A Cheerful and Comfortable Faith: Anglican Religious Practice in the Elite Households of Eighteenth-Century Virginia (review)

In his classic study of Virginia’s Anglican churches, Dell Upton described elite Anglicans as “a proud and unlovely people,” showy, self-absorbed, and impious. Like Upton, I have found it difficult to enter the imaginative world of eighteenth-century Anglicans with any sort of sympathy, though I am often moved by the stunning beauty of the houses, churches, and landscapes they left behind. Lauren F. Winner’s A Cheerful and Comfortable Faith: Anglican Religious Practice in the Elite Households of Eighteenth-Century Virginia does not so much redeem Virginia’s early gentry as create a multidimensional and often intimate portrait of a community of religious practitioners and people of faith. The inner or spiritual life of eighteenth-century Anglicans has been somewhat overlooked, wedged temporally between more dramatic forms of religious expression in the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. With this study, Winner disrupts a well-established characterization of early elite Anglicans in Virginia as essentially secular. She characterizes Anglican spirituality as quotidian rather than rapturous, ordinary, subtle, and also beautiful, even though some of the structures that underwrote Anglican domestic religion were ugly. As an affirmation of early Anglo-Virginian piety, A Cheerful and Comfortable Faith might insightfully be read alongside Louis Nelson’s The Beauty of Holiness, another work that draws readers’ attention to the spiritual life of eighteenth-century Anglicans. Winner’s study emphasizes texts as primary evidence while Nelson’s work is object-driven, but they both offer sensitive and balanced readings of a little-understood part of American religious history.

A Cheerful and Comfortable Faith emerged from Winner’s attempts to reconcile the devotional nature of domestic objects owned or made by the Anglican gentry in Virginia with the notion of a firmly secularized household. Great houses free of spiritual practice simply could not account for the presence of artifacts that suggested a “vital religiosity.” Delft tiles depicting David slaying Goliath, religious art, alimentary items such as plates, teapots and chargers, religious books, cookbooks, and ritual clothing all hint at sincerely felt and regularly enacted forms of religion. Winner’s Virginians lived their faith on a daily basis. The failure of some scholars to perceive this, she claims, stems from a definition of religion that only counts as religious that which makes a sharp break with daily life in the world. But this was not the way of her subjects. Winner describes her book as “an extended exegesis” on a single sentence in Rhys Isaac’s The Transformation of Virginia where he notes, “Christian formulas were scattered throughout the daily routines of Anglo-Virginians.” Winner, attentive to more quotidian modes of religious practice, recreates a world in which these “Christian formulas” and daily routines gave shape and meaning to elite Virginians’ lives. In fact, it was the very ordinariness and continuity of household religious activity with other household orders—social, gender, and economic—that marked the Virginia gentry’s Anglicanism as itself.

In five evocatively titled chapters and an epilogue, A Cheerful and Comfortable Faith analyzes the religious practices that flourished in Virginia’s elite households. Each chapter takes on a different domestic religious practice associated with an object or group of objects. Chapter 1, “With Cold Water and Silver Bowls,” considers the practice of household baptism and is structured around an analysis of the often beautiful and treasured family baptismal bowls over which elite babies were christened. The chapter positions the baptismal bowls and gowns and the practice of household baptism as objects and rituals that signified the continuity of religion with the everyday life of the household. Winner strengthens her argument for the integration of religious ritual with domestic life by comparing the culture of Anglican baptism with that of Baptists and Quakers. Chapter 2, “Becoming a ‘Christian Woman,’ ” discusses the ways in which needlework, especially on religious subjects, trained girls...