| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 96.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 96.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Virginians Reborn: Anglican Monopoly, Evangelical Dissent, and the Rise of the Baptists in the Late Eighteenth Century. By Jewel L. Spangler. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008. x, 288 pp. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-8139-2679-7.)
Jewel L. Spangler's fine study of the rise of evangelical dissent in eighteenth-century Virginia retraces some familiar ground. More important, it offers a well-argued interpretation of how first the Presbyterians and then the Baptists impinged on and finally broke the Anglican monopoly in the colony. Spangler shows how the Baptists, especially, succeeded not by challenging the planter-dominated order, but by adapting to it even as the political culture of Virginia underwent important transformations during the revolutionary era.	1
Recent scholarship has shown that the established church was not the decaying institution it was once thought to be. Anglicanism, with its formal liturgy, hierarchy, and intimate ties to the elite, did reinforce planter hegemony. Yet contrary to such historians as Rhys Isaac, Spangler insists that Presbyterian and even Baptist growth did not represent an upsurge of lower-class resentment against an elitist culture. Instead, Spangler uses a supply-and-demand model to explain evangelical emergence in some parts of the colony. Where Anglicans were weak, in the western Southside, for example, Baptists did relatively well, assuming an effective preacher came to a locality ripe for proselytizing.	. . .

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