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Janet Moore Lindman, Rebecca Anne Goetz. The Baptism of Early Virginia: How Christianity Created Race., The American Historical Review, Volume 118, Issue 5, December 2013, Pages 1517–1518, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/118.5.1517
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Protestant Christianity was essential to the English colonial enterprise in seventeenth-century Virginia. As ardent believers in monogenesis, English settlers sought to convert the indigenous peoples of the Chesapeake region and create an “Anglo-Indian Christian Commonwealth” (p. 35). Their conversion efforts had mixed results, however, and this ideal community was short-lived. In the wake of clashes with Indians, Anglo-Virginians grappled with the inclusiveness of the gospel versus the realities of colonial life. In her new book, Rebecca Anne Goetz argues that in their relations with Indians, and later Africans, “Anglo-Virginians used Christianity to create an idea of race” (p. 2) wherein religion played a pivotal role. In the process, the English “effectively reimagine[d] what it meant to be a Christian but they also invented an entirely new concept—what it meant to be ‘white’” (p. 2). They advanced the notion of “hereditary heathenism” (p. 3)—the belief that Indians and Africans could never become Christian—over the course of the seventeenth century. This development was uneven and contradictory, as religion both “created and undermined race in Virginia” (p. 6). While Indians and Africans attempted to utilize Christianity for their own benefit and planters passed laws to exclude them from their religious community, Anglican missionaries and governmental authorities pushed proselytization based on “the unity of mankind” (p. 6).
