On a Sunday morning, early in the eighteenth century, Anglican minister James Blair accused male members of his Virginia congregation of attending church “on the purpose that they may feed their lustful Eyes.” Criticizing his hearers for unleashing their “Wanton Desires” through “Undecent, Lascivious Glances, and ogling Gestures,” Blair called on them to keep their “Hearts … eagerly intent upon Devotion” so as to “keep out the Wandring both of Eyes and Heart.” James Blair was not the only Virginia minister worried about the “irregular Wandring” of his parishioners' eyes and minds during weekly services.Footnote ²

Throughout the eighteenth century, Virginia's Anglican clerics repeatedly used their sermons to chastise congregations for their “Unattentiveness,” their “Dulness and Absence of Mind,” and their “Car[e]less disrespect” during Sunday services.Footnote ³ These previously unstudied sermonic reprimands indicate a pervasive inattentiveness in colonial Anglican churches. When coupled with lay descriptions of church inattention, ministerial chastisements reveal patterns of inattentive behavior that connected Virginia Anglicans with coreligionists throughout the British Atlantic. Examining both ministerial and lay accounts of inattentiveness in church, this essay maintains that inattention was integral to Anglican identity in colonial Virginia and to larger conceptions of popular religion that bridged geographic boundaries. Simply stated, this essay argues that a common culture of inattentive church behavior united disparate peoples in Britain's vast, eighteenth-century Atlantic empire.

As it is used here, inattention refers to a variety of behavioral forms that competed with the prescriptive goals of Sunday services. These behaviors included sleeping, talking or whispering, failing to respond appropriately during readings, offering half-hearted prayers, ogling at neighbors, leaving the service, looking out church windows, or staring blankly into space. Inattention is best described as the inversion of clerical expectations for church behavior. As Richard Allestree explained in his enormously popular devotional text The Whole Duty of Man, the church was a “place set apart for [God's] publick worship.”Footnote ⁴ Readily available and widely read in Virginia, Allestree's text reminded readers, “when ever thou enterest the Church, remember that it is the house of God, a place where he is in an especial manner present, and therefore … behave thy self with that godly awe and reverence, which belongs to that great Majestie, thou art before.”Footnote ⁵ Allestree cautioned parishioners not to “sleep out the time” in church or to “dispatch business with our neighbours” but to listen attentively to sermons and to “shut out all thoughts of the world.”Footnote ⁶ In contrast, inattentiveness—in all its various forms—constituted a distraction from the didactic goals of Sunday services. Importantly, inattention, as it is described here, should not be conflated with impiety. This essay is solely concerned with behavioral patterns in church, manifested on a transatlantic scale, and does not speculate on the spiritual implications of inattention.

Colonial Virginians did not uniformly follow Richard Allestree's prescriptive advice on appropriate church behavior. Throughout the eighteenth century, ministers chastised and cajoled their congregations against the perils of inattention. Occasionally, ministers preached entire sermons encouraging better behavior at church. More often, they included comments on inattentive church behavior in the course of regular Sunday sermons. Importantly, Virginia ministers were in a unique position to observe parochial behavior. From the elevated vantage point of colonial pulpits, they could easily survey their congregations and make inclusive observations on inattention.Footnote ⁷ Yet, because Virginia sermons have received very little scholarly attention, their vivid descriptions of parochial inattentiveness have remained unstudied.Footnote ⁸ It should be noted that the surviving corpus of Virginia sermons is relatively limited; only a handful of sizeable collections and a limited number of individual sermons survive.Footnote ⁹ This essay examines the theme of lay inattention in the largest surviving Anglican sermon collections. These collections include one hundred and seventeen sermons delivered by James Blair to congregations in Henrico and James City counties in the years between 1685 and 1722, forty sermons and partial sermons given by William Douglass to parishioners in Goochland County between 1750 and 1777, and forty-eight sermons and partial sermons given by Charles Clay to his parishes in Albemarle and Chesterfield counties between 1769 and 1786.Footnote ¹⁰ Together, these collections represent a comfortable majority of the surviving corpus; they also demonstrate a diversity of theological opinion and geographic location.Footnote ¹¹ Importantly, the frequency with which these different ministers addressed lay inattention, over a period stretching from 1685 through 1786, suggests that it remained a major theme in Anglican religious culture throughout the eighteenth century.Footnote ¹²

The study of the established church in Virginia has long been hampered by an extreme paucity of evidence. Aside from sermons, which previous scholars have neglected and not mined for their descriptions of lay behavior, only a handful of elite-written manuscripts describing religious practice are extant.Footnote ¹³ Consequently, the use of a previously under-utilized evidentiary base—sermons—to illuminate behavioral patterns in colonial Anglican churches is historiographically important. It should be noted, however, that the neglect of sermons and the relative lack of other sources has not hindered previous scholars from crafting narratives descriptive of the church and its role in colonial society. The oldest and most strongly entrenched of these narratives argues that eighteenth-century Virginia Anglicans were secular worldlings little interested in the things of religion. First articulated by nineteenth-century evangelicals, this declensional model of Virginia Anglicanism portrayed the established church and its ministers as corrupt and ineffective.Footnote ¹⁴ A recent example of this historiographic school is Rhys Isaac's Pulitzer Prize–winning work, The Transformation of Virginia, which conflated the message of the church with gentrified social control. Isaac argued that elite vestrymen used processions, church seating plans, and even violence against dissenters to cement their social hegemony.Footnote ¹⁵ Importantly, more recent work has questioned this declensional model of Virginia Anglicanism by contending that ministers were dedicated and well trained, that prayer books were plentiful, that churches were regularly built and adequately maintained, and that Anglican spirituality transcended social control.Footnote ¹⁶ Indeed, Edward L. Bond has argued that Virginians wholeheartedly embraced the Book of Common Prayer's prescriptive teachings on repentance and were, therefore, genuinely religious.Footnote ¹⁷ Whereas Isaac described them as hegemonic, Bond argues that Anglicans were sincerely devout. Consequently, in the eyes of recent scholars, Anglicans were either gentrified secularists who used the church to assert their social hegemony, or they were pious Prayer Book–reading Christians dedicated to the church's teachings of repentance. This essay suggests that an examination of previously underutilized sources, Virginia sermons, reveals a third way to describe colonial Anglicans: as inattentive, disinterested, and bored parishioners. Importantly, the use of sermons unleashes an evidentiary base larger than any previously employed to describe Anglican behavior. When correlated with themes in extant diaries and popular prescriptive manuals, sermons can provide a view of parochial Anglicanism that, given the relative paucity of sources, is thorough and convincing.

