7. Religion in Virginia

Religion played an extremely significant role in the life of the man of the seventeenth century—a century of great religious wars, schisms, and revolutions ensuing from the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. England suffered not only under feudalism, but under its corollary, the established state church. Indeed, one of the causes of the Reformation, expecially in England, was the desire of the rising absolutism of the Crown to bring the church in Great Britain under its domination.* The Church of England, appointed and controlled by the Crown, fulfilled this ambition.

The original founders naturally believed that Virginia would be as rigorously Anglican as the old country itself. King James I—that scholarly enthusiast for his own divine right—enjoined the Virginia colonists in the first charter of 1606 to propagate the true religion: “We, greatly commending... the desires for the furtherance of so noble a work, which may hereafter tend to the glory of his Divine Majesty, in propagating of Christian religion to such people, as yet live in darkness and miserable ignorance of the true knowledge and worship of God and man in time bring the infidels and savages, living in those parts, to human civility, and to a settled and quiet government....”

Much of the motivation, at least as officially proclaimed, for the founding of the colony was the desire to establish a Protestant bulwark against Catholic Spain. Many leading Anglican ministers, including John Donne, dean of St. Paul’s, propagandized for the Virginia Company’s settlement on these grounds. One of the preachers in the earliest settlement, the Reverend Alexander Whitaker, wrote a tract, Good News from Virginia, which was published by the Virginia Company in 1613 and which proclaimed that to doubt the future of the Virginia colony was to doubt the promises of God.

From the first settlement at Jamestown, the Anglican religion was the established church of the colony. The Virginia General Assembly periodically enacted laws to compel conformity, but the lure of profits led the landowners—eager for new settlers and servants—to relax de facto religious pressures on the immigrants, and such laws as compulsory church attendance were rarely enforced.

The new conditions faced in America—the great distance from home, the new lands, the freer social structure—caused Virginia’s Anglican church to develop very differently from the mother church. From the beginning, control by the bishop of London was loose, and each church came to be controlled by its own vestry—elected by vote of its parishioners, but in practice by the leading planters of the parish—rather than by the central government of the Church of England. Whereas the governor of Virginia had the right to induct ministers for life, the vestries called ministers for a year or a term of years, and rarely offered ministers for induction. Thus Virginia developed a decentralized—almost a congregational—government in its dominant Anglican church.

Although the church was decentralized, Virginia was nonetheless theocratic. The affairs of the smallest political unit, the parish, were governed by the church vestry, which had the power to levy local taxes. While theoretically elected by the parishioners, the vestrymen actually filled their own vacancies and so became a self-perpetuating oligarchy.

Informality and decentralization were also fostered by the thin, extensive settlement of the land; hence the scattering of churches over the Virginia countryside. Time and again the high-church hierarchy in England deplored the disorder, the neglect of ritual, the informality of prevailing low-church Virginia practice. One of Virginia’s leading planters, Robert Carter, expressed a typical sentiment when in 1720 he wrote:

I am of the Church of England way.... But the high-flown, up-top notions and great stress that is laid on ceremonies, any further than decency and conformity, are what I cannot come into reason of. Practical godliness is the substance—these are but the shell.

Liberalism in religion, however, proceeded but part way, and the hand of theocracy was often evident. Virginia, alarmed at Roman Catholicism in the neighboring colony of Maryland, passed an act “Concerning Popish Recusants.” The act levied the very heavy fine of twenty pounds per month for any failure to attend Anglican services. It also imposed life imprisonment and the confiscation of property on anyone who refused to take the Oath of Allegiance of 1605. This loyalty oath had been decreed by King James I in 1605 as a method of cracking down on Catholics, following the abortive Gunpowder Plot. From the granting of the first charter, King James had imposed a loyalty oath of allegiance and supremacy on all Virginia colonists; refusal was supposed to incur the death penalty. Indeed, the laxity of the London Company in enforcing the loyalty oath, caused by its desire to encourage settlement, was one of King James’ major charges against the company that led to its dissolution.

As a further persecution of the few Roman Catholics—they were virtually nonexistent in the colony—the mass and the sacraments were prohibited, tutoring one’s children in the Catholic religion was outlawed, and life imprisonment and confiscation of property were decreed for anyone sending their children to English-speaking Catholic schools in France or Spain. This extreme legislation remained in force until 1662, the Restoration period, when the act was quietly allowed to lapse. In 1643 a law was passed forbidding Catholics from holding office and outlawing all priests in the colony. After the Restoration, apart from the imposing of oaths of loyalty to the state church for public officials, the theocratic rule relaxed somewhat, although the heavy fine for nonattendance at Anglican services continued. Again, a partially mitigating factor was that these harsh laws were not always rigorously enforced. Thus, the leading—and virtually the only—Catholic family in the colony, headed by planter George Brent, a relative of the Maryland Carrolls, was allowed to move to Virginia about 1650 and to remain there relatively undisturbed. In Brent’s case, laxity was encouraged by the thinness of the population in Virginia, the virtual nonexistence of Catholics in the colony, and the prominence and pronounced royalist sympathies of this tobacco planter.

*As always, a corollary to power was loot, and one of the attractions of the Reformation to England was the opportunity it afforded Henry VIII to confiscate the property of the monasteries and to distribute and sell the seized assets to favorites of the Crown.