| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Origins of Proslavery Christianity: White and Black Evangelicals in Colonial and Antebellum Virginia. By Charles F. Irons. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. xiv, 366 pp. Cloth, $59.95, ISBN 978-0-8078-3194-6. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 978-0-8078-5877-6.)

Charles F. Irons's excellently researched and strongly argued book fills in gaps in the scholarship on the connections between proslavery and southern biracial churches. Focusing on Virginia, a key state in size and leadership of the religious proslavery movement, Irons traces the interplay between the evolution of biracial evangelicalism and the proslavery argument. Few studies have placed proslavery in the context of southern religious institutions. Historians instead cast evangelical proslavery in the context of sectional dispute. By shifting attention to southern churches, Irons is able to describe functional proslavery in the eighteenth century and early national period, both of which are often ignored in favor of the post-1831 period of sectional dispute. But as this study demonstrates, white evangelicals' perceptions of slavery were molded by their day-to-day interactions with slaves in their own congregations.

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