I read this book amidst the media frenzy over Texas Governor Rick Perry's “Day of Prayer and Fasting,” which reframed twenty-first-century debates about religious freedom and the place of religion in American politics. Contestants in those debates have been prone to simplistic renderings of late eighteenth-century debates, for which the essays in this lovely little volume are a rewarding antidote. Each of the book's six essays places Virginia's Statute for Religious Freedom (1786) in a deep and local context. The Statute, after much acrimonious debate, enshrined freedom of conscience and separation of church and state in Virginia's government, and provided a model for the free expression and establishment clauses of the First Amendment. The essays, originally given as a series of public lectures in a semester-long symposium at Virginia Wesleyan College, collectively argue for the importance of Virginia's long and unique struggle with religious diversity and religious freedom that has so deeply influenced American public life.

The collection's opening essays introduce us to the importance of Virginia's seventeenth-century religious experiences. Brent Tarter reminds us that Christianity was important to the founding and early history of English Virginia; unlike in the New England colonies, in Virginia a “considerable variety of individual belief systems could dwell together peaceable enough in the colony's scattered and independent congregations” (31). Edward L. Bond explores lived religion in colonial Virginia, emphasizing the role of magic and the supernatural, as well as the institutional strength of the Church of England. Anglo-Virginians “adapted . . . rather than abandoned” their faith. Bond argues for the importance of understanding religious practice (67). Both Tarter and Bond are concerned that historians still overlook the power and potency of English Christianity in seventeenth-century Virginia, as well as the peculiar circumstances in which Anglo-Virginians tolerated diversity within Christianity. These seventeenth-century experiences were critical in developing the historical context from which the Statute emerged.

Yet it was not merely Christian diversity that characterized Virginia religion. Philip D. Morgan argues that “heterodoxy and dissent” were not only widespread but also characteristic of Virginia religiosity (74). Native Virginians and enslaved Africans were not Christian, though they shared aspects of a religious worldview with Europeans, but they accepted Christianity only gradually, and on their own terms. On the eve of the Revolution, Morgan notes, “religious heterogeneity was still the norm” (101). Monica Najar observes that “[s]ectarian diversity was a fact of life in colonial Virginia,” and plots the different strategies evangelicals deployed to counter Virginia's strict interpretation of the Act of Toleration (110). Though the Act of Toleration had granted limited rights of dissent to Protestants, Virginians interpreted the Act quite strictly (as Quakers discovered). In the second half of the eighteenth century, Presbyterians tried to show that they complied with British law, while the Baptists denied the legitimacy of state authority over religion entirely. In a colony that contained a wide variety of Protestants (as well as a small number of Catholics), liberty of conscience and free exercise were theological as well as political and legal issues. Najar also argues, in a nod to her 2008 book Evangelizing the South: A Social History of Church and State in Early America (New York: Oxford University Press), that gender played an important role in how Virginia Baptists advocated for religious freedom.

In the third quarter of the eighteenth century, Virginia's religious diversity did not threaten the established Church of England, but the incipient Revolution was catastrophic. Thomas Buckley argues that religious diversity in Virginia also led to a variety of approaches to the problem of religious freedom (Buckley outlines four general ways in which Virginians theorized freedom of conscience). Efforts to end state support for the Church began as early as 1776. By the mid-1780s, the new Protestant Episcopal Church was unprepared to deal with its newfound “freedom” from state support. Early nineteenth-century evangelicals stepped into the breach by advocating for their vision of religious authority, with a version of religious freedom that disestablished the church, but did not require the state to remain neutral in religious matters. Daniel Dreisbach's concluding essay, a précis of his 2009 examination of American religious diversity, argues that while the founding generation believed that religion and morality were critical to the survival of any republic, they also increasingly believed that religious establishments hindered republics. Virginia's struggles went national after 1786, beginning with the First Amendment, and continuing through state-by-state battles over disestablishment.

While specialists in early Virginia history and in early American religious history will find few surprises in this volume, the collection neatly contextualizes Virginia's colonial history of religious diversity and of practical toleration. By viewing the Virginia statute as the result of two centuries of experience with religious diversity and experimentation with religious toleration, these essays put the Statute for Religious Freedom in a context that looks deeper than the American Revolution. Many general histories of the United States and of the Constitution overlook Virginia's religious heterogeneity, and non-specialists will find this book enlightening.