I. Church Attendance and Sermon Culture in Colonial Virginia

Sermons, and the chastisements against lay inattention they contain, need to be judged within the context of eighteenth-century churchgoing practices. In a colony in which church attendance was enforced by legal statute, Anglican churches were frequently crowded places.Footnote ¹⁸ Describing church attendance patterns in his late 1740s diary, perambulating minister Robert Rose repeatedly noted that he preached “to a great Number of people,” “to a numerous congregation,” and “to a great many people.”Footnote ¹⁹ Similarly, parishioner William Byrd II noted “a very great congregation” on February 20, 1709, “the biggest congregation I ever saw in the country” on November 13, 1709, and “an abundance of people” on January 11, 1710.Footnote ²⁰ Even more suggestive of widespread attendance are eleven Virginia respondents to the bishop of London's 1724 questionnaire on the size and vitality of American congregations. They collectively reported an average Sunday attendance of 420 parishioners. One of the bishop's respondents from Lancaster County noted, “The Church is thronged and almost all white persons in the parish … attend.” Likewise, in Stafford County there was “generally as full a congregation as” the church “can contain.” In Isle of Wight County, 500 “constantly attend[ed]” services, and in Hanover County attendance was “no less than 200 or 300 people.” So great were the crowds in some Virginia parishes that some ministers noted they had “more present than they had pews for.”Footnote ²¹ The rector of Washington Parish in Westmoreland County complained that there was “not convenient room for them all” and, by mid-century, “benches … [were] placed at the doors” of St. Marks Parish Church in Culpepper County to accommodate parishioners.Footnote ²²

The service these parishioners came to hear was, as historian Dell Upton has argued, predictable.Footnote ²³ Each week Anglican parishioners reaffirmed their shared cultural and religious bonds by joining in common prayer. The liturgical rubrics crafted by Thomas Cranmer during the reign of Edward VI and slightly modified after the Restoration united coreligionists throughout Greater Britain in the cadenced repetition of familiar words and ideas. Even variations in congregational Psalm singing seem to have been relatively circumscribed by the colonial popularity of the Tate and Brady metrical Psalter and by Bishop Gibson's calendrical assignment of Psalm texts.Footnote ²⁴ The one prominent variation in weekly services was the sermon. Indeed, because it was the single unpredictable aspect of Sunday services, Dell Upton has convincingly argued that the sermon was likely “the most attractive part of Divine Worship.”Footnote ²⁵

While sermons were an unpredictable aspect of liturgical worship, they also possessed certain shared commonalities. For example, stylistic templates conveyed by widely circulated preaching manuals and popular sermon collections ensured that Virginia sermons mirrored fashionable metropolitan homiletic trends.Footnote ²⁶ Consequently, although the subject matter of sermons varied from week to week, a highly structured sermon style—emphasizing the clear explication and application of biblical texts—remained in use throughout the period.Footnote ²⁷ In addition to style, ministers shared a common understanding of the purpose of sermonizing that was regularly conveyed through a series of popular preaching manuals. In his highly influential work, A Discourse of the Pastoral Care, Gilbert Burnet noted that the goals of preaching were “to make some Portions of Scripture to be rightly understood; to make those Truths contain'd in them, to be more fully apprehended; and then to lay the Matter home to the Consciences of the Hearers, so directing all to some good and practical end.”Footnote ²⁸ A good preacher, John Wilkins argued in his manual, Ecclesiastes or a Discourse Concerning the Gift of Preaching, combined “a right understanding of sound doctrine” with “an ability to propound, confirm, and apply it unto the edification of others.”Footnote ²⁹ Similarly, Joseph Glanvill commented in his ministerial manual, An Essay Concerning Preaching, that “The End of preaching must be acknowledg'd to be the Instruction of the hearers in Faith and Good Life, in order to the Glory of God, and their present, and future happiness.”Footnote ³⁰ Likewise, the anonymous author of Two Letters to a Friend Containing Certain Considerations Relating to the Pulpit noted that “it is a Preacher's part … by solid Arguments and Motives, to enforce the just practice of Christian Duties.”Footnote ³¹ Or, as Robert Dodsley wrote in his versified The Art of Preaching,

That Virginia ministers followed the advice of popular preaching manuals is evidenced by the moral tone of their sermons. Indeed, James Blair, William Douglass, and Charles Clay devoted their preaching careers to the inculcation of what one recent historian has termed “practical godliness.” The message of Anglican ministers, John K. Nelson has argued, was that “lives were to be lived in conformity to the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount.”Footnote ³³ This emphasis on pious virtue was, Edward Bond has written, “a practical theology [which] stress[ed] duty.”Footnote ³⁴ Because the purpose of the sermon was to promote moral piety and virtue, it is not surprising that ministers responded brusquely to inattentive behaviors impeding these goals.

Despite their common style and shared goals, sermons remained the most unpredictable part of Sunday services and, consequently, received a great deal of attention in contemporary diaries. A parishioner could, after all, never be completely certain what his minister would say on Sunday mornings. Consequently, when parishioners described church services, they often limited their comments to sermons. For example, planter-diarists William Byrd II and Landon Carter frequently passed judgment on their preachers’ abilities. Byrd appreciated good rhetoric and resented panegyric; Carter wished that his preacher spoke more clearly.Footnote ³⁵ Presbyterian tutor Philip Vickers Fithian marveled at the brevity of Anglican sermons and pined for the warmth of evangelical enthusiasm.Footnote ³⁶ Fithian's contemporary, diarist John Harrower, limited his descriptions of church services to the name of the minister and his scripture text.Footnote ³⁷ For all of these commentators, the sermon—whether “sorely delivered,” “good,” “poor,” “long,” “warm,” “useful,” or “one nobody understood”—stood at the center of the churchgoing experience.Footnote ³⁸ The cultural preeminence accorded to sermons was further articulated in church architecture. Dominating the viewscape from the aisles and pews, elevated pulpits proclaimed the centrality of homiletics to the Anglican experience of worship. Pulpits were often the first objects visible from the nave, and the elaborate sounding boards constructed above them and the windows often located behind them were eminently practical devices designed to optimize sound and light so that a minister's words might be communicated more effectively.Footnote ³⁹

Colonial Virginia was a churchgoing culture in which crowded pews and Sunday sermons were a part of everyday life. Yet, if Virginians took church attendance for granted, they also accepted a degree of inattentiveness and misbehavior in Sunday services. Indeed, crowded churches did not necessitate universally attentive and reverent behaviors. Consequently, it was the sermon's unpredictability—its unique caché of listenability in an otherwise predictably liturgical setting—that made it an ideal place for ministers to rail against the inattentive behaviors they witnessed from their elevated pulpits. Hoping that their sermonic chastisements would not fall on deaf ears, ministers concentrated on three forms of deviant, although popular, behavior: inattentive listening, indifferent hearing, and disrespectful action.

II. Inattentive Listening

While their churches were frequently filled, Virginia ministers often worried that no one listened to them. In a sermon encouraging deeper piety, James Blair asked his congregation, “Of those who afford their bodily Presence at … [Church], how few are there who Afford Attention or Presence of Mind?”Footnote ⁴⁰ On another occasion, he spoke of the church's “Edifying Sermons” and castigated his parishioners for “hear[ing] them so carelessly, that ye never think more of them to put them in Practice.”Footnote ⁴¹ Similarly, in a sermon on prayer, he noted, “bare bodily Attendance signifies nothing, if we are absent in Mind; if we carry our Shops, and Stores, and Farms; our Accounts, Bargains, worldly Cares and Projects, along with us.”Footnote ⁴² From Blair's perspective, parishioners were too preoccupied with earthly concerns to listen to the spiritual fare he offered them.

