The Baptism of Early Virginia: How Christianity Created Race. By Rebecca Anne Goetz. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012. xvi + 224 pp. $55.00 cloth.

Abstract

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)The Baptism of Early Virginia: How Christianity Created Race . By Rebecca Anne Goetz . Baltimore, Md. : Johns Hopkins University Press , 2012. xvi + 224 pp. $55.00 cloth.Book Reviews and NotesIn this enterprising study, Rebecca Goetz, a historian at Rice University, charts what she identifies as the process whereby Virginia slaveholders used Christianity to invent race in the English colony. The Baptism of Early Virginia is the first substantial study of race in the Anglo-American colonies to engage centrally with what Goetz calls This was the idea that Christianity was a heritable condition and that non-Christian peoples--particularly Indians and Africans--were naturally incapable or less capable of conversion.She explains the conflict between Virginia's missionaries, who sought to convert Indians and Africans, and the planters who generally opposed their efforts by claiming that Africans were naturally incapable of such. She then charts the legislation, social divisions, labor practices, and theological arguments concerning hereditary heathenism in Virginia. In chapter 1, Goetz states that before colonizing Virginia, the English people distinguished themselves from the Irish (whom they colonized) and from Muslims and American Indians by emphasizing cultural as opposed to racial distinctions. Since these peoples were judged capable of conversion, she claims, they were not racially defined. Conspicuously absent in this chapter is a discussion of how English Christians engaged with Jews. Chapter 2 argues that violent Anglo-Indian wars undermined the optimism of English settlers that Indians might convert to Christianity. Instead, the English began to promote the ideology of hereditary heathenism. Chapter 3 examines English settler proscriptions against interracial sex and marriage (especially between the English and Africans). By 1705, Goetz concludes, these attitudes had fully hardened into race. The fourth chapter examines the legal and theological administration of baptism in Virginia. Whereas and not physical appearance dominated at the time the earliest African slaves arrived in Virginia, Goetz proffers, the 1700s witnessed the triumph of phenotype over religious identity as the basis of social status in Virginia. And baptism operated eventually as a racial institution imposing the ideology that only the English could be truly Christian (111). In her fifth chapter, Goetz specifically examines how Virginia's English settlers articulated whiteness as a racial identity, a process she connects to an emerging religious toleration in the colony that extended to Quakers but not to Catholic convicts, blacks, Indians, and mulattoes (137). And in chapter 6, Goetz examines how some free and enslaved Africans pursued both Christianity and freedom (these were metonymic), thereby challenging the ideology of hereditary heathenism. An epilogue provides a tidy recap of the foregoing arguments.The book is without question a seasoned demonstration of historical method. Goetz's lucid prose reveals her detailed, intimate mastery of archival sources--court records, pamphlets, and correspondence. And she distills her discussion of the primary works through a disciplined command over the larger historical context of Virginia. She explains, for instance, that the Virginia Indians provided food for English settlers because this was a Native convention for dealing with political inferiors. And she explicates the intricate political philosophy that guided Anglo-Indian intermarriage from the perspective of the Virginia Indians. Experts in the history of English colonialism will also appreciate the fresh reading Goetz brings to this study of the Chesapeake because she combines incredibly rich historical detail with an exciting query into how Virginia's slaveholding elite shaped religion and race in the colony. Thus, it is easy to see that this monograph, which contributes so uniquely to her field, will serve professional researchers as a valuable source of historical data for years to come. …