How were religious dissenters treated in the early colonies?

It is difficult now to imagine that as recently as the 1960s few monographs on the southern British colonies of Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia (as the “early South” would then have been defined) addressed religious topics in a sustained way. The historical master narrative of fifty years ago typically contrasted “religious” New England with the more secular “plantation colonies,” reflecting a dearth of curiosity about the nature of early southern religious institutions, beliefs, and experience. Those working on southern religious topics tended to be lone voices, not fully in conversation with one another and barely audible to non-specialists.1 In textbooks, a few lines about the (weak) Anglican establishment and brief mention of other Protestant faiths—mostly as accompanying immigrants from Scotland, Ireland, France, German principalities, and the like—had to suffice. Allan Nevins and Henry Steele Commager, in the 1969 edition of their popular textbook, put it typically: “in New England, the people associated in compact villages to maintain their church congregations; in most of the South, congregations counted for little.”2

In my lifetime, the historiography of southern Protestant dissent before the American Revolution has expanded fantastically and has become required reading for both southernists and American religious historians more generally. There are, of course, many ways that one might parse this literature, but I would like to suggest here a particular reading of the field around three groupings of the scholarship. A “founding” set of publications on southern Protestants appeared primarily in the 1960s and 1970s, which both awakened sustained interest in the subject and inspired further research. Such work shaped a new understanding among academics of the region as religiously oriented and at the same time distinctive in beliefs, practices, and institutions from the rest of the United States. While the antebellum period was the dominant focus, the recovery of a religious history of the early South, including dissenting Protestant groups, also developed apace. A second grouping, overlapping somewhat with the first, is thematic in nature, comprised of studies that addressed early Protestant dissent as a countercultural movement. This work assessed whether and how Christian communities posed political, social, and/or cultural opposition to the dominant “southern” order. It typically also considered whether, when, and how those challenges were neutralized in the emergence of a distinctive, southern evangelicalism in the post-revolutionary period, one that yielded to the hierarchal, proslavery vision of the southern ruling class. A third grouping is comprised of publications that evidence a decided move away from the preoccupations of the founding generation, and the current emphasis on new topics which mark a general fragmentation of the field.

While there has long been some scholarship on early southern Protestantism, after midcentury several historians had a particularly pronounced impact beyond their immediate intellectual circle, helping to awaken a renewed and sustained scholarly interest in southern religion. Among the best known of these founders of the field were Donald G. Mathews, John B. Boles, Dickson D. Bruce, Eugene D. Genovese, and Albert J. Raboteau, though several others could certainly be named here.3 This field emerged at a time when scholarship treated the South, past and present, as distinctive, different, perhaps a few steps to the side of the American cultural mainstream—as an unmodern or antimodern, face-to-face, hierarchical culture clinging to tradition (think Old Time Religion) in a modernizing world.4 The work that launched southern religious history as a field highlighted the fact that many dissenting Protestants in the post-revolutionary South retained Calvinist impulses that were becoming outmoded elsewhere. Dissenting Protestant groups attracted plain farmers who sometimes gathered in primitive camp meetings—these were rough and tumble events, more “authentic” than the slick affairs that would eventually become popular in the North. Masters and slaves came to worship under one roof, navigating their distinctive, southern relationship, in part, through church practice and religious belief. Mathews was surely not the only one in this group of founders who hoped that his work would inspire “further discussion of the character, functions, and significance of religion in shaping and defining the South as a distinct part of the new American nation.”5

As early Americanists caught this same intellectual wave, their work thoroughly undermined the myth of the “secular” southern colonies. Two mutually compatible lines of inquiry emerged. One asserted the importance of the established Anglican Church in the region, an institution that so defined a mainstream that all other Protestants must automatically be understood as dissenters, even in places where the Church itself was weak. Here the work of Joan R. Gundersen, S. Charles Bolton, John Woolverton, Dell Upton, Edward L. Bond and John K. Nelson particularly stand out.6 All of these historians, and others besides, treated the southern colonies as distinctive from the rest of British North America both because the Church of England enjoyed some considerable sway there (or could hope to) and because the Church was in some sense shaped by the interests of a plantation-based master class, unlike elsewhere.

