As I was beginning research on what became my first book more than a decade ago, people repeatedly told me to give the project up. Religion and race in the seventeenth-century Chesapeake? Certainly race mattered, of course it did, there in that crucible of tobacco and slavery. But religion? There were no sources for religion in seventeenth-century Virginia! For my critics, religion only mattered in Virginia—and indeed in the rest of the South—for the emergence of the evangelical Bible Belt. This dominant narrative obscured the religious worlds of colonial southerners—the many Christianities, African religions, Islam, Judaism, and the beliefs of native Southerners.¹ Older assumptions festered: the South’s white colonists valued profits over prayers and enslaved people lived in a world devoid of the sacred, victims of a “spiritual Holocaust.”²

The last ten to fifteen years have seen a sea change in our understanding of colonial religiosity in general and in the early South in particular. I have observed the changes through my own work; where I was once pressed to defend the study of religion in Virginia, I am now asked detailed questions about religious minorities and African American syncretic Christianity. When the editors of the Journal of Southern Religion asked me to put together a forum on religion in the early South, I saw an opportunity to show how delightfully complex our awareness of the religiosity of the early South has become. The colonial South was a deeply and variously religious place, and the advent of the Bible Belt was a much longer, more complicated process than earlier work had indicated. Most critically, scholars have absorbed the existence of many colonial Christianities and the place of both the Atlantic World and the continental interior in circulating ideas and beliefs. They have also begun to take the spiritual lives of non-whites seriously. The forum essays by Travis Glasson, Jewel Spangler, Maura Farrelly, Jason Young, and Tracy Leavelle, take into account these historiographical and methodological developments and offer thought-provoking suggestions about where future research might take us.

The early South we are in the process of recovering was deeply diverse: it was multireligious, multiethnic, and multiracial. As Philip Morgan recently wrote about colonial Virginia, “[u]northodoxy, no matter what the perspective, was widespread.”³ Morgan’s observations on Virginia could be usefully applied to the rest of the colonial South. Christian heterodoxy and general religious diversity were persistent and ubiquitous features of the colonial South. A list of the many Christianities present in the region would be longer than my arm: there were Roman Catholics, members of the Church of England (in all their glorious variety), Huguenots, German Pietists, Moravians, Quakers, and in the eighteenth century, small groups of Baptists and Presbyterians as well. And this list is not exhaustive, of course. The most important point is that European Christians, their Indian and African converts, and various non-Christians lived cheek-by-jowl with one another. While this did occasion episodes of sectarian violence (often between Protestants of various stripes and Roman Catholics), it also forced a practical toleration. In Virginia, Quakers—though mistrusted and sometimes imprisoned—never found themselves in danger of being executed as their brethren were in Massachusetts. In Virginia, too, wealthy landowning Catholic families such as the Brents were not only tolerated but even protected.⁴ Some southern colonies even wrote toleration of a sort into their founding documents. The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina mandated religious toleration “that civil peace may be maintained amidst diversity of opinions.”⁵ Though the Carolina document was never much respected among its constituents, other southern colonies also experimented with toleration. Georgia, for example, initially did not have an established church and extended religious toleration to all except Roman Catholics. Recognizing the religious diversity of the colonial South, then, should have the effect of encouraging scholars to think anew not only about the sources of religious violence in the early South but also about the origins and development of religious toleration.⁶

One of the happy effects of acknowledging religious diversity and of decentering the growth of evangelicalism has been to refocus attention on the Church of England. Most historians generally considered Anglicanism too weak (even where established), too peppered with scandalously unprincipled clergy, and too irrelevant to the daily lives of ordinary colonists to have had a meaningful impact. In this narrative, the Church of England remained a quaint creature of the elite, waiting to be challenged and overcome by evangelicalism. Though other, less pejorative histories of Anglicanism have long emanated from within the Church of England, counternarratives of a dynamic and adaptive Anglican church have only recently come to the fore.⁷ Travis Glasson’s essay “Protestantism in the Early South” establishes the importance of Anglicanism in the South in the context of a multiracial, multireligious society, crediting Atlantic history with reviving the fortunes of Anglican historiography. As Glasson points out, “Atlantic history has served as an antidote to the excessive exceptionalism to which some Southern religious history has been prone.” Glasson also notes that Anglicanism appealed to a much wider group of people than had been previously assumed. The Church of England adjusted to a variety of conditions and bound Anglicans living around the Atlantic together. It was also a source of rich tradition and valued spirituality—especially for displaced Britons. Glasson’s own fine book specifically addresses Atlantic Anglicanism in the context of missionary activity in the Caribbean and mainland North America. The very fluidity and adaptability of the Church of England transformed a missionary movement designed to mitigate the worst effects of slavery into a fully formed proslavery Christianity. Yet as Glasson also notes, the Church of England was crucial to the development of black Protestantism.⁸ In this new history of the Church of England, Atlantic currents and careful attention to nonwhite interaction with Anglicanism will help scholars answer new questions about African and Indian interactions with Christianity in a context where it has been sorely overlooked.

