For well over a century, scholars of race relations in North America have focussed on early Virginia for explanations of how and why slavery secured a foothold on the continent and how racism became its ideological underpinning. Rebecca Anne Goetz's study of Virginia's first two centuries offers a new paradigm. It does not drastically unsettle prevailing interpretations; rather, Goetz expands the discussion by emphasizing the role of the Anglican church and of certain Virginia laws and court cases in excluding Africans and Indians from baptism when the colonists decided that both categories' “hereditary heathenism” was irreversible (ix). Despite the Anglo-Americans' occasional missionary successes, Africans and Indians were ultimately denied full conversion and therefore full freedom.

Along the way, racial stigma played a crucial role. “The story of race as it unfolded in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English North America,” Goetz concludes, “shows that race was not a predictable product of colonization; it was carefully invented and reinvented, and religious belief was a critical part of constructing and defining human difference” (172). Many scholars in the extensively debated field of racism and slavery would probably agree with that summary and perhaps with her collateral arguments: that “Anglo-Virginians laid the foundations for an emergent idea of race and an ideology of racism” (3), “created [the concept of] whiteness during the seventeenth century” (6), and “asserted a new definition of human difference that was written both on the body and in the soul” (10). By the dawn of the eighteenth century, Goetz maintains, race as a shaping concept and racism as the ideology of oppression were firmly in place, though applied less consistently to Indians than to Africans.

The author has read widely in the sources but makes numerous errors in her presentation. On the trivial but annoying side, for example, are the substitution of an “f” for a long “s” (176 n. 5) in a quotation from the Geneva Bible, which suggests a surprising unfamiliarity with sixteenth-century orthography and printing; the dating of Virginia's first representative assembly in 1618 rather than 1619 (9), despite the almost universally recognized irony that the House of Burgesses was established in the same year as the arrival of the first slaves; and the misrepresentation of an English pamphlet of 1622 which, Goetz says, advocated the use of mastiffs to “tear Indians to pieces” (58), in disregard of the front matter's prominent correction of several misprints, including “Mastiues to seaze” in place of “Mastiues to teare.” Closer editing might have caught these and other glitches.

More significant errors include misreadings of important laws. In discussing the comprehensive Law of Servants and Slaves of 1705, for example, Goetz asserts that it differed from a law of 1691 by labeling the children of mixed-race parents “abominable mixture and spurious issue” (83), when, in fact, the 1691 law used the identical phrase. Even more serious is her claim that enslaved Africans “lived among the English, usually as indentured servants with a fixed period of servitude rather than as slaves for life” (72). That was an arguable interpretation during most of the twentieth century, especially at the height of Oscar and Mary Handlin's theory of 1950 and its subsequent enshrinement in textbooks on American or African American history, but not for the past two decades or so. Goetz gives no sources for her statement, yet elsewhere she approvingly cites a recent book by Lorena S. Walsh and a dissertation by John C. Coombs (193–94 n. 2) that document the rarity of indentures for Africans in the Chesapeake colonies. Coombs's meticulous examination of Virginia estate inventories found a total of 286 African “servants” before 1677, only two of whom had specified numbers of years to serve, in contrast to eighty-three percent of English servants. Goetz revives a hoary myth.

On a still larger scale, several of Goetz's emphases are questionable. She puts too much blame on Christianity (especially in the book's subtitle), not enough on planters and their allies who exploited it. She lays too much blame on Virginia for the “invention and reinvention” of racism, not enough on the colonists' predecessors in Europe and Iberian America and contemporaries in other British colonies. Finally, the emphasis she places on baptism within the framework of early American Christianity seems overdone. It was, to be sure, important both procedurally and symbolically, but especially in her title and at various times in her text, Goetz overburdens that ritual in much the way she overburdens the Virginia colony and Christianity. The Baptism of Virginia tackles a tremendously complicated subject with originality and intelligence, but this reader remains unconvinced by much of its argument.