Another group of scholars described the eighteenth-century British South as increasingly rife with “evangelical” Protestant dissenters, especially Presbyterians and Baptists (and eventually Methodists), whose more emotive, stripped down version of “vital religion” built a deep sense of community among adherents and made particular inroads with plainer folk and even the enslaved. Rhys Isaac is perhaps the most important single figure here. His articles and subsequent book, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790 (1982), centered on the idea that dissenting groups offered a real alternative to the established church and increasingly challenged not only its religious primacy but also its core values. This “evangelical revolt” laid the groundwork for the emergence of the Bible Belt across the southern states in the early-national period, again connecting Protestant dissent back to the development of regional distinctiveness. The early chapters of Donald Mathews’s synthesis touched on similar themes, while Richard R. Beeman and J. Stephen Kroll-Smith quickly provided more detailed studies of evangelicals in Virginia and William Howland Kennedy III, David T. Morgan, and Allan Gallay were among the first to draw sustained academic attention to their significance for the Carolinas and Georgia.7

As the profession reckoned with early dissenters as never before, a new core theme emerged that comprises a second grouping of the literature for our purposes here. The focus settled, for a time, on the question of how, and to what extent, early Protestant dissent challenged the dominant social order—what southern religious historian Beth Barton Schweiger has termed the “stock opposition of American history … populism versus hierarchy.”8 Constructing a story of a viable established church and the emergence of active dissent from it almost of necessity creates a framework of opposition between the two. Yet those who first drew widespread attention to early dissent, especially Isaac and Mathews, took the point much further. These studies sat at the crossroads of two historiographical trends that they, and the historians they influenced, sought to square with one another. One line of reasoning underscored planter power (over slaves, but also in southern life generally) as the defining feature of the development of a distinctive South—even, to a degree, before there was a nation for these colonies to become southern states of—potentially muting internal conflict among free people and channeling and blunting slave resistance.9 Isaac’s treatment of the Church of England identified it with southern elites, and viewed its primary function as the reinforcement of social hierarchy and elite privilege. Mathews, while unimpressed with the effectiveness of the colonial church in the South, claimed that it “tried to fit everyone snugly into a social system where individuals were valued not on the basis of their own merit but on their family background and social station.”10 The other historiographical trend of the 1960s and 1970s that influenced work on early southern Protestantism centered on class and cultural conflicts and how they related to the American Revolution. This literature drew attention to internal social relations and the efforts of common folk to assert themselves politically, reject social hierarchy, and embrace a more egalitarian ethos in the Age of Revolution.11 Isaac, in particular, implied that evangelical religion appealed to and welcomed plain folk and slaves, but it was not initially attractive to very many in the ruling class. Dissenting fellowship gave plain folk a sense of belonging and a means of asserting themselves in public. These faiths valued all souls equally and their practices eschewed earthly hierarchies. The “evangelical revolt” contained a reform impulse that potentially threatened slavery, as well as offering a political and cultural critique of planter society. It is not entirely clear in this literature how the hierarchy and the counterculture moved forward from their colonial battles to create a distinctive southern Protestantism of which the planter class could approve, but both Isaac and Mathews hint that evangelicals gradually backed away from the most radical aspects of their faith and practice in pursuit of legitimacy and longevity.

Mathews’s and Isaac’s work in many ways set the terms for future research on Protestant dissent for at least a generation, whether scholars ultimately supported, nuanced, or challenged their arguments. Key books completed in the 1990s seemed to embrace the oppositional narrative most pointedly. Erskine Clarke’s masterful 1996 study of Calvinists (mostly Presbyterians and Congregationalists) in Lowcountry South Carolina represents one way that this was so. The dissenting congregations at the center of this book took in a surprisingly large number of early South Carolinians, black and white, rich and poor, and endured internal divisions that echoed the tensions within southern society more broadly at the end of the colonial period. Clarke shows us how congregations struggled to strike a balance between the expectation that religious institutions would provide order and preserve hierarchy and the impulse to recognize individual liberty (and maybe even equality). At times, these tensions became open conflicts, until the post-revolutionary period, when the elite won the day and a more hierarchal, order-driven form of dissent came to the fore. Alternatively, Christine Leigh Heyrman’s beautifully written Southern Cross (1997) describes this cultural clash as external to dissent, not internal to it. She argues, in fact, that evangelical dissent was so very countercultural that it could attract few converts in its founding generation and expanded very slowly indeed. Only well into the nineteenth century, after dissenters abandoned most of their distinctiveness, were they able to succeed in becoming dominant in the region.12

