The Baptism of Early Virginia: How Christianity Created Race

Early America: History, Context, Culture

by Rebecca Anne Goetz

Christianity's role in furthering racism in early America. In The Baptism of Early Virginia , Rebecca Anne Goetz examines the construction of race through the religious beliefs and practices of English Virginians. She finds the seventeenth century a critical time in the development and articulation of racial ideologies—ultimately in the idea of "hereditary heathenism," the notion that Africans and Indians were incapable of genuine Christian conversion. In Virginia in particular, English settlers initially believed that native people would quickly become Christian and would form a vibrant partnership with English people. After vicious Anglo-Indian violence dashed those hopes, English Virginians used Christian rituals like marriage and baptism to exclude first Indians and then Africans from the privileges enjoyed by English Christians—including freedom. Resistance to hereditary heathenism was not uncommon, however. Enslaved people and many Anglican ministers fought against planters’ racial ideologies, setting the stage for Christian abolitionism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Using court records, letters, and pamphlets, Goetz suggests new ways of approaching and understanding the deeply entwined relationship between Christianity and race in early America.

Genres: History, Religion, Race, Nonfiction, Grad School, Academic

240 pages, Paperback

First published August 23, 2012

Reviews

[Monica Mitri · Rating 4 out of 5]

In "The Baptism of Early Virginia," Rebecca Goetz presents a Virginia that was already racialized by the mid-seventeenth century. Racial categories – conflated with religious ones – were rigid to a degree that would shock later English settlers and ministers. Goetz’s book is an examination of language in the description and categorization of human differences, especially race and religion, which were both fluid and intensely negotiated at the time. “Anglo-Virginians … effectively reimagine[d] what it meant to be Christian but they also invented an entirely new concept—what it meant to be “white.” [They also] us[ed] Christianity to create race.” (2, 5). By believing in the inability of Natives and Africans to become truly Christian, Anglo-Virginians categorized them as irreconcilably different, and inscribed these differences onto their bodies – as racial difference. Of course, their applicability and rigidity remained in intense negotiation between English settlers, Catholic and Protestant missionaries, and enslaved populations. Yet, these budding racial categories would harden in the seventeenth century and become the base of eighteenth and nineteenth-century white supremacy.
To study the emerging and conflated categories of Christianity and race, Goetz first explores the Elizabethan settlers’ complex notion of Christianity, with its Biblical centrality, Anglican relation to political freedom and hostility to ‘servile’ traditions like Catholicism and Islam. She then links it to their bewildering encounter with Native Americans’ way of life, worship, theology, heredity, and resistance to Christianity. The English settlers’ acceptance of Native Americans hinged on the possibility of the latter’s conversion and hence ‘Europeanization,’ which they initially tried to accomplish. However, as trouble intensified between both parties, so did the increased perception and articulation of differences between them. These differences entailed constructing boundaries between the two groups that would be difficult to transgress. Such boundaries were articulated in terms of race, religion and gender norms. “The curse of heathenism became a racial marker, one that defined the Indians not by their potential Christianity but by their hereditary heathenism” (60, my emphasis). The same boundaries were constructed in relation to Africans in Virginia. The paths to crossing them, like parentage, marriage, baptism or resisting violence became intense negotiation sites of similarity, difference, ‘true conversions,’ color and most critically, freedom. Anglo-Virginians gradually blocked these paths as they reified the racial differences between them, Africans and Native Americans. However, that negotiation would continue, and by the end of the eighteenth century, would arise in the form of abolitionist and proslavery Christianity.
Goetz writes exceptionally well; her narration is lucid, articulate and enjoyable. Her book is an eye-opening account of the gradual process by which race was made, unmade and remade in Virginia, as Laura Gómez would put it. Her argument can also be juxtaposed with Willie Jennings’s essay in "Race and Secularism in America." Jennings argues that European settlers conceived of the “new world” as peoples and lands awaiting Christianization. They were “empty spaces” that could be reprogrammed and won for Christianity. That emptiness was inscribed upon Native bodies, as they were stripped of their spiritual connections to the land and nature and converted to (Catholic) Christianity. Conversion was a crucial part of the Spanish colonial enterprise, he argues, and it enabled white possession of Native lands, bodies and souls. Goetz also portrays the struggle around converting Native Americans and Africans in terms of possession. However, conversion became inversely proportional to possession! Anglo-Virginians were concerned with converting Native Americans and Africans only when that conversion did not threaten their enslaved status. In this sense, Goetz presents a more complicated account of the ways “Christianity is used (and abused) to create race and difference” (p. 173).

[Cabot · Rating 3 out of 5]

My Old South class has us reading roughly a book a week, so there will be lots similar to this. Goetz makes quite an interesting argument about how central Christianity was to race-making. Overall, this was definitely interesting but the introduction is really all one needs if they aren’t a specialist in this kind of work.

[Ms211 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rebecca Goetz. The Baptism of Early Virginia: How Christianity Created Race. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012.

 

 

In Goetz’s work, her nuanced argument is that in colonial Virginia, Christianity was always considered an inherited condition by the white English, yet not for people of color or Indian.[1] The term hereditary heathenism was its direct counterpart. For Goetz, the seventeenth century included the pivotal years establishing race.   An enslaved Black person born to an enslaved person, even if Christian, could not be freed based on baptism into the Anglican church.  Her argument is well supported through her research on the legal court records of early colonial Virginia. Goetz reviews the legal intersection of Anglican Christianity and the laws enacted to control indentured servants and enslaved people. Ultimately these laws evolved to manage a person’s body based on skin color.