James Blair's sermons routinely commented on those parishioners who were “absent in Mind.” In 1717, he preached an entire sermon describing “the Duty of Hearers.”Footnote ⁴³ Here, he confessed that the “Unattentiveness” of many parishioners gave him “too great [a] Reason to suspect that their Hearts and Minds are absent.” Too many, he complained, brought “their Cares and Lusts, their Shop and Farms, and worldly Projects and Contrivances along with them, which … divert their Attention.” Instead of focusing their attention on “the divine Truths proposed to us in the Gospel,” his hearers were drawn to “Thoughts of an inferior and more hurtful Nature.” For Blair, these wanderings of the mind were comparable to “Weeds in neglected Gardens” that “kill and choak all the good Flowers and Plants.” What was needed in his congregation, he maintained, was “Attention … and due Consideration.”Footnote ⁴⁴

William Douglass encountered similar inattention in his Goochland County congregation. Like Blair, he worried that his parishioners were too easily distracted by “all our earthly cares buzzing about our Souls.” “The highest & best ends of preaching & hearing, praying & praising,” Douglass argued, could not be achieved “if we come into the sanctuary with our heads & hearts full of the affairs of this life.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Young people, especially, were prone to inattention. In a sermon delivered for their benefit, Douglass complained that youth “were idle in ye duties of Religion, & waste yt [that] time that they pretend to employ wt [with] God.”Footnote ⁴⁶ In a particularly dramatic use of language, he conjectured the deathbed contrition of a young person guilty of inattention in church. Devoting his last words to remorse over inattentive church behavior, the youth remembered, “how I have trifled when I heard Sermons! how I have mocked God by my Sleepy prayers.”Footnote ⁴⁷

Charles Clay found his Albemarle County parishioners equally inattentive. In a sermon on Christian sincerity, preached sixteen times between 1770 and 1779, Clay questioned the piety of inattentive parishioners. “Can you be his [Christ's] Disciples,” Clay asked, “when many of you, (might one Judge of your Devotion from the inattention Visible on your Countenances in time of Divine Service,) w[oul]d give more heed to a tale of Tom Thumb, Tom Hickerthreft, or Jack the Giant-killer, than to any prayer, or the best Sermon it was in the Power of Man to Preach.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Clay expanded on the theme of lay inattention in a sermon delivered seven times during the same period. Preaching from the scriptural text “Take heed of how ye hear,” Clay admitted that while physical attendance at church can be noted, “whether our minds be absent Cant be so easily observed.” Moreover, Clay believed that serious attentiveness was beyond the capability of most of his parishioners. “Too many,” he preached, “have indulged an indolent thotlessness, till applying their minds in earnest to any thing is become extreamly difficult & painful to them.” The preacher remarked that “not a few” people were “engaged so deeply in Observation of w[ha]t they See at Church that they have no Room left of taking notice of w[ha]t they hear.” Others unleashed their imaginations during services. Echoing Blair, Clay noted that drifting thoughts were a particular hazard “in the midst of Our Religious Exercises.” Describing daydreaming in church, he wrote, “Once our minds are got loose; an Effect wh[ich] the least accident will produce; then On they Run from one thing to another, hanging together by Some kind of whimsical Connection, till we are Carried we know not whither.” Believing that many in his congregation were absent-minded daydreamers, Clay was convinced that most parishioners “take no Notice of w[ha]t is said” and leave church “without So much as a Simple thot of ever Changing their Conduct.”Footnote ⁴⁹

III. Indifferent Hearing

For James Blair, William Douglass, and Charles Clay, inattentive listening was often manifested by a genuine lack of concern for the words spoken in Sunday services. James Blair likened this form of parochial response to hearing “the Word of Christ as we hear News of some remote Country, which we are indifferent and unconcerned whether it be true or false.”Footnote ⁵⁰ In another sermon, Blair complained that his parishioners had a “universal Coldness and Indifference in all Things relating to Religion.”Footnote ⁵¹ More than condemning daydreaming and other forms of inattentive listening, Blair, Douglass, and Clay sought to correct the half-hearted, indifferent attitudes of many of their parishioners. To properly participate in worship, they argued, churchgoers needed to both forgo daydreaming and compose their hearts and minds in an appropriately spiritual manner. In other words, from the vantage point of the pulpit, parishioners needed to look interested and engaged.

James Blair's sermonic comments on parochial indifference questioned his congregants' sincerity. In a series of sermons on avoiding hypocrisy in the practice of prayer, he complained that “there is all the Probability in the World … that our publick Devotions are more for Fashion's sake, and to be seen of Men, than from a true fear of God.” Blair cited his parishioners' disinterested participation in public prayers as a sign of their indifference. “I wish,” he wrote, “that when we draw near to God with our Lips, our Hearts went duly along with them.”Footnote ⁵² He was further convinced that “though we pronounce the Prayers with our Mouths, we do not trouble our selves to make good the Meaning of them.”Footnote ⁵³ Blair especially noted his congregation's indifference during the weekly recitation of the Lord's Prayer. “We often say that excellent Prayer Our Father which art in Heaven,” he reminded his hearers, “but how few are there among us, that love, fear, honour, trust, and obey God, as if we believed in good earnest that he is our heavenly Father?”Footnote ⁵⁴ Mumbled, half-hearted prayers were hardly indicative of the piety Blair expected from his parishioners.

James Blair further commented on the “lifeless” and indifferent faith of his congregation in a sermon comparing the “good Effects” of Christ's Sermon on the Mount on its hearers with religious practice in Virginia. Whereas Christ's hearers had been inspired to put their lessons into practice, Blair's congregation thought “all is over as soon as we get out of Church.”Footnote ⁵⁵ “Alas, how few have we in our Days,” the preacher lamented, “who are struck and pricked at the Heart with any Sermons they hear, or have any lasting Impressions made upon their Spirits from the best Doctrine that can be preached to them?”Footnote ⁵⁶ Describing the indifference of his parishioners, Blair wrote that even when the minister was congratulated for “a very good Sermon … we take no Time to apply it to our own Use.”Footnote ⁵⁷ James Blair complained that even if sermons were listened to, they were soon forgotten. For Blair, this indifferent parochial forgetfulness was simply a “Treachery of Memory.”Footnote ⁵⁸

William Douglass similarly worried about his parishioners' indifferent attitudes at church. He was convinced that some congregants were “only watching” the service or, more menacing for the pastor, “Passing Judgment on ye ability perhaps no more than ye style & outward manner of ye Speaker.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Other signs of their indifference included uninspired participation in public prayers. Echoing Blair, Douglass noted “the generality [of people] content themselves wt [with] ye prayer of ye voice, without ye affections.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Sermons were received with similar indifference. “How much less good will a sermon do us,” Douglass asked his congregation, “if as soon as the hour of worship is ended, we run immediately from God, & plunge our selves into worldly affairs, without giving our thoughts and leasure & leave to reflect on what we have heard?”Footnote ⁶¹ To remedy parochial forgetfulness, Douglass encouraged his listeners to discuss the sermon around the Sunday lunch table. But he was quick to note that such a discussion should concern the discourse's “application to our Selves & not to others.”Footnote ⁶²

