In this exhaustively researched and well-writtten study, historian Edward L. Bond provides an inside view of religion in America's first colony. Focusing on religion as the various expressions of individual and corporate relationship with the divine, the author gives the reader an insightful picture of religion and society in colonial Virginia. In the process, he clarifies our understandings of Virginia's established Anglican Church, discusses the theology and devotional practices of the colonists, and explains the role of religion in colonial polity. Such an approach allows the reader to see clearly both the conservative and progressive elements in the way the earliest colonists in Virginia defined their individual and corporate relationship with God.
In particular, Bond argues that concerns about England's role as an empire and its national self-image formed much of the background of the colonization of Virginia. Virginia was not merely a mercantile venture, or a religious mission to spread the Gospel, or an outpost to rival the Spaniards, or even all of these together. The first permanent colony offered proponents of expansion tangible evidence of empire and thus became a vivid assertion of the nation's imperial identity.
Throughout Bond's fascinating analysis, he shows that by the end of the seventeenth century Virginians, though viewing themselves as Anglicans, nonetheless gradually discovered that they were defending an ecclesiastical institution much different from the one they left behind in England.
