Religious Life of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century: The Faith of Our Fathers

This book traces the religious foundations of American society through one colony's turbulent first century. Beginning with the 1607 Jamestown settlement, Brydon documents how English settlers carried their faith across the Atlantic and attempted to forge a Christian community in a land already inhabited by diverse indigenous peoples. The Church of England served as the colony's backbone, establishing parishes that functioned as both spiritual centers and units of local governance. What emerges is a complex portrait of colonial religion: ministers struggling to maintain congregations amid political chaos and scarcity; efforts to convert Native Americans that revealed both missionary zeal and colonialist ambition; the arrival of enslaved Africans whose Christian instruction became entangled with questions of bondage and resistance. Brydon shows faith not as a quiet refuge but as a force that shaped everything from tax policy to frontier defense. The work remains essential for understanding how Virginia's religious institutions laid groundwork for patterns persisting throughout American history: the complicated relationship between church and state, the persistent question of religious liberty, and the enduring presence of faith in American civic life.