Charles Clay also remarked on the indifference of his congregation. In a sermon delivered in 1775 and again in 1780, Clay complained that his hearers were “cold & indifferent, lifeless & inactive.”Footnote ⁶³ Likewise, in a sermon delivered twelve times between 1772 and 1786, Clay commented that many in his congregation heard his words with the “Coldest disregard.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Echoing these sentiments in an undated sermon, he referred to his hearers' hearts as “indifferent Cold & lifeless” and suggested that they might “Reap as much advantage in a Turkish Mosque or a Jews Synagogue.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Like Blair and Douglass, Clay especially noted his congregation's indifference during public prayers. In a sermon on the Lord's Prayer given three times in 1774 and 1775, Clay asked his hearers: what is “the State of your minds w[he]n you Repeat the Lords P[rayer]?” Reminding parishioners that “there is great difference” between praying and saying the weekly prayer, Clay noted that although “It is an easy manner to Repeat the Lords P[rayer] with Our lips … God Requireth the heart.” Using strong language, Clay blasted his hearers for their indifferent approach to public prayer. “How can you,” he charged, “disregard that divine form of words, w[he]n they were Composed by God himself? W[ha]t signifies your Saying a parcel of words without paying the least attention to w[ha]t you are ab[ou]t?”Footnote ⁶⁶ Similarly, Clay informed his congregation on another occasion, “if y[ou]r Devotion hath not been the effect of Faith … y[ou]r Devotions have been unmeaning Ceremony; y[ou]r Book not y[ou]r Heart hath Spoken.”Footnote ⁶⁷

Like James Blair, Charles Clay associated indifference with a lack of religious sincerity. Describing a response he feared was “very Common” in his congregation, Clay noted that many people heard sermons “only with Curiosity.” The preacher worried that too many listeners heard his words only for their rhetorical value as “a pleasing exercise of our understanding at the time, & a help to Conversation afterw[ar]d.”Footnote ⁶⁸ On another occasion, he asked his hearers if they were listening to him merely out of “Curiosity.” Did they pay attention to his words, he wondered, simply “to amuse a Critical Head,” or was it “to Settle you in Just Notions & Orthodox Opinions?”Footnote ⁶⁹ Similarly, before a sermon on the last judgment, Clay informed his hearers that his words were “not designed merely as an amusing Speculation to gratify Our Curiosity, but Ought to have proper influence upon our temper & Conduct.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Church attendance, he argued at another time, was not a “matter of Costom or entertainmt” but an opportunity to “Join fervently” in public worship.Footnote ⁷¹ Yet few in Clay's congregation demonstrated the fervent religiosity he expected in Sunday services. Like Blair and Douglass, Charles Clay despaired of his parishioners' poor memories, half-hearted prayers, and spiritual indifference.

IV. Disrespectful Action

In addition to observing sleepy prayers and blank facial expressions, Virginia ministers gauged parochial attentiveness in terms of more overtly distracting and disrespectful behaviors. William Douglass, for example, railed against those who “laugh and sport” at “the very time of divine worship.” Such rabble-rousers were “destitute even of the least Spark of [page torn] decency & good manners.” For Douglass, this “vain giddy tem[per]” in church was “ridiculous.”Footnote ⁷² Similarly, as we have seen, James Blair chastised those who exchanged “lustful Look[s]” in his services.Footnote ⁷³

The most comprehensive examples of disrespectful behavior in church are found in Charles Clay's sermons. In one of his most detailed chastisements against lay behavior, preached at least thirty-one times in two different sermons between 1769 and 1785, Clay spoke of those who

In this vivid description, inattention and indifference manifest themselves in distracting and disrespectful behaviors. Clay's parishioner was not only bored and indifferent, but he or she also refused to kneel, chatted with neighbors during the service, and—perhaps most distracting—ran in and out of the church. Preached a remarkable number of times to his congregation, Clay's description of disrespectful church behavior was perhaps the preacher's most oft-repeated and well-known sermon example.

Charles Clay's remarks on disrespectful church behavior were not limited to one frequently repeated example. In another sermon, he described parishioners who “have So much to say one to another yt [that] they loose much of w[ha]t the Preacher hath to say to them.” The news they shared in the pews, Clay noted sarcastically, was “of such importance & necessity to be Communicated immediately yt [that] even the Duties of hearkening to Gods word in the lessons & Singing his Praises in the Psalms must give way to them.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Similarly, on another occasion, Clay derided those who only came to church to share “Some matter of tittle tattle.”Footnote ⁷⁶

More than chastising disrespectful chit-chatting, Clay used his sermons to combat the parochial practice of “Running in and out” of church. Mentioning the practice repeatedly in his sermons, he noted that some parishioners “when they Repair to the temple of God, are so Remiss, So unconcerned while there; Sauntering out & in, as if et[ernal] Sal[vation] was a Matter of indifference.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Clay gave an extended example of one form of “sauntering” to which he objected in an undated sermon on baptism. Focusing on the behavior of women during the baptismal service, he railed against their “Common” practice of “talking & laughing & pacing up & down.” Emphasizing the movement implicit in such “pacing” or sauntering, Clay argued that it was better suited to the “race field” than the church. He described their movements as analogous to dancing but argued that a “Carriage wh[ich] appears so light & wanton in So Sacred a place, & at so holy a Solemnity” would “be deemed indecent even in a ball Room.”Footnote ⁷⁸ For Clay, pacing, chatting, whispering, and refusing to kneel were all characteristic of “ye irreverent Behaviour yt [that] Careless disrespect, which is too Scandalously Visible in ye worship of these Days, (in Our Churches) out of which Negligence & Prophaness have almost banished Seriousness & Devotion.”Footnote ⁷⁹

At the same time Charles Clay was chastising his parishioners for their inattentive behavior in church, he was also providing them with an ideal description of the form of parochial reception he wanted them to emulate. Yet, even in describing the ideal parishioner, Clay's biting sarcasm provides a portrait of the inattention rampant in his congregation. In a note appended before two sermons encouraging resolution and fortitude in spiritual matters, delivered thirteen times between 1770 and 1779, Clay noted that Christ “hath Said whomsoever Shall be ashamed of me befor Men of him will I be ashamed before my father wh[ich] is in heaven.” Building on the theme of shame, Clay told his hearers,

Clearly, there were some in Clay's congregation who felt it was “too condescending” to kneel; there were others who muttered their prayers; and others who jeered the presence of a prayer book.

James Blair, William Douglass, and Charles Clay looked down from their colonial pulpits and saw widespread inattention. Parishioners, they claimed, were bored, disinterested, sleepy, insincere, rude, distracted, and talkative. Subsumed under the category of lay inattention, these behavioral patterns were certainly not the only possible responses to parochial Anglicanism—there were undoubtedly some pious Anglicans—yet, given the ubiquity of ministerial evidence, inattentiveness was clearly widespread in eighteenth-century Virginia.

V. Homiletic Realities

It is important to question, however, whether ministerial descriptions of lay inattention can be trusted to accurately portray the environment inside colonial Anglican churches. Is it possible that sermonic chastisements were merely rhetorical jeremiads—more reflective of ministerial biases than of actual conditions? Indeed, because two of the most outspoken clerical critics of lay inattention—Charles Clay and William Douglass—were Anglican evangelicals, it could be argued that ministerial chastisements were indicative of an evangelical ethos at odds with worldly-wise behaviors. Yet because James Blair—who was certainly not an evangelical—articulated almost identical ideas, the congruency between attacks on inattention and evangelicalism is imperfect. Indeed, the non-evangelical Blair complained just as loudly about church inattention as his more evangelical counterparts.