As colonial Anglicanism has emerged from the shadows, so have the South’s dissenting Protestants. Dissenters were, of course, everywhere—even in colonies with established churches. Their communities should be viewed not in isolation but as part of a broader Atlantic context of migration, exchange, and conflict. The experiences of individual dissenters moving around an Atlantic world full of religious ferment show how varied dissenters were and how their own beliefs changed over the course of their lifetimes. The seventeenth-century Anglican minister Patrick Copeland, for example, began his career by evangelizing Bengalis on behalf of the East India Company. He later became a member of the Virginia Company of London, advising the Company on matters related to Indian conversion. He eventually emigrated to Bermuda, where he abandoned the Church of England in favor of radical congregationalism. He was briefly imprisoned on Bermuda before joining a colony on the island of Eleuthera (Greek for “freedom”) that welcomed all Protestant dissenters. Copeland’s experiences show how dissenters moved around the English imperium, and also illustrate how their religious liberties were usually limited to some degree by the state.⁹ Protestant dissent moved and circulated throughout the Atlantic world, shaping nascent religious cultures and challenging—by their very existence—mainstream Protestantism.

Black Protestant dissenters also moved around the Atlantic world. In the eighteenth century, the tale of Rebecca Protten similarly demonstrates the movement of dissenters in the Atlantic world, this time through the Moravian Church. Rebecca was born into slavery on the island of St. Thomas. She converted to Christianity through the efforts of a Moravian missionary, gained her freedom, and became a missionary in her own right, living first in the Caribbean, then in Germany. Her last voyage as a missionary was to the Danish slave-trading factory of Christianborg on the Gold Coast, where she died in 1781. Protten’s story suggests the complicated relationship among Moravians, race, and the institution of slavery.¹⁰ Studying Protestant dissenters is another window into the spiritual lives of nonwhite southerners. Moravians and Quakers embraced racial equality in interesting ways; rather than treating their radicalism on race (and gender for that matter) as odd outliers, scholars should integrate them into the broader narrative of southern religion.

Puritans—that hotter sort of Protestant—were ubiquitous in the seventeenth century. Far from being confined to New England, puritans lived in Bermuda, the Caribbean, and in the South. The presence of puritans in early Virginia drew Governor William Berkeley’s ire; he drove them out as soon as he was able to and his conflict with these dissenting Protestants exposed fault lines in colonial southern society. Dissenters were sometimes seen, as Berkeley saw them, as traitors and as dangers to the stability of colonial administration. As late as the 1670s, Berkeley directed sarcastic commentary toward Massachusetts Bay puritans, whom he referred to as the “Brethren,” “for they as the Popes ever did doe love an usurper better than a lawful prince.”¹¹ Berkeley’s feud with puritans and his support for the established Church of England reinforce to some degree the trope of established elites in conflict with challenging dissenters. Recent scholarship strongly suggests, though, that thinking in terms of conflict between an orthodox establishment and upstart dissenters might not be useful for the eighteenth century. Jewel Spangler argues in her essay “Protestant Dissenters in the Early South” that some dissenting traditions such as Presbyterians and Baptists, while offering true alternatives to the Church of England, also worked within an established social order. Her conclusions suggest that dissenters were not as countercultural as those they supposedly challenged—including Berkeley—wanted to believe.