In the 2000s, the oppositional narrative has continued to play a role in defining the focus of many studies, though with some modifications. Some scholarship, while still in conversation with Isaac and Mathews, sought to undermine their interpretations by rejecting the premise that Protestant dissent was socially oppositional. My own study of the rise of evangelical religion in colonial Virginia would be a case in point.13 I argue that Presbyterians and Baptists did offer an alternative to the Anglican establishment that was truly distinctive in terms of belief and practice. While these dissenting faiths certainly presented challenges to the dominant order at times (Anglican and secular), I suggest that evangelicals were only able to expand as rapidly as they did because their beliefs and practices also evidenced correspondences with the dominant culture from the first. I tended to read these congregations as supportive of planter power, social hierarchies, and slavery. The rise of evangelicalism, then, was part of the process of solidifying a distinctive South but not part of a revolutionary-era cultural conflict that helped to give impetus and meaning to the American Revolution.

To my mind, some of the best work of the aughts engaged with the frameworks developed by the founders of the field but also began to transcend both of their core narratives, marking a transition to a third grouping in the literature. Monica Najar’s study of early Baptists in Virginia, Kentucky, North Carolina and Tennessee, for example, describes dissenting belief and practice as conflicting with the values of the dominant order in areas as fundamental as gender conventions, class hierarchies, and racial ideology. Yet these observations are not aimed simply at casting Baptists as countercultural. Rather, she develops a larger point that these churches “acted as both civil and religious bodies,” especially in areas that were institutionally weak. Baptist congregations created “institutions that drew settlers together, galvanized their loyalties, and schooled them in the structures of community,” which ultimately reformulated “the lines between the ‘religious’ and the ‘secular’ realms.”14 The distinctive South being referenced here is not simply the one that planters controlled, slaves labored in, and evangelicals provided the religious services for. It is also one in which religion played a particularly active civic role and where public and private were defined in unique ways, that would be familiar to any student of southern history. Similarly Janet Moore Lindman’s Bodies of Belief (2008), a study of Baptists in the Pennsylvania and Virginia colonies, notes the distinctiveness of this dissenting faith without taking up the core intellectual projects of the previous generation of scholarship. Her aim is both to highlight the paradoxes attendant upon those distinctions (in her words, “Baptists adopted the spiritual equality of the New Testament but built an institutional structure based on racial and gender asymmetry”) and to analyze the “bodily enactment” of religious conversion, belief, and practice. 15

Perhaps the migration in interpretation is most evident in the work on African American dissenters. The countercultural narrative of the “founders,” followed by declension into proslavery Christianity, was the standard way of discussing early African American Protestantism for some time. For example, in The World They Made Together (1989), Mechal Sobel described early Baptist Christianity in Virginia as “a shared black and white phenomenon” and claimed that each group’s world view “stimulated, permeated, and invigorated the other.” Then in the post-revolutionary period, an escalation of racism in congregations pushed slaves and Free Blacks to the margins of fellowship, as the countercultural moment gave way to planter power.16 Jon Sensbach’s 1998 study of African Americans among North Carolina Moravians highlights a similar trajectory from countercultural egalitarianism to social conformity and African American exclusion.17

Fast-forward to 2008. Two studies published on evangelicals in Virginia that year discussed similar subjects, but without casting early evangelicals simply as cultural outsiders or producing the strict declension narrative which typically placed planters at the helm of a solidly proslavery South, with evangelicals in their pockets. Charles F. Irons’s spectacular study, The Origins of Proslavery Christianity, observes that early evangelical churches provided opportunities for African American agency that were sorely absent in other public spaces, and Irons acknowledges considerable evangelical deviations from dominant racial hierarchies. Yet he also shows us biracial churches that had always evidenced complex and sometimes conflicting policies, practices, and ideas with respect to race and slavery, and engendered a range of experiences for African American churchgoers. Concomitantly, even after the rise of so-called proslavery Christianity, Irons explains, “white southerners’ religious commitment was never completely prostituted to the slave power; it sometimes abetted and sometimes inhibited slaveholders’ political ambitions.” His larger objective is to recast the significance of black agency in biracial churches, and to show how it was directly, albeit inadvertently, related to the development of proslavery practices and policies. Similarly, Randolph Ferguson Scully’s monograph on Virginia Baptists, published almost simultaneously, gives us a complex characterization of pre-war evangelical distinctiveness. Scully, too, rejects the simple trajectory of decline from the revolutionary-era peak of inclusiveness, suggesting instead that even Nat Turner’s 1831 Rebellion did not produce the complete ascendance of proslavery evangelicalism.18