If evangelical biases do not fully explain the ministerial preoccupations with inattention, perhaps clerical chastisements reflected a bias against poorer, culturally unsophisticated parishioners. Anglican churches were, after all, meeting places for people of all socioeconomic levels. Noting the variety of peoples at church, Philip Vickers Fithian commented that at Easter “all the Parish seem'd to meet together High, Low, black, White all come out.”Footnote ⁸¹ James Blair similarly recognized the diversity in his congregation, noting that his sermons had been written for “a plain Country Auditory” or, as he also noted, “the meanest Hearers.”Footnote ⁸² Given the obvious social distinctions between parish priest and rural farmer, could clerical injunctions against inattention have represented a form of manners moralism in which clerics attempted to inculcate class-defined conceptions of propriety? It should be noted, however, that widely circulated preaching manuals actively discouraged ministers from conflating class biases with religious didacticism. While clerics were expected to improve parochial piety, they were also encouraged to understand the unique nature of their congregations. Educated priests, for example, were warned not to display their superior knowledge ostentatiously before their congregations. Gilbert Burnet's preaching manual reminded ministers that a preacher should “fancy himself, as in the room of the most unlearned Man in his whole Parish; and therefore he must put such parts of his Discourse as he would have all understand, in so plain a form of Words, that it may not be beyond the meanest of them.”Footnote ⁸³ Joseph Glanvill similarly noted that “the hearers of Sermons are mixt people, among whom usually there are very few of so much sagacity and attention, as to be able to comprehend, and to go along with a judicious, exactly penn'd Discourse: Whoever would edifie them, must dilate, and represent the same things in different lights and colours.” Addressing ministerial ostentation in language, Glanvill maintained that it was “reprehensible in a Preacher … to affect outlandish words that have not yet receiv'd the publick stamp, and especially to do it when the ordinary English will represent the thing as well.” Glanvill especially cautioned against the use of “scraps of Greek and Latin” which, given their unintelligibility to common parishioners, clearly represented class ostentation.Footnote ⁸⁴ The goal of ministers, Gilbert Burnet noted, was “to edify” their parishioners “rather than to make them admire [their minister] as a learned and high-spoken Man.”Footnote ⁸⁵ Indeed, John Wilkins pressed humility on his ministerial readers by reminding them of the example of a Roman pagan noted for his “notional humane learning” who was, nevertheless, converted to Christianity by a plain-talking “Countrey-man.” According to Wilkins, “The greatest learning is to be seen in the greatest plainnesse.”Footnote ⁸⁶

If preaching manuals warned ministers against bringing class biases into the pulpit, widely circulated devotional texts clearly demonstrated that religiously didactic admonitions against inattention functioned as something more than elite recommendations of bourgeois behavior. Indeed, reverent church behavior assumed an almost doctrinal significance in the Restoration Church of England. The 1662 Book of Common Prayer, the edition used throughout eighteenth-century Virginia, argued that the purpose of liturgical (that is, Anglican) worship was “the procuring of Reverence, and exciting of Piety, and Devotion in the Publick Worship of God.”Footnote ⁸⁷ That the “procuring” of reverent behavior superseded personal piety in the Prayer Book's enumerated goals for Anglican worship attests to the religious importance of polite church behavior. Moreover, as we have seen, Anglo-America's most famous devotional writer, Richard Allestree, repeatedly recommended reverence in his widely circulated self-help manual, The Whole Duty of Man. Allestree went on to include detailed admonitions against lay inattentiveness in another highly popular devotional work, The Ladies Calling. Here, Allestree vividly critiqued the church behavior of London women, noting that they “sit down to talk and laugh with their Pew-fellows, and rise up to gape and look about them.”Footnote ⁸⁸ Instead of worshiping reverently, these women exchanged gossip and discussed the latest plays. In addition to chit-chatters, Allestree complained of those who arrived in the midst of the service. Echoing Clay's “saunterers,” Allestree's latecomers kept “the Congregation in a continual motion and agitation.” “Often,” Allestree wrote, “during the whole time of Praier, the clapping [of] Pew-doors does outnoise the Reader.”Footnote ⁸⁹ Consequently, clerical chastisements against lay inattention were representative of a religious definition of appropriate church behavior, conveyed by devotional literatures and the Book of Common Prayer. In advocating reverence, clerics may have been extolling the virtues of their class, but they were also articulating the accepted mores of their church.

Neither purely the product of evangelical nor elite biases, ministerial chastisements against lay inattention accurately describe the environment inside colonial Virginia churches. That sermonic descriptions of lay behavior can be trusted is attested by their surprising resonance with the extant descriptions of Virginia church behavior. Given the paucity of contemporary accounts, the thematic congruity present between sermonic chastisements and surviving diaries suggests the viability of church inattention as a way of understanding Anglican religious practice in colonial Virginia. As in sermons, lay accounts stressed the variety of forms inattention could take. According to Philip Vickers Fithian, a Presbyterian tutor living in the family of Robert Carter, few Virginia parishioners joined in weekly psalm-singing. Remarking on the novelty of an organized choir singing from the church balcony, Fithian described it as “entirely contrary to what I have seen befor in the Colony, for it is seldom in the fullest Congregation's [sic], that more sing than the Clerk, & about two others!”Footnote ⁹⁰ On another occasion, Fithian echoed Charles Clay by describing a form of “sauntering.” “It is not the Custom,” Fithian wrote, “for Gentlemen to go into Church til Service is beginning, when they enter in a Body, in the same manner as they come out; I have known the Clerk to come out and call them in to prayers.”Footnote ⁹¹ For Fithian, Virginia Anglicans were quiet when they should have been singing and were talkative in the churchyard even as services were beginning. How ministers in the parish churches Philip Vickers Fithian attended felt about this behavior is unknown. However, Fithian did note that he heard rector Isaac Giberne “preach on Felixes trembling at Paul's Sermon.”Footnote ⁹² Although Fithian provided no description of the sermon, the choice of scripture text—one in which St. Paul's sermon fully captivates the attention of a Roman governor—may be revealingly representative of Giberne's own hopes for his congregation.

Even if one questions the objectivity of a Presbyterian observer, other evidence suggests the viability of inattention as a widespread parochial response within Virginia Anglicanism. For example, even pious William Byrd II—who bracketed most of his days in devotional reading and prayer—was apt to fall asleep in church on occasion. Hearing James Blair preach in Jamestown in 1709, Byrd noted, “Nothing could hinder me from sleeping at church, though I took a great deal of pains against it.”Footnote ⁹³ Similarly, when living in London in 1718, he remarked, “I slept away a pretty good sermon.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Following Byrd's return to Virginia, he continued to sleep in church. After dining with Lieutenant Governor Alexander Spotswood on venison pasty in November 1720, Byrd went to church and “slept in sermon time.” A week later, he again ate venison with spotswood and “slept a little” during the afternoon service. The following week, he ate giblet pie and stayed awake.Footnote ⁹⁵ Even when Byrd did not sleep, he occasionally described sermons as “dull,” and “sleepy.”Footnote ⁹⁶ Inattention, it seems, was a dilemma even for the most pious of Virginians.

