Religion In Early Virginia Essay, Research Paper
In a harsh new world, Virginia’s English colonists were supported by an
ancient and familiar tradition, the established church. The law of the land from
1624 mandated that white Virginians worship in the Anglican church (The Church of
England) and support its upkeep with their taxes. Where religion was an
integral part of everyday life in Virginia, the lines blurred between religious and
civil authority. Virginia gentlemen, who supported establishment but disliked
centralized church authority, gained control of parish vestries and county
courts to secure their power over religious matters. Despite establishment, the
religious life of white Virginians was not without diversity. Dissenters from many
Protestant groups had settled in the colony from early on, and had long resented the
legal restrictions placed on their own practice of religion. Finally, after about
1750, evangelical Christians started a struggle for religious freedom parallel to
and often opposite from the wider struggle for political independence.
Although Anglicans tolerated Protestant dissenters, they found the
traditional religious views of Native Americans and Africans beyond sanction. But English
colonists made only fitful efforts to bring blacks and Indians into the
established church. The Powhatans and Indians further inland proved resistant to
Christianity. For blacks, the oppression of slavery inevitably forced them to abandon a
purely African worldview. Still, they did not come to Christianity in great numbers
until evangelicals began gathering Christians from both races after the
mid-eighteenth century. Although some blacks and whites formed bonds through their shared
evangelical experience, Virginia’s celebrated statute for religious freedom
would have only limited meaning for African-Americans until after the Civil War.
The Anglican gentry in Virginia long had a reputation for shallow faith
and attendance at church was more of habit and a desire for social contact than
piety or zeal. Historians have begun to reevaluate this oversimplified view. They now
characterize many of Virginia’s elite as sincere attachments to a moderate
faith that provided a standard for judgment. Faith was only a private and family
affair. Reflections on a minister’s sermons, for example, were discussed within the
family group or recorded in diaries, such as those of William Byrd II and John
Blair of Williamsburg.
The spread of religion in eighteenth-century life inspired the motifs
used in the design of some household furnishings. Inscriptions on this pot encouraged
the hostess, as she poured coffee, to "keep her conversation as becometh the
lord" and her company to remember the comforting words of the twenty-third psalm, "the
lord is my Shepherd Ishall not want." Studies of the religious lives of the
middle and lower classes, although harder to pursue, have tended to focus on the
period after 1750, when evangelical Christianity pulled in Virginia’s "lesser folk,"
including many slaves. Recent research indicates that small planters and
their families made up the bulk of the congregations in Anglican churches and that
thesecolonists held values similar to those of their betters. While accepting
difference in social rank, they came to expect a certain civility and recognition from
the gentry that likely extended to the parish church and churchyard.
The seeds of faith planted in Anglican homes and churches often lay
dormant under routine worship, but later flourished under the influence of
evangelical preachers. These men remodeled familiar biblical themes into a message of
spiritual renewal and of a personal God who intervened in human affairs.
Slaves in great numbers were drawn to evangelical Christianity, particularly the
Baptist groups. After the mid-eighteenth century, evangelical Christians (Baptists,
Presbyterians, and Methodists) challenged the establishment’s discriminatory practices by
flaunting licensing laws and refusing to be restricted to particular meetinghouses or
locales. As the Revolution approached, they formed an unlikely partnership
with apostles of the Enlightenment among the Revolutionary generation. Both were
bent upon disestablishing the Anglican church in Virginia.
The diversification of religion in Virginia up to and through the Revolutionary
period was relatively peaceful. Conflicts did occur. Anglican agents
sometimes forcibly broke up evangelical meetings in the 1770s, and the sight of Baptist
ministers preaching from their jail cells galvanized James Madison to give
full support to disestablishment. But it seems as if the very number of religious
groups in Virginia (and America) precluded the religious persecutions and sectarian
warfare that had plagued England and the rest of Europe for centuries. Virginians
proved to be less tolerant of non-Christian faiths, however. Most notably,
slavery constituted a form of violence that deprived Africans of their traditional
religious systems.
Native Americans clashed with colonists not only over land but in resisting
conversion to the Christian faith. As settlers pushed back the Indians and as
Anglican parishes spread out over Virginia, the gentry were able to gain control of
the established church on the local and county levels as well as in the colonial
legislature. Anglican elites proved to be tough opponents to evangelical Christians
and the Revolutionary leaders who joined them in supporting disestablishment.
African-Americans also made common cause with the evangelicals after 1750.
Before that time, few blacks had joined the Christian fold. In the 17th century,
small numbers of slaves had recognized that they could gain their freedom through
baptism, but the General Assembly closed this loophole in 1667. Over the next
century, most slave owners and Anglican ministers ignored the spiritual lives
of African-Americans.
Throughout the colonial period, the established church was supported and
reinforced by other formal and informal institutions. Virginia lacked a bishop.
Therefore, control of religious matters was largely left in the hands of local
institutions ruled by the gentry. Vestrymen became the dominant influence on
church affairs by the end of the 17th century. They paid the clergy, built and
repaired church buildings, and provided support for the needy. Justices of the
peace, sitting on the bench of county courts, heard cases having to do with
attendance at Anglican church services and adultery, and other moral offenses. In
consolidating control over civil and religious matters on all levels, the leading men
of the county further enhanced their power, and at the same time imparted their
authority to the church.
Virginia’s General Assembly protected the established church in law. It
enforced laws that penalized dissenters: for example, requiring all officeholders to
be Anglican. The legislature also exercised authority over such matters as the
creation of new parishes and the setting of ministers’ salaries. It was in the
legislature that the battle over disestablishment was waged and eventually
won, but informal institutions also supported the religious lives of Anglicans and
dissenters alike. Families transmitted values and religious teachings. Reflecting the
evolution of family relationships, by the mid-18th century, white women had become the
primary guardians of the religious lives of their families. For dissenters, traveling
preachers and local congregations played an important role in affirming their faith.