Religion and the Making of Nat Turner's Virginia: Baptist Community and Conflict, 1740–1840 (review)

Randolph Ferguson Scully's Religion and the Making of Nat Turner's Rebellionoffers a bold reinterpretation of the Baptists in Revolutionary-era and early-national Virginia, adding complexity and ambiguity to our understanding of evangelical Christianity in the commonwealth. Relying on the outstanding collection of Baptist records from Southampton, Sussex, and Isle of Wight counties, Scully's work traces the movement of Virginia Baptists from biracial Baptist communities in the post-Great Awakening era toward the racially exclusive religious societies of antebellum Virginia. (If not fully exclusive, Baptist churches following Turner's rebellion marginalized the place and role of black members.)

Conscious of their own religious persecution, Baptists both black and white took seriously the revolution's rhetoric of liberty. Their own rhetoric of liberty and liberation, however, coexisted with "Baptist efforts to shape orderly religious communities in ways that more often than not reinforced worldly hierarchies" (pp. 52–53). As a result, the rhetoric of liberty had limitations. Whereas black Baptists and some white Baptists interpreted their denomination's rhetoric of liberty and liberation in terms that enhanced black status and challenged the institution of slavery, slaveholding Baptists saw biracial Baptist worship as a means to make better slaves and better masters, both of whom better understood their reciprocal responsibilities.

Liberty became a contested and ambiguous term, one fought over by slave-holders, slaves, free blacks, and antislavery whites, all adherents of a Baptist vision of the Christian religion. Sometimes Baptists made liberty the possession of the private conscience rather than of the public church, therefore allowing Baptist brethren the freedom to support slavery. Public agitation on the issue had its consequences. In 1826, for example, Jonathan Lankford was expelled from the Black Creek Baptist Church because he could no longer hold fellowship with slaveholders or with Baptists who did hold fellowship with slaveholders.

"The equivocally inclusive model of evangelical community that white Baptists articulated in the late eighteenth century," according to Scully, gave way by the 1820s as white Baptists "tacitly stated the separateness and inferiority of African American church members far more firmly than they had in the eighteenth century" (p. 182). Nat Turner's rebellion only accelerated the growth and resolve of these attitudes. White Baptists noted the "extensive religious influence" of Turner's rebels and questioned, given the central role of religion in the rebellion, whether any possibility of biracial religious fellowship still existed. Discipline in Virginia's Baptist churches became much stricter following the rebellion, and black members lost their former ability to influence church decisions. Some churches explicitly established segregated seating. In short, as Scully concludes, the Turner rebellion "catalyzed the emerging alliance between white evangelical religion and white southern culture, and it simultaneously increased the distance between black and white religion in the region's Baptist churches" (p. 231). A religious movement that had at one time challenged the racial hegemony of southern culture had come to embrace it.

Scully's book makes an important contribution to historians' understanding of religion, society, and culture in early-national and antebellum Virginia. His work is a welcome addition to the literature on religion in pre-Civil War Virginia.