Like William Byrd II, Virginia planter Landon Carter similarly struggled with inattention. Confronted with the presence of a detested son-in-law at church in 1774, Carter “took up my hat, bid everybody goodbuy and walkt away home ordering my boy to fetch my great Coat and book out and follow me with my horses.” Explaining his action as a preservative against inattention, he noted, “there can be no true religion where such objects are Perpetually bringing to remembrance, the grossest of all injuries in the world.”Footnote ⁹⁷ Later that week, after his minister had rebuked him for “turning [his] back on the church,” Carter informed his parson that leaving the church was a “sensible” act of “true Christian humanity.” “For there could be only a mockery in prayer,” Carter reasoned, “with the object of my injury received always in view Vibrating on every Nerve in my Machine.”Footnote ⁹⁸ Rather than face distraction in his devotions, Carter left the church. Yet, Landon Carter did not always follow this logic. A year later, he attended church on a fast day even though he lamented the distraction that a neglected breakfast had caused him. It was hard to be piously “composed,” Carter argued, when he “was pained in the body that incloses the soul.”Footnote ⁹⁹ A growling stomach or a despised enemy was enough to draw Landon Carter's attention away from religious piety.

Of course, the testimony of extant diaries is undeniably limited to the experiences of social elites. The fact that planters, like William Byrd II and Landon Carter, were inattentive in church does not necessarily mean that others behaved in this manner. And yet, it should be stressed that while diaries describe elite inattention, sermon chastisements are far less exclusive in scope. When ministers cajoled their inattentive congregations, they spoke of the behavior of all the parishioners they could see from the vantage point of an elevated pulpit. Consequently, the fact that elites, who possessed the time and ability to write, corroborated ministerial descriptions of inattention is not an indication that inattentive behavior was solely the prerogative of the wealthy.

VI. Transatlantic Continuities

Inattention, as described by both ministers and parishioners, not only describes the experiences of some Virginia Anglicans, it also connects them with co-religionists throughout the British Atlantic. Indeed, if James Blair, William Douglass, and Charles Clay had been successful in stamping out the inattentive responses of their parishioners, their congregations would have been truly unique in an Atlantic context. Parochial inattentiveness was as much a factor in English churches as it was in Virginia. As we have seen, inattention featured prominently in Richard Allestree's transatlantic devotional works. Yet, descriptions of inattention in English churches were not limited to devotional texts; they were also featured in the pages of the popular London periodicals the Spectator and Guardian. Undeniably the most popular British magazines in the colonial Atlantic World, these journals were regularly available to colonial Virginians. Indeed, one author has argued that, on eighteenth-century southern bookshelves, “the Spectator is almost as likely to be present as the Bible.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ In their witty and urbane articles, these popular magazines described lay inattentiveness to a transatlantic audience. For example, a 1711 correspondent to the Spectator described “a Set of Gigglers” who sat in church and because of the minister's unusual accent “made it an Occasion of Mirth during the whole Time of the Sermon.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ Likewise, a 1712 letter described a woman who “pull[ed] out her [snuff] Box (which is indeed full of good Brazile) in the middle of the Sermon; and to shew she has the Audacity of a well-bred Woman, she offer[ed] it the Men as well as the Women who sit near her.”Footnote ¹⁰² Another Spectator essay, published later in the year, described a man who “seldom comes in till the Prayers are about half over,” and “who takes a Pinch of Snuff, (if it be Evening-Service, perhaps a Nap) and spends the remaining Time in surveying the Congregation.”Footnote ¹⁰³ The Guardian similarly described some “pretty young Ladies, in Mobbs, [who] popped in here and there about the Church, clattering the Pew Door after them, and squatting into a Whisper behind their Fans.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Not only did widely popular English magazines refer to the “sauntering,” “giggling,” and “chit-chatting” so popular in Virginia churches, but they also placed James Blair's “ogling gestures” in a transatlantic context. Describing a London service, the Guardian blatantly noted that “I have seen the young People who have been interchanging Glances of Passion to each others Person.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Similarly, the Spectator published a 1711 letter from correspondent Jenny Simper in which she admitted, “I come constantly to Church to hear divine Service and make Conquests.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Earlier in the year, the magazine published a letter from S. C. in which she complained against a male “starer” who had recently begun attending services with a largely female congregation in North London. The gentleman, although a “Head taller than anyone in the Church,” stood on a stool and stared at his female parishioners. Calling the man a “monstrous starer,” who had little “regard to Time, Place, or Modesty,” S. C. noted that, “what with Blushing, Confusion, and Vexation, we can neither mind the Prayers nor the Sermon.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Two months later, a “reformed starer” wrote in to complain against the behavior of women he referred to as “Peepers.” “If they do every thing that is possible to attract our Eyes,” he asked, “are we more culpable than they for looking at them?” Describing a recent service in which he was “shut into a Pew, which was full of young Ladies in the Bloom of Youth and Beauty,” the man noted that his attempts to keep his “Eyes from wandring” were foiled by a Peeper who “so placed her self as to be kneeling just before me.” “She display'd the most beautiful Bosom imaginable,” he wrote, “which heav'd and fell with some fervour, while a delicate well-shaped Arm held a Fan over her Face … I frequently offer'd to turn my Sight another way, but was still detained by the Fascination of the Peeper's Eyes, who had long practised a skill in them, to recal the parting Glances of her Beholders.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸

References to church inattention contained in urbane metropolitan magazines were designed to foster both devout piety and polite gentility. As important cultural vehicles in the inculcation of bourgeois manners, the Spectator and Guardian were far more prone to class bias than religiously didactic sermons. Yet it should be noted that these magazines were not the only media in which church inattention was discussed. Far less sophisticated than the Spectator essays, and catering to a less well-heeled audience, street pamphlets also articulated themes of inattentiveness. Like the Spectator and Guardian, popular pamphlets demonstrate that sexualized interpretations of church services were a widespread phenomenon. Indeed, a nearly contemporaneous English example of Blair's “ogling Gestures” can be found in the following description of an English dandy in church, originally published in a London pamphlet:

Whether published in urbane magazines or in the pornographic penny press, whether describing libertines or chit-chatters, English descriptions of church behavior suggest that when Virginia Anglicans ignored their ministers, talked in church, and flirted with their neighbors—when their thoughts wandered to secular or sexual matters—they were engaged in behavioral patterns that bridged the Atlantic. In addition to being united by the stately cadences of common prayers, Anglo-American Anglicans also shared a common proclivity for inattentive church behavior.

