Citation

Ingham CJ. History Compass 2008; 6(1): 345-363.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2008, John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1111/j.1478-0542.2007.00489.x

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

In the years after the American Revolution, the religious life of Virginians was dominated by the experience of living with and in ‘impartial liberty’– the expression often used to describe what Thomas Jefferson's ‘Statute for Establishing Religious Freedom’ had wrought. However, the Statute was merely the prelude, for it provided no guidance – only a door to Something Else as yet unknown. Lacking the referent of governmental authority, norms of religious liberty were not self-evident but under construction. As Virginians began turning abstract concepts into everyday experience, they drew upon a revolutionary lexicon, well practiced in the legislative battle over religious liberty; and they also explored tolerance, or ‘Christian forbearance’, as the basis for good manners in the nondeferential world of the new nation. Yet the emergence of distinct denominational identities reveals that the meaning of the Revolution was plural, which Virginians discovered especially in their religious lives. Indeed, for one particular group, the elasticity of the postrevolutionary moment worked uniquely to their advantage. At a time when power was suspect, authority challenged, and norms pliant, those who most lacked power and authority – Afro-Virginians, both slave and free – slipped through the unguarded spaces to mold Afro-Christianity into a source of community, resistance, and hope.