Religion in early Virginia

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