Reviews of Books

Reviewed by Patricia U. Bonomi, New York University

Since the publication in 1952 of Charles S. Sydnor's elegant little book, Gentlemen Freeholders, historians have perceived colonial Virginia's local government in terms of county courts and justices of the peace.1 John K. Nelson, in this scrupulously researched, revisionist history of religion in pre-revolutionary Virginia, argues instead that the colony's local government was "parish-county" (p. 4). The parishes, Nelson tells us, were at least equal with the counties in Virginians' daily concerns, and the tithe that supported them was two-and-one-half times the county tax. The established Church of England was by the eighteenth century central not only to the religious but also to the political, social, and economic life of the colony. It broke from English forms where necessary to serve a scattered and diverse population, and by 1776 it had 95 functioning parishes, a minister resident in each, and 249 congregations.	1
Nelson suggests that two flawed assumptions have led scholars to misconceive local governmental forms and underestimate the strength of Virginia's Anglican establishment. The first depicts the church primarily as the instrument of a planter elite determined to maintain its social dominance, a perspective that has over the years often foreclosed serious examination of Anglican spiritual life. The second results from a founding narrative constructed by evangelical historians, which asserts that only Separate Baptists, New Light Presbyterians, and Methodists brought genuine religion to the Chesapeake. This "pernicious dissenter bias, most often unrecognized and perhaps even unintended," has promoted an image of the Church of England as a "lifeless, this-worldly, weak, and even dissolute" (p. 9) institution.	2
Nelson challenges this historiography—with unfailingly civility and great respect for his predecessors' contributions—by laying out the results of his own decades of research into every aspect of Virginia's established church and describing its insinuation into the colonists' ordinary concerns. Because Anglicans did not wear their religion on their sleeves as evangelicals did—favoring the quiet cadences of the liturgy, family prayer, and pastoral visits to ardent public proselytization—Nelson argues that the character and authenticity of Anglican beliefs "must largely be inferred from everyday behaviors" (p. 9). These he explores under four subject headings: parishes, parsons, divine services, and parishioners.	3
By the beginning of the eighteenth century, Virginia parishes had taken on a number of important tasks, some more often associated with governments. The most familiar ones were paying ministers, clerks, and sextons, providing parsonages and glebes (averaging 380 acres), building and maintaining churches and chapels, and appointing freeholders to walk ("procession") and reconfirm the boundaries of all property held in the parish. In addition, from one-fourth to one-third of the parish tax went to poor relief, which involved allowances and home care for the destitute (in a few cases for up to twenty or thirty years), doctors for the sick, the maintenance of neglected children, and the binding out of orphans. The churchwardens presented parishioners to county grand juries for moral infractions and infrequent church attendance, with fines imposed by the court being paid to the poor fund. The county courts sometimes asked the parishes to supply tobacco inspectors, road workers, and even ferry men. And the courts were known to intercede in such seeming church affairs as the supply of bread and wine for communion as well as controversies over the use of hymns in place of psalms. This mixing of the secular and the sacred persuades Nelson that colonial Virginians did not see their world divided into religious and civil spheres.	. . .