Empire, Religion, and Revolution in Early Virginia, 1607–1786

Abstract

James B. Bell has authored two recent books on colonial religion and compiled an online biographical dictionary (accessible by paid subscription at www.jamesbbell.com) of 1,281 men who ministered to the Church of England in the continental colonies. One might therefore expect to find new evidence, or old evidence newly digested, on the 534 men who served the English church in Virginia during the colonial and revolutionary eras. A good deal of that exists here, including useful tables of names, parishes served, dates of tenure, and (mainly English) universities attended, along with a discussion of two seventeenth-century clerical libraries—one never used in Virginia because its owner died on his voyage out. Otherwise Empire, Religion, and Revolution in Early Virginia tells a familiar story using familiarly sparse evidence. Since the Anglican Church of Virginia left little documentation of its activities, what can historians say about it? Bell tells us that Virginia's Anglican Church was not like the Church of England in Ireland, but this potentially interesting comparison is not developed (beyond repetition of its institutional contrasts). Also left hanging are contrasts with the Church of England itself, back home, and with the much more vigorous Congregational cultures of the New England colonies (which, of course, left too much evidence). With relatively little direct evidence, more thought might have been given to functional (rather than merely institutional) comparisons with churches elsewhere in the Anglophone Atlantic, or Bell might have established new contexts in Virginia, following (for instance) the provocative and rewarding example of Rhys Isaac's The Transformation of Virginia (1982). But Bell curiously sees Isaacs's work as “focus[ed] without perspective” on religious issues and thus lacking in “true understanding” (pp. 4–5). This odd judgment perhaps derives from Bell's insistence on studying the English churches in Virginia as the Church establishment, as a whole entity that can and should be compared to other religious establishments in more settled places. Once those parameters are established, not much can be said, for “the church” in Virginia was unsuccessful at doing not very much, and the Englishness it managed to embody harmed it during and after 1776. Conversely, as Isaac and others have made clear, Virginia's churches, acting as congregations or, more accurately, as parish vestries, did play a coherent part in shaping the Old Dominion—as welfare agencies, as purveyors of values, standards, and styles, as meeting places, and as agents of Anglicization. As such, they were embraced by some and rejected by others, engendering several interesting narratives. Here we learn only, and once again, and repeatedly, that “the church” in Virginia was not a success.