The absence of Africans from the established church was more theologically problematic than was that of the Powhatans. Anglo-Virginians could cultivate the fiction that Indians belonged outside the geographic bounds of their settlements, but they invited Africans into their most intimate spaces to perform their domestic and agricultural labor.15 Virginia blacks were thus undeniably parishioners of the colonial establishment, even if, as John Nelson explained, "few among them would have considered themselves as such" or "few, if any, of the dominant white inhabitants would have been willing to
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