Race and religion in early Virginia
Subtitle: from potential Christians to hereditary heathens
By: Rebecca Goetz
Series: Early America : history, context, culture
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 2012
Place of publication: Baltimore
Language: eng
Number of pages: 223
ISBN-13: 9781421407005
Subjects: Race relations; Racism; Church history
Description: In The Baptism of Early Virginia, Rebecca Anne Goetz examines the construction of race through the religious beliefs and practices of English Virginians. She finds the seventeenth century a critical time in the development and articulation of racial ideologies - ultimately in the idea of "hereditary heathenism," the notion that Africans and Indians were incapable of genuine Christian conversion. In Virginia in particular, English settlers initially believed that native people would quickly become Christian and would form a vibrant partnership with English people. After vicious Anglo-Indian violence dashed those hopes, English Virginians used Christian rituals like marriage and baptism to exclude first Indians and then Africans from the privileges enjoyed by English Christians - including freedom. Resistance to hereditary heathenism was not uncommon, however. Enslaved people and many Anglican ministers fought against planters' racial ideologies, setting the stage for Christian abolitionism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Using court records, letters, and pamphlets, Goetz suggests new ways of approaching and understanding the deeply entwined relationship between Christianity and race in early America. -- Book jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction: Christians and Heathens in Virginia; title: English Christians among the Blackest Nations; title: The Rise and the Fall of the Anglo-Indian Christian Commonwealth; title: Faith in the Blood; title: Baptism and the Birth of Race; title: Becoming Christian, Becoming White; title: The Children of Israel; title: Epilogue: Christian Abolitionism and Proslavery Christianity.