The transatlantic nature of this common religious culture of inattention is best gauged by the behavior of Virginians in English churches. For example, William Byrd II, who fell asleep with equal ease in Williamsburg or Westminster, also recorded ogling a woman in a London church. Living in London and attempting to woo a wealthy wife, William Byrd found himself smitten and scorned by Mary Smith. When Smith refused to see or speak to him, Byrd followed her to church where he “put her in all the confusion in the world, her face glowing and her eyes looking conscious both of love and shame.” Refusing to recognize Byrd, Smith instead “hid herself behind those that sat with her in the pew.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ Byrd's actions at church, repeated on three successive Sundays with similar embarrassment for Mary Smith, were comparable to his behavior at the opera, where he confided to his diary, “I had the pleasure to ogle my dear Miss Smith.”Footnote ¹¹¹ In his attempts to win his “Dearest … divinest Mrs. Smith,” William Byrd the Virginian connected James Blair's Virginia “oglers” with the English “starers” and “peepers” of the Spectator.Footnote ¹¹²

In addition to being a Virginia ogler in London, William Byrd II was also a Virginia author whose pen captured the imperial dimensions of religious inattention. Heavily influenced by the wit and style of the Spectator and Guardian, Byrd's private manuscripts repeatedly addressed church behaviors that were common on both sides of the Atlantic. In the Female Creed, Byrd's earthy, misogynistic diatribe on women, he referred to a minister named Mr. Cant who preached his “Congregation into a Lethargy.”Footnote ¹¹³ Although fictional, Cant's boring style mimics Byrd's own lethargic experiences in church and the “sleepy” and “dull” sermons he heard. Even closer to Byrd's own experience was his confession in an undated letter to “Bellamira” that “My Eys have stray'd towards you at church.” Bellamira's identity is unknown, and Byrd's love letter to her may simply have been a literary diversion, yet the letter's admission that Byrd's ogling was done “in prejudice of my Devotion” provides a masculine commentary on the behavior that is absent from his account of staring at Mary Smith.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Conversely, in another letter, to the unidentified “Vaporina,” Byrd describes a woman's reaction to being stared at in church. Describing a woman whose rarified beauty made her uncomfortable, Byrd imagines her asking, “How many young fellows have neglected their Devotion at church to ogle me?”Footnote ¹¹⁵ Perhaps reflecting his own embittered rejection at the hands of a beautiful woman, Byrd prescribed self-mutilation as a “remedy” that would “put an effectual stop to all the mischiefs occasion'd by her charms.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ Byrd's literary descriptions of church behavior were not always as violently misogynistic. In a letter to “My Lady C,” he lampooned the behavior of an unnamed woman whose “Devotion at Church is very singular, for she ogles the young fellows dureing the service and casts up her Eys devoutly at publishing the Banes [sic] of Matrimony.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ Similarly, in the Female Creed, Byrd told a story of a woman whose attempts to conceal her pimples with patches resulted in “not one Fellow [looking] upon her dureing the whole Service.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ Beautiful ladies that promoted distraction, ogling men burning with desire, and presumptuous women who came to church looking for husbands populated both William Byrd's imagination and his real-life experience on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.

VII. Causalities

In establishing lay inattention as a widespread, transatlantic form of religious response—as common in London as Williamsburg—little has been said about the motivating factors behind these behaviors. In other words, why were people inattentive? Or, what cultural meaning did inattention have in eighteenth-century Anglo-America? Perhaps one reason for inattention lies in the established nature of the Church of England. In Virginia, where church attendance was mandated by law, inattentiveness may have been an attractive option for evangelical dissenters dissatisfied with the ecclesiastical establishment. Yet, in Virginia, the widespread popularity of inattention seems incongruent with the colony's relatively limited numbers of dissenters. To argue that inattention and dissent were synonymous would be to suggest that dissenters had overrun the colony as early as James Blair's lifetime; a point, incidentally, that both recent scholarship and Blair's own testimony strongly refute.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Moreover, despite laws requiring bi-monthly, and later monthly, church attendance—laws that evangelicals strongly opposed—the evidence of crowded churches suggests that many people exceeded the requirement and came to church regularly and voluntarily.Footnote ¹²⁰ Indeed, describing church attendance as “a matter of personal choice,” one recent scholar has argued that “a form of voluntarism was emerging within the structure of the institutional church.”Footnote ¹²¹ It should also be noted that the extant evidence, ministerial and otherwise, does not support the association between evangelicalism and inattentiveness.

It could also be argued that inattentive behaviors were the product of visual or hearing impairments. Disabled parishioners, legally required like other residents to attend church, might have manifested their sense of exclusion from the proceedings by being inattentive. Yet, notwithstanding Andrew Pettegree's fascinating discussion of the Early Modern ubiquity of “blunted sight,” it seems unlikely that the numbers of persons with disabilities ever approximated the large numbers of inattentive parishioners.Footnote ¹²² Moreover, neither sermon chastisements nor lay accounts make any connections between inattention and physical disability.

Perhaps inattentive behaviors were spawned by inebriation. Scholars have long commented on the popularity of alcohol in early America, and contemporary Virginians, including William Byrd II, regularly mentioned liquor's ubiquitous presence in public and private life.Footnote ¹²³ Indeed, Byrd clearly recognized the signs of inebriation; he scolded slaves for drunkenness, identified horse races, court days, and militia musters as places where excessive drinking occurred, and noticed when dinner guests drank too much.Footnote ¹²⁴ Interestingly, in March 1709, while visiting James Blair in Williamsburg, Byrd noted that he was “very much surprised to find Mrs. Blair drunk.”Footnote ¹²⁵ Similarly, Landon Carter described excessive drinking at barbecues, by slaves, and by plantation overseers.Footnote ¹²⁶ Importantly, while they encountered drunkenness in many other places, neither man ever recorded witnessing inebriation in church. Moreover, ministers themselves did not describe inattentive behaviors in terms of drunkenness. In a society where signs of inebriation were readily recognizable, it is telling that no one connected inattentive church behaviors to excessive drinking. Indeed, on the rare occasions when ministers mentioned alcohol, they routinely referenced activity outside the church. For example, Charles Clay composed two complementary sermons for Christmas Day that roundly criticized the conventional observance of the holiday. Too many people, Clay argued, spent Christmas Day in “drunkenness & debauchery, Reveling & Swearing fiddling & Dancing.” “Is the way to praise God,” Clay asked his congregation, “to Curse Swear & blasphem[e], to game to get Drunk, to Run into every excess of Riot Regardless of all law human and Di[vine] as many of you are known to do?”Footnote ¹²⁷ By Clay's own account, however, the drinking started after church. In a second sermon on Christmas, Clay identified “hunting, Sporting, Gaming, [and] Drinking” as forbidden holiday sins and noted that absent parishioners skipped church to begin these festivities early; the churchgoers, he complained, would wait until services had ended.Footnote ¹²⁸ Yet, in both Christmas sermons there is some ambiguity as to when the drinking started. In a passage repeated almost verbatim in both sermons, Clay described Christmas as “a Day of immunity, one priviliged for the Commission of all kind of Wickedness, Vice, & immorality, & accordingly you begin the soking feast in the morning, & are early inflamed with Strong Drink.”Footnote ¹²⁹ It is likely that the persons “inflamed with Strong Drink” were also those who skipped Christmas services to begin the “soking feast” early. Even if these drinkers came to church, Clay gives no description of their behavior. Indeed, aside from the comment that Christmas tipplers began drinking early at a time, ostensibly, when services were held, neither Clay, Blair, nor Douglass gave any indication that alcohol played a role in inattentive behaviors at church. Consequently, while drinking was a regular feature of colonial society, ensuring that commentators would recognize the signs of drunkenness when they saw them, there is no evidence from ministerial or lay sources to suggest that inattentive church behaviors were caused by or attributed to inebriation.

