The Grandees of Government: The Origins and Persistence of Undemocratic Politics in Virginia

2. True Religion and a Civil Course of Life

2 22 TRUE RELIGION AND A CIVIL COURSE OF LIFE St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, New Kent County (Virginia Department of Historic Resources ), was begun about 1701 and is one of the oldest surviving church buildings in Virginia. The tower was added in 1739–41. The substantial brick structure exhibits care in its construction and is typical of the simple design of early colonial churches. This and its fellow churches, most of which no longer survive, stood as testimony to the importance of the Church of England in Virginia. During the seventeenth century the colonists’ religious beliefs and practices influenced the political practices and institutions that they developed, and those practices and institutions had influences that persisted for centuries. Protestant Christianity got off to an inauspicious start in Virginia. Late in life Captain John Smith set down a short recollection of how in 1607 “we beganne to preach the Gospell in Virginia .” He wrote, “wee did hang an awning (which is an old saile) to three or foure trees to shadow us from the Sunne, our walls were rales of wood, our seats unhewed trees, till we cut plankes, our Pulpit a bar of wood nailed to two neighbouring trees, in foule weather we shifted into an old rotten tent . . . this was our Church, till wee built a homely thing like a barne . . . yet wee had daily Common Prayer morning and evening, every Sunday two Sermons, and every three moneths the holy Communion, till our Minister died, but our Prayers daily, with an Homily on Sundaies; we continued two or three yeares after till more Preachers came.”1 The Protestant Christianity of the Church of England provided the center of gravity for the spiritual and intellectual lives of most of the Englishspeaking residents of Virginia for a century and a half after the arrival of the first settlers. The people who moved to Virginia brought with them an Elizabethan version of English civilization of which the English Reformation was an essential component. By the time that the first few English men and boys set foot in Virginia in 1607, three generations of English men and women had experienced tumultuous religious changes that rocked their native land to its political foundations and severed the relationship of a vast majority of the English people with the Christian Church headquartered in Rome. It had exposed many residents of sixteenth-century England to requirements of belief and practice that they did not share and that could damn them eternally to hell. That was not just a figure of speech. For Catholics in England the Reformation exposed them to the risk of excommunication or the damnation of their souls if they went along with it or to many forms of physical and mental abuse or even death if they did not. For English Protestants, at least during the reign of the first Queen Mary, they, too, were equally at risk of spiritual and physical death. The English Reformation and its consequences affected every person in England. The English men and women who colonized Virginia and their descendants who lived there, freed from Roman Catholicism, believed themselves to be a chosen people in an almost biblical sense. They did not doubt that their Protestant nation, their church, their faith was the one true Christian nation, church, faith. The English Reformation and its implications were as fundamentally a part of their lives as their language, dress, and legal culture.2 The 36 the grandees of government linkage in their minds between true religion and civilization can be seen in documents from the very earliest days of the colony when they recorded facts about those few English men who left the settlement and took up more or less permanent residence with the Indians. Scarcely any event was more difficult for them to comprehend. The language that they used to describe the abandonment of civilization for savagery, as well as the language that they used to discuss differences between themselves and their Indian neighbors, was heavily freighted with religious meaning. They wrote about Christians and heathens and also about Englishmen and heathens. They wrote about Christians and Indians and also about Englishmen and Indians. They wrote about Christians and savages and about Englishmen and savages. The words English, Christian, and variations on civilization identified one set of people and their culture. The words savage, heathen, and uncivilized identified another. The religiously based language, which they also used...