To define a third group of work, I take some liberties with the very concept of a “grouping.” In recent years, as asserted just above, work on evangelical dissent in the early South has begun to disengage from both the counterculture theme and the concern with the rise of a distinctive and unified “southern” Protestantism out of these eighteenth-century roots. This work reflects a general tendency among southernists in recent times to problematize the very notion of a “southern” history before the American Revolution, and to conceive of the South as a diverse and, in some ways, disaggregated region, even after the formation of the United States.19 As historians of the early Protestant South move beyond the issues that most interested the field’s modern founders, they have also begun to take on new subjects and new ways of defining the field itself. The general impulse right now seems to be toward fragmentation. Rather than looking for the roots of a fairly unified southern Protestantism, historians of the early “South” are striking out in various directions with no clear synthesis yet in sight (and perhaps more interestingly, not necessarily even wanted).20

In a 2004 essay, Sensbach persuasively called upon early southern religious historians to rethink the terms “colonial” and “South.” If the region were considered not as the origin point for a “southern” evangelical religion, and not merely defined as the colonies that became the southern seaboard states, new themes would surely come to the fore.21 In my view, he was completely right on this point as it pertains to dissenting Protestants. Take the question of geographical framing. Historians have long noted transatlantic connections in the rise of evangelicalism, and they have sometimes considered the southern seaboard colonies in comparative context.22 Sensbach’s own 2005 book, Rebecca’s Revival, stands as an excellent example of how historians are moving beyond old geographical categories and pushing from the comparative to the transnational, and why these are admirable goals. He traces the free black Moravian Rebecca Protten’s evangelical activities in the Danish Caribbean, in (primarily German-speaking) Europe and parts of West Africa, and in the process illustrates how her life reflects the emergence of a Black Christianity in the Americas and how it relates to African American Christianity in the American South.23 Widening the geographical scope beyond the seaboard colonies, and even beyond the “South” of the antebellum period, provides new insights that promise to thoroughly refresh this field.

The major evangelical groups that arose in the early period—the Presbyterians, Baptists, and Methodists—have been the subject of many studies and have often been homogenized into a single “evangelical” category.24 But the complexity and diversity of “evangelical” dissent in the colonial period is now coming more fully into view as well. Philip N. Mulder’s 2002 study is a case in point. He focuses on the largest dissenting faiths, but his aim was to highlight what defined each group separately, how these groups related to one another, and the internal conflicts that plagued them on occasion. The result is a variegated study that brings the distinctive beliefs and practices of each group to the center of the discussion rather than seeking a central and homogenized narrative.25

Studies of the many other Protestant groups that took root in the South before 1775, but did not become one of the “winning” denominations of the nineteenth century, now have room to emerge as well. Take the Quakers, for instance. The first southern Friends began meeting together in the mid-seventeenth century, and with the advent of religious toleration Friends’ monthly meetings expanded in the eighteenth. As a faith that deeply valued its distinctive practices (like plainness, the peace testimony, and rejection of some earthly marks of social distinction) and actively sought to remain a separate people (especially in terms of endogamous marriage practices), the story of the Quakers fit awkwardly within the trajectory of the narrative of evangelical revolt and post-war co-optation. Freed of that structure, historians can now turn their attention to this important faith anew.26 Similarly, there has been a renewed interest in other, less-well-known Protestant groups, especially Moravians and Huguenots, and I fully expect that this trend will continue.27

As I see it, historians of early religious dissent are currently going through a regrouping phase. Liberated from the intellectual projects of the past, they are embracing new subjects, new goals, and new conclusions. The results may well be at least temporarily frustrating for those who are looking for ways to bring this work into a master narrative of American religious history or southern history. But, in the reputed words of William Faulkner, “People need trouble – a little frustration to sharpen the spirit on, toughen it…. [Y]ou have to learn fortitude, endurance. Only vegetables are happy.”

Why did Puritans persecute dissenters?

What was a dissenter in colonial America?

Which colonial region had colonies created by religious dissenters?

What are some examples of religious persecution?