Spangler also argues in her essay here and in her other well-received work that dissenter congregations were “supportive of planter power, social hierarchies, and slavery.”¹² Spangler’s work is also part of a renaissance in new studies of non-Anglican Protestantism in the late colonial and early national periods that has upended previously cherished truths about the rise of evangelicalism and proslavery Christianity. New work by Randolph Scully and Charles Irons, for example, highlights the complicated relationship between these emergent congregations and African Americans, and both paint a complex picture of the relationship between Protestant dissent and proslavery Christianity.¹³ Included among southern dissenters were also smaller groups, Moravians, Quakers, and Huguenots for example. As Spangler also notes, these people did not fit neatly into old standard narratives about the development of evangelicalism. With that narrative sufficiently complicated, Spangler suggests that scholars can renew their interest in groups that faded in the nineteenth century, taking them and their importance for the religiosity of the colonial South seriously on their own terms. Their presence and persistence in the colonial period again highlight the importance of ideas of religious toleration and religious liberty.

Though our understanding of Protestantism and its dissenters has changed radically in the last decade, Protestantism maintains its hold on our imaginations. It is the form of Christianity that dominates the narrative of religious history in the early South. But until the early eighteenth century, Protestants in any guise were the minority Christian group in the South, heavily outnumbered by Roman Catholics.¹⁴ The Spanish had missions in Florida (and for a brief period, in the Chesapeake), and the French presence in the lower Mississippi Valley brought Catholicism farther west. If we take seriously Juliana Barr’s call to define the South as a “Sunbelt” stretching from the Atlantic coast into the Southwest to the Pacific Ocean, Catholicism’s dominance in the colonial South becomes even more obvious.¹⁵ Spanish missions in Texas, New Mexico, and California worked hard to convert native people to Catholicism, and by the early eighteenth century, their efforts had borne fruit. From Florida to Santa Fe, French, Spanish, and native Catholics connected across trade routes that reached into the desert Southwest and into the heart of the continent. Far from being a land of (mostly) Anglophone Protestants of various stripes, when seen from the Caribbean, from Florida, from the French trade up and down the Mississippi River, or from Mexico City, the South was a Roman Catholic space.

The English (Protestant) challenge to the Catholic South came not with the establishment of Jamestown (though the Virginia colonists spent much of the seventeenth century living in fear of Spanish raids), but with the establishment of Carolina and the growth of a vigorous trade in enslaved Indians. Between 1702 and 1705, English slave traders and their Indian allies repeatedly raided the missions of Spanish Florida, destroying many towns and enslaving and killing native people. Those who were not killed or enslaved fled to French territory, hoping for protection there. During one particularly devastating raid in 1704, a party of English and Ochese raiders burned towns and tortured captives, and in a fit of anti-Catholic ire, the invaders burned and looted a mission church.¹⁶ English ascendancy in Carolina not only threatened the Catholic South but also doomed the well-connected chain of missions that stretched from the Florida peninsula to the Gulf Coast South. As Jon Sensbach has pointed out, the early eighteenth-century attacks on the Florida missions represented a turning point in the history of the South, one that historians who have been shaped by the narrative of Protestant domination have missed.¹⁷ This Catholic South needs to be understood on its own terms, and its dominance needs to be integrated into our understanding of southern religiosity.

As Maura Farrelly notes in her essay “Catholicism and the Early South,” Catholicism had an “English accent” in Maryland, the only English colony formed deliberately to shelter Catholics. English Protestants quickly outnumbered English Catholics in the little colony (puritans in the settlement attempted to take over the colony on behalf of Parliament in 1645–1646). After the Glorious Revolution, Farrelly observes that though Catholics labored under sometimes severe legal disabilities during the eighteenth century, they retained a commitment to toleration and religious liberty that spurred their enthusiastic participation in the American Revolution. Farrelly also argues that Maryland’s English Catholics were crucial to the legal institutionalization of race-based slavery in the Chesapeake, and that slavery “played a role in the creation of a distinctly ‘American’ form of Roman Catholic identity.”

