Program summary
With their clothing, provisions, weapons, understandings of English law, and other essential aspects of seventeenth-century English culture, they early colonists brought with them to Virginia the religious beliefs of the English Reformation and created in the colony an American edition of the Church of England. As the institutions of the church in the colony evolved along with the institutions of government, Virginia became an Anglican polity that shared many characteristics with the mother country and with the other English-speaking colonies of North America. The institutions of the church and the role they played in colonial society nevertheless grew different in some important respects from the English model as governors, vestrymen, clergymen, and parishioners adapted that model to the situation in which they found themselves. During the seventeenth century, Virginians escaped most of the violence associated with the English Civil Wars and experienced somewhat less religious intolerance than in old England or in New England. During the first hundred fifty years, however, it was not evident that Virginia society and culture were necessarily moving inexorably in the direction of multi-cultural toleration and toward the bold declarations of religious liberty made by the Revolutionary generation.