The Origins of Proslavery Christianity: White and Black Evangelicals in Colonial and Antebellum Virginia

by Charles F. Irons

Other scholars have demonstrated how profoundly enslaved persons shaped the ways in which whites thought about everything from family life to politics. Several have worked directly on the commonwealth. Anthony lacca- rino, for instance, showed how African American Virginians put enough pressure on their owners to shape the development of the first party system, and William Link placed enslaved persons at the center of his account of secession in Virginia. In some ways, this book is an ecclesiastical version of laccarino's and Link's political analyses; while they argue that Virginia slaves altered the political process, in this work I argue that slaves altered the ecclesiastical processes through which white Virginians forged a politically relevant proslavery argument.28