Maryland’s Catholics might not have wrestled with questions of conscience regarding race and slavery, but as Farrelly points out, French and Spanish Catholics, especially the regular clergy, certainly did. The New Orleans Ursuline convent housed French, Cuban, and American-born women but championed equal access to the sacraments for all people.¹⁸ Equally important were the large numbers of African Catholics in the South. Just as Travis Glasson argues that understanding enslaved Anglicans is an important project, so is understanding enslaved Catholics. Jason Young’s essay “African Religions in the Early South” makes a powerful case for carefully considering African Catholicism in the context of a diverse southern religiosity. When Kongolese Catholicism entered the South with enslaved people, it was a Catholicism that had been understood, adopted, and adapted by several generations and had been worked into the fabric of West African life. British missionaries and clergymen observed with interest and some puzzlement the presence of this strong Afro-Catholicism among enslaved people in Carolina; some of these Kongolese Catholics requested conversion into the Church of England. Kongolese Catholics’ devotion to the Virgin Mary might have inspired the slave rebellion in Stono, South Carolina, in 1739.¹⁹ Young rightly suggests that West African Catholicism, like Protestantism and Islam, contributed to the emergence of African American religion later in the eighteenth century. But Afro-Catholicism is also important in its own right. The South was sprinkled with black Catholic converts as well, especially in Spanish Florida. These men and women chose Catholicism in the New World rather than in the Old.²⁰ Roman Catholicism in the broad South was diverse: it was multiethnic, multiracial, and multilingual. It appealed to people from Europe, Africa, and the Americas, and it formed the backbone of southern religiosity for the better part of three centuries.

Other Old World monotheisms made their way to the American South as well. Islam came to the North American continent via the South, and it accompanied Christianity. The history of Islam in the New World began as soon as Old World voyagers began exploring the land. In the sixteenth century, Muslims came mostly from North Africa via trade in slaves around the Mediterranean. Estebanico, a North African slave on Panfilo de Narvaez’s expedition, was one of only four survivors of the venture and spent the years between 1527 and 1536 walking from the west coast of Florida to the Pacific coast of Mexico. Estebanico was from the town of Azamor in Morocco, and was most likely born into a Muslim family. After his enslavement, probably by Portuguese invaders/traders, Estebanico’s captors likely forced him to convert to Christianity and gave him a new name—after St. Stephen. Spain forbade the immigration of Muslims, Jews, and conversos to the New World, so Estebanico’s master must have accepted his Christianity, at least nominally. Estebanico had a gift for languages and an adaptability that eluded some of his Spanish counterparts; he was confident in his relationship with native peoples he met along the way.²¹ Another Muslim, named Chinano and enslaved in Cartagena, found his way home to the Levant via one of Francis Drake’s piratical attacks and a (possibly spurious) conversion to Christianity in London.²² Even in the seventeenth century, Turks found themselves in North America after circuitous journeys. In the 1670s, three Turkish captives were living in Virginia, and Governor Berkeley promised them freedom if they converted to Christianity. Two of the men took the governor up on his offer, and Lady Berkeley stood as godmother to the new converts. The third man did not convert, but Berkeley freed him anyway.²³

The stories of Estebanico, Chinano, and the three Turkish captives hint at the possibility of many microhistories of Muslims in the early South awaiting discovery in the archives. Yet most of what we know about Islam is anecdotal or comes from reconstructing the deep context of the African origins of enslaved people. As Michael Gomez has noted, Islam was fairly common in portions of Senegambia and the interior of the Gold Coast and the Bight of Benin—all places from which British planters preferred to import enslaved people. Gomez estimates the numbers of West African Muslims coming into the colonial South in the thousands—making African Muslims a significant presence.²⁴ Jason Young notes that enslaved African Muslims were present in French Louisiana, Spanish Florida, and the British South, and that African Muslims helped shape African American society and identity. Atlantic history has been crucial to tracing the existence and legacies of African Muslims as well. Young’s previous work argues for the importance of “African Atlantic religion” in defining the importance of African Christianities and African Islam to the formation of African American identity.²⁵ Yet despite the scholarly certainty that the presence of Muslims is important to understanding the religiosity of the early South, there are still more questions than answers. The history of the early South’s Muslims unfortunately remains a niche topic that has resisted integration into broader narratives about the diversity of southern religiosity. In this way older assumptions about the principal importance of European Christianities still hobble efforts to see a more diverse South.

