Reviewed by Dee E. Andrews | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 66.2

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Reviewed by Dee E. Andrews | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 66.2 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

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. 299 pages. $45.00 (cloth). Religion and the Making of Nat Turner's Virginia: Baptist Community and Conflict, 1740–1840. By Randolph Ferguson Scully. The American South Series. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008. 320 pages. $42.50 (cloth).
Reviewed by Dee E. Andrews, California State University, East Bay
Early American Baptists were a diverse and diffuse lot. Emerging from the Puritan controversies of the seventeenth century, they favored congregational forms over episcopal and presbyterian but with the Great Awakening adopted a missionary-style itinerancy that guaranteed a greater expanse and influence for their faith than the New England Congregationalists ever achieved. With the coming of the American Revolution, some Baptists were ardent patriots while others' main aim was to remove the heavy hand of church establishments from their religious communities. The remarkably early emergence of black Baptist preachers was to be of great historical significance, but most white Baptists remained ambivalent at best on the subject of slavery. Baptists exhibited every sign of elevating women in the ranks of their small communities but, after the Revolution, women's status declined precipitously. The only clear connection among diverse Baptist congregations was the doctrine of adult baptism; Baptists might be more or less free-will Arminians or more or less Calvinist predestinarians.	1
But, perhaps because of their strong historical link to New England, the Baptists have been prominent in early American studies for some time: as the centerpiece of the histories of separation of church and state; as coconspirators with other evangelicals in the emergence of American revivalism; and, for readers of this journal, as the countercultural challengers to Anglican hegemony in Rhys Isaac's pathbreaking work on colonial and revolutionary-era Virginia. Recently, historians have outpaced Isaac, examining the place of gender, race, and status within southern Baptist communities and complicating the diametric paradigms—top-down authority versus bottom-up, worldliness versus otherworldliness, social radicalism versus social control—that have informed so much writing on American religious movements.¹ These two fine studies value distinction over opposition, cultural ambiguity over historical certainty, and, in one, an understanding of the limits of cultural action and, in the other, a comprehension of the results of cultural inaction.	2
Jewel L. Spangler's Virginians Reborn takes on Isaac's thesis—that the Baptists formed a genuine threat to the Virginia elite—in an elegantly written, thoroughly researched, and tightly argued examination of the transition away from Anglican religious monopoly in mid-eighteenth-century Virginia, through the rise of the Presbyterians and Baptists in the years of the Great Awakening and the subsequent popularity of the Baptists in revolutionary and early republican Virginia. Spangler's book is an extended essay on the ways in which Virginia dissenters rejected the established church but accepted the social order of the colony and state (the Methodists, oddly overlooked here, likely would also fulfill her thesis). As she writes: "The American Revolution was an important event in Virginia's Baptist history, but this study does not seek to reinforce the idea that the rise of the Baptists was itself revolutionary, in the sense of a sudden, dramatic overturning. Rather, it emphasizes the many small factors that, taken together, moved the Baptists incrementally toward the religious mainstream over time—and moved the mainstream toward the Baptists" (5). The Baptist influence, in short, was far greater than the sum of its parts, and as Virginians found "ways to integrate revolutionary ideology with a slaveholding society ... the Baptists were midwives to this Virginia reborn" (8).	. . .

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