In the first part of her monograph, she reviews the early colonial settlement of Virginia, the interactions with the Native population, and the limited attempts at the Christianization of the Native people. In this segment, she revisits the well-known history of Jamestown and the Indian conflict. Goetz strongly believes that the military confrontation with the native population “opened the door to the emerging English ideology of hereditary heathenism.”[2] The marriage of converted Indian women to Englishmen was celebrated as the case of Matoaka as an example of a successful conversion, and attempts were made for schools throughout this century in hopes of obliteration of Indian beliefs and conversion to Christianity. Townsend’s work on the Powhatan people is relied on heavily here as a secondary source. [3]

In the second part of her monograph, court records and legal records of counties in early colonial Virginia are used by Rebecca Goetz to explain her argument further for hereditary heathenism and perpetual enslavement based on an evolving definition of color. Her focus somewhat abruptly switches here from the Indian people with an occasional discussion of persistent attempts at conversion to a tighter focus on black enslaved people and their attempts at freedom by becoming Christian. The use of legal laws, especially the law of 1667, showed that Anglo-Virginians changed the rules of English customs based solely on the need to control the enslaved black labor force. [4]

As the last chapter concludes, Goetz explores how enslaved black Christians tried to challenge the precedent of the seventeenth century and hereditary heathenism. Unfortunately, she has to significantly read against the grain of her primary sources to conclude from the Christian point of view of the enslaved population. While there is no doubt that Christian belief was a part of these attempts at freedom, constant violence against an enslaved person may have been a more significant factor. In this final analysis of her work, the evolution of race based on hereditary heathenism seems forced onto the primary legal sources. Yet, Goetz is successful in her defense of the formation of race in the seventeenth century compared to the later eighteenth-century pseudo-scientific medicine used to racialize people of color.

 


[1] Rebecca Goetz. The Baptism of Early Virginia: How Christianity Created Race. (Baltimore:John Hopkins Press. 2012.) 62.

[2] Rebecca Goetz. The Baptism of Early Virginia. 58.

 

[3] Camilla Townsend, Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004).

[4] Rebecca Goetz. The Baptism of Early Virginia: How Christianity Created Race. (Baltimore: John Hopkins Press. 2012.) 161-167.

[Poppy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Goetz explores the development of Christianity in early Virginia, showing how it warped and developed to be a foundational component in deifning race. Virginians created “hereditary heathenism”, which determined that Indians and Africans could never become Christian, as relgious identity was inheritable as any physical characteristic. To enforce hereditary heathenism, religious practices had to be shifted–things like Baptism and Marriage, once requisites to conversion to Christianity, became separate from Christianity, and these new practices made it so African and Indian people were unable to convert or participate in a legitimate Christian baptism, or marriage–that is, baptism and marriage no longer converted these groups to Christianity.

[Garret Shields · Rating 4 out of 5]

Showed the transformation from early English Virginia that wanted to convert the Indians to Christianity and form an Anglo-Indian Commonwealth, to the later Anglo-Virginians that used Christianity to create a larger racial divide that justified their treatment of Africans and Indians. By the end of the seventeenth century, they enact the legal codes that show they believe “heathenism” is hereditary and they close off Christianity so it’s essentially thought of as a religion only for white people.

[Sam · Rating 3 out of 5]

reading this back to back with raboteau’s “slave religion” made me appreciate raboteau’s rich engagement with the slave archive. this book did not engage nearly as deeply with that archive and instead attempted to construct race primarily through legal documents in colonial virginia in order to understand how race came to be primarily through white doctrine. and while i think the argument is largely compelling, i felt the actual theory of race was mostly flat.

[Liam · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting book, but one that left me with questions about how far Anglo-American Christianity was willing to go. Of course, I was more than happy to see some connections made that I'd actually thought of last semester. The book has left me with a new understanding on race in America.

[Richard Boles · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a superb book. It's so important for showing the religious agenda of early English colonists and the role that Christianity plays in creating boundaries among English colonists, Native Americans, and Africans and in supporting (and at times contesting) the system of race-based slavery.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

This must be one of the best books that I have ever read. I say this not in the sense that it is a great read, as the book is extremely detailed and researched, which can make the reading a bit tedious and difficult at times. But, the attention that Goetz gives to research into the archival records of the early Virgnia colony is illuminating!!

Goetz demonstrates that English Christianity basically invented the concept of race. At first, the colonizers, at least to some extent, had hopes for converting the indigenous inhabitants to Christianity, but when the indigenous peoples showed no real interest in becoming Christian, they became "hereditary heathens", meaning that they were biologically and essentially heathen, racially heathen and inferior. For Africans, who were bought as slaves, there was never a real interest in conversion so that they were thought of as hereditarily heathen from the beginning, and therefore, racially different and inferior. Rather than one human race, humanity was then conceived to belong to distinct superior and inferior "races", based upon their supposed ability to become Christian.

[Kaya Guthrie · Rating 3 out of 5]

baptism 🫡

[Maia Boswell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read for my Old South history class, the writing style was a bit redundant but super engaging topic overall