting of the Episcopal Church from the Church of England, as well as dabbled with Presbyterianism, Methodism (which split from Anglicanism in those years), and Unitarianism. In a letter to John Adams, Rush described his religious views as "a compound of the orthodoxy and heterodoxy of most of our Christian churches." Christian Universalists consider him one of their founders, although Rush stopped attending that church after the death of his friend, former Baptist pastor Elhanan Winchester in 1797.