Virginians Reborn: Anglican Monopoly, Evangelical Dissent, and the Rise of the Baptists in the Late Eighteenth Century.

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. 288 pp.

Baptists' success in eighteenth-century Virginia has long interested historians. Baptists' rise is often explained by describing Baptists as oppositional: Baptists demanded that church members break from the surrounding society, and thus, attracted many socioeconomically marginal converts. In a new look at early Virginia Baptists, Spangler credits their rise to four factors: Baptists made gains where the Anglican establishment was weak; their organizational methods (e.g., revival meetings) were effective; the larger imperial crisis worked to Baptists' advantage; and, finally, "Baptists were able to expand because they did not stand in stark opposition to the dominant social and political order in ways that would have mattered the most." (4) Indeed, the congruence between Baptist practice and larger social mores, Spangler argues, was key to their success.

In this last argument, Spangler throws down a revisionist gauntlet. Central to her claim is a simple but important historiograpahic observation: the early-nineteenth-century Baptist historians on whom modern scholars have relied (e.g., Robert B. Semple, William Fristoe) were not, of course, true contemporaries of the early Baptists about whom they wrote. Spangler argues that Semple and others who "emphasized the plain origin of converts and the strict morality of their practice, placing their faith in dramatic contrast to the wicked ways of the Anglican world" (20) were polemical, not merely descriptive. Her careful reading of records from three counties demonstrates that Baptists attracted poor, middling, and rich converts.

Spangler further reassesses the ostensibly oppositional habits we usually ascribe to early Baptists: spurning alcohol and gaming, adopting plain clothes, and rigorous Sabbath observance. Spangler acknowledges that in avoiding the race track and the ballroom, "Baptists distinguished themselves from 'the world' to a significant degree." (142) But other descriptions need to be reconsidered. Regarding alcohol, Baptists required only moderation, not wholesale abstinence--and the disciplinary records that on the one hand testify to the Baptists' abstemious preferences also suggest that many ordinary Baptists tippled quite happily. Most important, Spangler argues that the surrounding "wicked ... Anglican" culture was more in sync with these Baptist prerogatives than historiography suggests. Baptists criticized luxurious clothing at precisely the pre-Revolutionary moment when many Virginians began to equate sartorial restraint with civic virtue. Furthermore, Baptist politics was only oppositional from one perspective: ordinary white men had more power in Baptist churches than they did in Anglican churches, but Baptists households had the same patriarchal structures as other people's households. "[T]he subordination of ... wives and other familial dependents to [fathers'] authority ... was actively supported by Baptist church government," (152) and Baptists were more accommodating to slavery than some historians have allowed.

Occasionally, the argument is a bit strained--for example, Spangler acknowledges that Baptists were stricter than other Christians about the Sabbath, but then suggests that Anglicans were themselves fairly "mindful about Sabbath breaking" (146), a claim that is in tension with her own earlier argument that Anglicans did not strictly enforce Sunday church attendance (35). Still, Spangler's overarching argument--that "there is a basis in fact" for characterizing Baptists as oppositional but that there were "important correspondences between Baptist ideas, structures and practices and those of the dominant culture in which they competed," and that those correspondences help explain their success (4)--is a significant revision to common wisdom. This bold and creative study will repay careful rereading by students of Baptist history and Virginia history.--Reviewed by Lauren F. Winner, assistant professor, Duke University Divinity School, Durham, North Carolina.