Nat Turner and the Making of the Evangelical South

One of the most commonly cited imbalances in the study of early America is the enormous attention given to the northern colonies, especially New England, versus the southern colonies. Nowhere has that imbalance been more obvious than in religious history. The narrative of New England Puritanism, its decline, and the coming of the Great Awakening has dominated the field since Perry Miller put his indelible mark on the literature in the mid-twentieth century. Of course, religion in the Middle Colonies and the South has gotten its share of attention, too; and Virginia has received some notable treatments, including, most obviously, Rhys Isaac's award-winning The Transformation of Virginia (1982).

The year 2008, however, saw a major shift southward, or at least Virginia-ward, in studies of colonial and antebellum religion. A remarkable spate of books on religion and race in colonial and early national Virginia appeared, including Charles F. Irons's The Origins of Proslavery Christianity, Janet Moore Lindman's Bodies of Belief (about Baptists in Virginia and Pennsylvania), Jewel L. Spangler's Virginians Reborn, and the book under consideration here by Randolph Ferguson Scully. It remains to be seen which of these books, if any, will emerge as a definitive treatment, but on the whole these books have given us a much finer understanding of southern evangelicalism's interactions with hierarchies of race and gender. Prior to 2008, the dominant narrative of evangelicalism's trajectory in the early South was from early egalitarianism to antebellum complicity with white male dominance. Scully's admirable book highlights the contested nature of white and black evangelicalism, even in antebellum Virginia. Scully shows that even if white evangelicals did come to endorse the racial status quo, there remained a "Nat Turner's Virginia," where evangelicalism retained its egalitarian, subversive, and even revolutionary implications.

Scully opens the book with a very helpful chapter on the intersections between religious dissent and race in colonial Virginia. Although many have noted the attractions of evangelical faith to African Americans, Scully makes the point that, to the Virginia establishment, "the dangers of slave Christianity and of religious dissent might compound and exaggerate each other, undermining the very foundations of social order" (p. 45). Even someone as eager to include black converts as Presbyterian pastor Samuel Davies worried that evangelical faith might give slaves irregular ideas about equality. At the same time, Davies and early Virginia evangelicals gave dissent a more threatening aspect to the establishment because they were proselytizing among white and black Virginians once taken for granted as Anglican parishioners.

The rise of the Baptists presented an even more ominous challenge to the establishment because of the Baptists' flouting of legal and cultural standards for proper religious behavior. Specialists will find much of this overarching story familiar, as Separate and Regular Baptists made courageous efforts at evangelism in the face of sometimes brutal persecution. Scully is at his best in describing closely the emergence of the Baptist movement in southeastern Virginia, based on archival research in the early church records. Even as the establishment accused them of social and religious disorder, white and black Baptists sought to define ideal church order. At every step this was a contested, inconsistent process. Scully's constant refrain is how negotiated and uncertain the development of local Baptist culture was. He is dismissive of any attempts to label Baptist church life as "'radical' or 'conservative' or even 'egalitarian' or 'hierarchical'" (p. 91). All is process and contest. I think his focus on complexity understates the comparatively egalitarian nature of early Baptist church life, but his central point is fair enough: there never really was a monolithic Baptist movement in Virginia, only its local manifestations. Out of those church records, teeming with discipline cases and polity disputes, Scully recreates the exhausting process of framing a new model of godly fellowship.

The coming of the Revolution brought new complexities to Baptist life in Virginia. Again, specialists...