In addition to evangelicalism, disability, or inebriation, it might be argued that inattention represents a surging secularism—a grassroots opposition to establishment metaphysics presaging the civic religion of Jefferson's 1788 Statute for Religious Freedom.Footnote ¹³⁰ Yet, it would be genuinely ironic if the church was secularized by inattentive behaviors while secular almanacs and newspapers simultaneously continued to express religious values. Indeed, religion was so deeply entrenched in Virginia, as evidenced by government-sponsored fast days, the widespread popularity of devotional works, and what one historian has called “the most thoroughgoing religious establishment in colonial British North America,” that widespread secularism seems an unlikely reason for inattention.Footnote ¹³¹ Of course, the concept of secularism could imply something more nuanced than a generalized opposition to religious faith that was, admittedly, rare in colonial Virginia. In this sense, perhaps secularism can explain religious apathy, which, far more than religious antipathy, was a defining characteristic of parochial life. Indeed, because inattentive behaviors brought the secular world into the spiritual realm, behavioral patterns that valued “worldly Cares and Projects” over religious prescription were an undeniable form of secularized expression.Footnote ¹³² Consequently, an appreciation for the secular world certainly contributed to church inattention, although this secularism fell well short of religious antipathy.

Inattention to the things of God and attentiveness to secular concerns—whether “Shops, and Stores, and Farms” or members of the opposite sex—is best explained by parochial boredom.Footnote ¹³³ Indeed, wistfully looking out of windows, chit-chatting, and sauntering are indications of an unwillingness to preserve rapt attention throughout rather lengthy services. Boredom was certainly a fear expressed throughout preaching manuals. Gilbert Burnet reminded ministers that “the shorter Sermons are, they are generally both better heard, and better remembered.” Noting that hour-long sermons might “tempt [hearers] to sleep,” Burnet suggested that in a thirty-minute sermon a minister might “hope to keep up the Attention of his People.”Footnote ¹³⁴ Likewise, Robert Dodsley noted, “If Pastors more than thrice five Minutes preach, Their sleepy Flocks begin to yawn, and stretch.”Footnote ¹³⁵ And, for obvious reasons, Joseph Glanvill advised ministers to “avoid a droning dullness of speech.”Footnote ¹³⁶ While it is difficult to assign a spoken duration to a written manuscript, it is clear from their length that Virginia sermons were not easily deliverable in thirty, or even forty-five, minutes.Footnote ¹³⁷ Consequently, with the accompanying liturgy, Sunday services could easily last several hours. The length of the service undoubtedly exacerbated the discomfort of an alternatively unheated or sweltering church and an uncomfortable wooden pew.Footnote ¹³⁸ Indeed, given the length of the service, it is perhaps not surprising that, on those Sundays when Holy Communion was observed, the vast majority of colonial Virginians chose to leave church at the earliest permissible opportunity rather than stay for the sacrament.Footnote ¹³⁹

Yet, if parishioners were inattentively bored, why did they attend church above and beyond the legal requirements? How were crowded churches and the culture of establishment “voluntarism” compatible with inattentiveness? The answer lies in seeing the church not merely as a place for religious instruction but also as a site for sociability. Given the scattered nature of Chesapeake settlement, weekly church gatherings were important exercises in communal interaction. They were opportunities for parishioners to advertise their produce, discuss current events, and reaffirm social bonds. As Philip Vickers Fithian noted, it was a “general custom” in Virginia for gentlemen to “consult about, determine their common business, either before or after service.” Following the service, parishioners might spend “three quarters of an hour … strolling round the Church among the Crowd.” Church services gave individuals an opportunity for “giving & receiving letters of business, reading Advertisements, consulting about the price of Tobacco, Grain &c. & settling either the lineage, Age, or qualities of favourite Horses.” Indeed, when Fithian arrived at church on Sunday, December 12, 1773, he found an advertisement for pork “to be sold to-morrow at 20/. Per Hundred” posted on the church door.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Philip Vickers Fithian was not alone in describing a church culture of sociability; extant diaries brim with accounts of people encountered and news acquired at church. For example, Landon Carter noted in 1777 that “a report” of a revolutionary victory “Prevailed at Church.”Footnote ¹⁴¹ Similarly, Carter, Fithian, William Byrd II, and the less affluent John Harrower were constantly meeting people at church with whom they later dined. Consequently, it is plausible to suggest that some people came to church both because the law required it and because they desired the sociability to be found there. In this light, lengthy services must have been a somewhat unwelcome interruption of the chit-chatting, gossiping, and wheeling and dealing that occurred before and after the service. Inattentive parishioners who demonstrated boredom with services through chatting, ogling, or sauntering were merely continuing the patterns of sociability that drew them to church.

VIII. Conclusion: ‘Horse-Shed’ Anglicans in an Atlantic World

Describing the majority of Anglo-American Anglicans as bored and, therefore, inattentive requires some modification of the existing historiography of the Anglican Church in Virginia. As we have seen, historians have described the colony's parishioners in mutually self-exclusive terms. Anglicans were alternatively hegemonic elites who used the church to cement their social position or pious Prayer Book–reading Christians dedicated to their church's prescriptive teachings on repentance. Based on the evidence for inattention presented here, a third historiographic option—describing some, but certainly not all, Anglicans as inattentively bored—seems necessary. A model for such a historiographic category exists outside of Anglican studies in the field of New English popular religion. There, David D. Hall has definitively argued that a sizeable number of New England Puritans were “horse-shed Christians.” These were less-than-zealous pew-fillers who “limit[ed] their commitment to the church.” Hall describes this group of New Englanders by noting their “indifference” to the prescription of the church. Some engaged in “mischief” during services while others gathered at the horse shed to discuss grain and horse prices.Footnote ¹⁴² Hall's point is that lay inattentiveness constituted a viable parochial response among Puritans. Importantly, “horse-shed” Christianity need not imply radical secularism or revolutionary evangelicalism. Horse-shed Christians, whether in Massachusetts or Virginia, were no more violently opposed to established religion than they were religiously zealous. They were simply bored, apathetic, and indifferent.

Clearly Hall's concept of the “horse-shed Christian” is applicable beyond the boundaries of New England. As we have seen, Virginia Anglicans demonstrated similar forms of religious inattention. Indeed, describing some Virginia Anglicans as “horse-shed Christians” seems as plausible as describing others as hegemonically elite or penitently pious. Moreover, given the transatlantic ubiquity of lay inattention, horse-shed Christianity seems to accurately describe the religious sensibilities of a large number of parishioners—both metropolitan and colonial—in the British Atlantic. Consequently, in the sense that Anglo-Americans regardless of geographic location engaged in inattentive behaviors, they participated in a common “horse-shed” religious culture. Indeed, the large numbers of chit-chatters and saunterers would have found cultural commonalities in both English cathedrals, Virginia churches, and Massachusetts meetinghouses.

The congruity between Anglican sermon chastisements, lay descriptions of church behavior, transatlantically popular devotional works, and widely circulated magazines suggests that inattentive church behaviors were common in the British Atlantic. Indeed, the evidence presented here suggests that church inattentiveness—or “horse-shed” Christianity—was an imperial phenomenon that transcended geographic and denominational boundaries. Given its nearly ubiquitous presence in sermons, diaries, and devotional and secular texts, lay inattentiveness clearly constituted a common parochial response—a shared religious culture—in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic. While many Anglicans undoubtedly came to church to worship and pray, many others came to chat, ogle, and sleep. Consequently, when Virginians flirted with their neighbors, ignored their ministers, and sauntered about the church, they were engaged in activities that bridged the empire. Indeed, when bored parishioners stared blankly out of Virginia church windows, an empire of similarly uninterested churchgoers stared back.