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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...