The questions are similar for the history of Judaism in the early South. We know that Jews came in small numbers to mainland North America, yet their stories are also not integrated into the larger narrative of southern religiosity. And here too the Atlantic paradigm is critical to understanding how Judaism came to the South and how Jewish people circulated throughout the Anglophone and Lusophone worlds. Jewish people came to the South individually or in small groups. In Maryland, Jacob Lumbrozo, identified as “the Jew doctor,” was prosecuted “for uttering words of blesphemy agst [against] Our Blessed Sauiour Jesus Christ” in 1658. Lumbrozo demurred, telling the Provincial Court that he had answered particular questions “[b]ut sayd not any thing scoffingly or in derogaon [derogation] of him, Christians acknowledge for their Messias.”²⁶ Lumbrozo was probably a Sephardic refugee who left Brazil after the conquest of Dutch Recife by the Portuguese in 1654. Though it is not clear why Lumbrozo chose to settle in Maryland over New Netherland, Amsterdam, or Curaçao, he evidently made an impression on Marylanders. Jews had first come to the New World (officially and openly) via the Netherlands to Dutch Brazil, where they were not only tolerated but also permitted to worship freely. Jewish people trickled into Anglophone North America over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries under similar circumstances to those of Lumbrozo: they sought places of safety and toleration where they might peacefully settle.²⁷ Many of these people settled in New York or Newport, from which they were involved in the Atlantic trading activities that bound the mainland colonies with the Caribbean.

Starting in the late seventeenth century, other groups of Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jews began to make their way specifically to the Gulf Coast South. Jewish settlers were tolerated (though not encouraged) by the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, which granted freedom of religion to “Jews, Heathens, and other Dissenters from the purity of the Christian Religion” (though no Roman Catholics were allowed). Evidence suggests that by the 1690s at least a few Jewish families from Barbados were living in Charleston. In 1733 a group of Jewish settlers departed London for Georgia, and after a harrowing six-month voyage and some controversy on their arrival, they were allowed to stay in Savannah.²⁸ Judaism in the colonial South is often overlooked because of small numbers, but it must be a part of the narrative of southern religiosity.

Protestantism, Roman Catholicism, African religions, Islam, and Judaism were all newcomers on a continent with its own religious traditions. The world of Native American religiosity has suffered the same neglect and erroneous assumption as African American religion: that the coming of Christianity in all its forms was so destructive that native people (and their religious beliefs) were overrun, assimilated, and lost. This trope of the “vanishing Indian,” notes Tracy N. Leavelle in his essay “Native American Religions in the Early American South,” no longer controls historical inquiry into the Indian past, but Native American religions do remain understudied. Some of our current knowledge comes from archaeological studies of Mississippian chiefdoms and tracing the remnants of precontact Mississippian beliefs into the era of contact.²⁹ Early English settlers as well as later French settlers in the Gulf Coast South observed native people performing the Green Corn Ceremony, and French traders witnessed the remnants of the Mississippian chiefdoms among the Natchez in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Yet much of the literature wrestles with the long encounter between native people and Christianity, gauging the destructiveness of the Franciscan missions in Florida, of the Jesuits in the Mississippi Valley, or of the English with their Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. Leavelle calls for not only renewed scholarship into native religion, but also for scholarship that while not overlooking or excusing the destructiveness of European colonialism also seeks to understand the “creative transformations of people engaged in a struggle for freedom and dignity.” Leavelle also notes that the religious studies scholar Joel Martin argued in 1997 that only 2% of human history in the South involves contact among native people, Europeans, and Africans. Much of that missing 98% remains unknown, which means the longue durée of southern religious history has been flattened withits dynamism and diversity excluded from the narrative.

Despite the paucity of sources, this neglect is probably due in part to the hold explanations for the emergence of the Bible Belt retain on scholarly approaches to southern religious history. As this historiography has changed to make room for a muscular and adaptive Church of England, for dissenters who matter in their own right, for widespread, numerically superior Roman Catholicism, and even for new treatments of Islam in the early South, I would like to suggest one more avenue for upending the dominant narrative. Viewed through the lens of Native American history, much of the emphasis on the history of Christianity in the South is misleading. Christianity in all its forms was a minority religion in the colonial South. Christians of all types—established Protestant, Catholic, and dissenter—were outnumbered by native people with their own religious traditions and by the rich and varied religious traditions, including Islam, brought by enslaved people from Africa. If we take Philip Morgan’s observation about the unremarkable heterodoxy of the early South to its logical conclusion, what we see is a South where pockets of Christianity were surrounded by vast seas of other, non-European religions. Indians and Africans interacted with Christianity—sometimes on their terms, sometimes under duress, but always adapting it to suit their needs and desires in a changing world. Perhaps this colonial South, where Indian and African religions hold the most explanatory power and where they dominate the narrative, will be the intriguing place that drives scholarship forward.