The Religious Impulse in the Founding of Virginia: Religion and Society in the Early Literature

Abstract

T HE settlement of Virginia, so historians tell us, was a mercantile adventure, a purely business proposition. Behind it lay no organized religious interest as in Maryland or Massachusetts Bay, no Utopian expectation as in Pennsylvania, not even so vague a dream of philanthropy as created Georgia. It attracted no clique of intellectuals like the Puritan clergy, yet somehow, in its first tumultuous years, under the rule of a jointstock company and amid administrative confusion, it produced a literature. If we include in this literature, as legitimately we may, not only documents written in the colony but those produced in England by persons no less vitally concerned in the project, we can gather a small but substantial body of expression. Historians have treated this literature, most of it propaganda, much of dubious accuracy, a large part merely rhetoric, as possessing value only for documentation; literary critics cull out a few gems, and are condescending toward the remainder. I venture to suggest that there is an aspect to the material that has been overlooked: the men who wrote for and about Virginia, precisely because they were not dogmatists or visionaries, gave expression to a kind of averageness of the age that is worth serious study. Actually, if we take all this literature in review, put aside for the moment its utility as source material and regard it as an index, often an unwitting or inadvertent revelation, of what ordinary men, financeers, investors or planters, assumed were the cosmological conditions under which the enterprise was perforce conducted, then the Virginia literature becomes one of the most eloquent, even poignant, episodes in the emergence of the modern spirit. A great theme, vaster in conception than any of the writers could have framed by himself, elevates even the most ephemeral of these productions into a realm of universal meaning, and the philosophical student may, if he asks the right ques-