English settlers in Barbados, Jamaica, and South Carolina modified Protestant ritual practice, explains Nicholas Beasley, in order to achieve the complimentary goals of asserting an English cultural identity in the face of black majorities and of enacting white supremacy. Beasley's Anglicans, in other words, did not choose the main chance and the brutal repression of enslaved people over fidelity to their religious tradition; instead, they continued to embrace familiar Anglican practices but recast those traditions to fulfill their specific needs within a slave regime. Through his emphasis on the important role of ritual practice in the development of colonial society, Beasley revises the work of scholars such as Jack P. Greene who have, in his estimation, “had a tin ear for religious themes in the southern colonies” (16) and have underestimated the cultural vitality of Anglican worship in slave societies by making inappropriate and “unflattering comparisons with both evangelicalism and New England” (19).

In his use of ritual as an analytical category, Beasley follows in the tradition of Pierre Bourdieu, Catherine Bell, and others who see practice as “regulated by exterior social conditions” and therefore “helpful at illuminating situations of conflict between prevailing groups and less powerful social actors” (Laurie Maffly-Kipp, Leigh Eric Schmidt, and Mark Valeri, eds., Practicing Protestants [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006], 2, 3). For Beasley, the primary exterior social condition that influenced English settlers' modification of ritual practice was “the demographics of race.” He asserts that, as a result of the presence of black majorities, “whites in the plantation colonies thus faced a level of cultural anxiety persistently higher than residents of the Chesapeake” (17) and therefore elaborated strong cultural forms to salve those concerns. One need not accept Beasley's interesting but undeveloped contention that white Barbadians, Jamaicans, or South Carolinians shared a uniquely high level of cultural anxiety in order to appreciate his careful elucidation of the cultural functions of their ritual practices.

Beasley relies upon an impressive range of published and unpublished church records (mostly, but not exclusively, from Anglican parishes) to discuss six ritual practices: the celebration of the church calendar, the organization of sacred space, marriage, baptism, the Eucharist, and mortuary practices. In each case, English settlers excluded most people of African descent from full participation, proscriptively performing white supremacy in sacred space and/or in sacred time. In the case of baptism and marriage, for example, colonists broke with English practice by removing the rites from the sanctuaries. By “privatizing marriage and baptism by celebrating them at home rather than in church,” Beasley suggests, “Europeans reserved these rights and their legitimating power to themselves” (54). Indeed, at every turn in a ritually dense environment, English settlers set themselves apart from enslaved and free blacks. Whites typically excluded even baptized blacks from celebrations of the Eucharist, denied blacks burial within the walls of the church, and imposed a work rhythm (with Sundays as the only day of rest) that conformed to English, not African, sacred calendars.

Free people of color occupy a fascinating place in Beasley's account, and their navigation of the ecclesiastical practices of the English settlers provides a particularly revealing window into their complex roles in English plantation societies. Free blacks (joined in some instances by elite slaves) sought access to Anglican rituals, simultaneously differentiating themselves from the mass of enslaved laborers and threatening whites' hegemonic control over the church. These men and women sought and gained baptism in significant numbers, for instance, and gained legal protection for their marriages by solemnizing them in church (probably in the sanctuary itself, unlike whites). Thus, “while slave owners prevented the baptism and marriage of their slaves and many slaves expressed little interest in the rites of Christian marriage, the rise of populations of free black persons was the thin edge of a wedge that would slowly make Christian rites available and socially meaningful to nearly all people of color” (64). Free blacks and privileged slaves also helped to lead in the exodus from Anglican churches after the Revolution and the arrival of evangelicalism in the late eighteenth century, a phenomenon that Beasley treats in the final chapter.

Beasley goes far beyond the Book of Common Prayer to describe Anglican worship in a particular social context with particular social functions. His argument that English settlers used ritual practice, among other strategies, to assert their racial hegemony is compelling. It is difficult from the material in Christian Ritual and the Creation of British Slave Societies, however, to tell where this strategy fit in relation to more baldly exploitative approaches such as sexual violence, for example—or to gauge how far outside of the few urban centers in the Caribbean or Lower South that it held any relevance. Notwithstanding these unresolved questions, Beasley's work demonstrates the lush interpretive fruits available to those who take seriously the less emotionally demonstrative, more liturgical religious practices of non-evangelicals.