In the kind of detailed study long overdue, Charles Irons focuses on the development and character of biracial Protestant Christianity in pre-Civil War Virginia. Using a wide variety of sources, including manuscript church minutes, denominational newspapers, private letters and diaries, and printed sermons and biographies, he reconstructs the close interactions between black and white members in the three dominant churches of the region, the Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian, with most emphasis on the first two, which had the majority of worshipers both black and white. He begins with the early Baptist and Methodist ministers eagerly reaching out to gain black converts, but he rightfully cautions against the modern tendency to exaggerate the antislavery sentiment of the early ministers and their consequent moral retreat as they accommodated to the reality of the slave power. He also highlights the involvement of slaves in the so-called white evangelical churches of the Old South, although his emphasis is solely on Virginia. While he is aware that many blacks worshiped in the invisible church of the hush arbor, he makes it quite clear that the normative worship experience of antebellum slaves—at least in the first third of the nineteenth century—was in officially white churches. Blacks often outnumbered whites in these churches, and though they sat segregated in balconies or in the back pews, they heard the same sermons, took communion with whites, joined and were released from churches in the same fashion, and participated in church disciplinary procedures. Perhaps blacks from a variety of plantations and farms sitting together made these segregated spaces an important arena for the creation of a sense of black community; it was the safest place for blacks to meet other blacks from across the countryside. If so, it would not be the first time that slaves made of their situation something that whites would never have suspected.

Irons's interpretation is careful and nuanced. He does not portray the white attitude toward black members as solely instrumentalist—the church simply as an agent of social control—nor does he depict black involvement as solely passive. Clearly, many evangelical ministers sincerely cared for the souls of the blacks in their midst, and it is impossible to explain blacks' attraction to the church if they did not find authentic meaning there. Whatever the law said about slaves as property, white evangelicals understood that blacks were people in the eyes of God, and the slaves found an important degree of moral agency in, for example, their participation in church disciplinary proceedings. Ironically, even as the whites used the heartfelt involvement of slaves in the churches as putative evidence of the providential purpose of the institution—a God-sent means of converting Africans—the presence of black members in many ways shaped the theology, the practice, and the tone of the church services. In ways whites could not have foreseen, the presence of blacks in the officially white churches influenced how those churches responded to the blacks in their midst.

Irons shows how, after Nat Turner's Rebellion, cautious whites withdrew some of the privileges previously allowed black Christians and began a more concerted effort to control the slaves' religious practice by means of white missionaries and white-supervised black churches associated with white churches. While many blacks still worshiped in officially white churches, increasingly blacks practiced their faith with surprising autonomy in these nominally white-supervised churches. Blacks in cities and larger towns controlled quite independent black churches, and of course many rural blacks found their spiritual homes in hush arbors, although some seemed to worship in the invisible church and the more visible biracial church as well. But however blacks related to white churches, their very numbers and sincerity forced white accommodation; the presence of black evangelicals in ways profound and minor helped shape the practice and outreach of white evangelicals. And the whites' felt need to promote black Christianity as a way of justifying the institution of slavery and refuting abolitionist charges against the failures of the white churches required that whites support the existence of black preachers, to a degree promote literacy for black ministers, and accept surprising degrees of independence for black-dominated churches. And at least in Virginia, according to Irons, the evangelical defense of slavery as a divinely supported institution did not lead to automatic support for secession.

Irons as a modern historian obviously is fully aware of the racism, the elitism, and the self-serving rhetoric common to antebellum white evangelicals, but he does not categorically dismiss their stated concerns for blacks as sheer hypocrisy or resort to reductionism when analyzing either black or white responses to Christianity. I do wish he had said more about the theology and ecclesiology of the completely independent black churches and denominations that emerged during and after the Civil War. He reports that in the antebellum churches the blacks were more raucous at outdoor baptisms and sang with more emotion, but were the emergent post-Civil War black denominations, at the heart of their faith and practice, significantly different from their predecessor antebellum white denominational homes? Not all questions are answered, but this is a carefully argued, impressively researched, persuasive book. If at times it more confirms and deepens what we knew than really offers a fundamentally revisionist view, perhaps that only makes it more convincing and valuable.