Did “evangelical dissent” actually change in any significant manner the social, racial, and political landscape of once-Anglican Virginia by the end of the eighteenth century? Attempting to answer this question, Jewel Spangler has placed the rise of the Baptists in the center of a debate that has been going on now since the 1970s. Spangler ably summarizes the conditions of British North American Anglicanism in the Old Dominion before turning to the challenge posed by the Presbyterians at mid-century. She argues that the Virginia Anglican parishes by the 1760s had become far more successful than at any time in Virginia's past, in part because a good number of parish ministers were either homegrown or Scottish imports. The number of English parsons declined overall, and a fair degree of mutual understanding characterized clerical-lay relationships at the parish level. Even outside the relatively well-paying Tidewater parishes, Anglicanism as a “way of life” apparently reached a significant part of the colony's population. Although she knows the literature on the devotional life of Anglicans, one might wish that she could have provided a bit more insight into whether sermons and devotional literature such as the famous Virginia edition of the Whole Duty of Man actually made a difference in deepening the attractions of the English Church among Virginians. Spangler knows that little success attended Anglican forays into the religious life of enslaved Africans (27–28), and she wisely concludes that the rise of the Presbyterians did nothing to challenge prevailing social or racial conventions in Virginia, in either the Tidewater or the Piedmont (71–75).

What, then, does one make of the rise of the early Baptist dissent? Spengler's research turns to this question by devoting three chapters of the book to the rise of the dissenting evangelicals in the decade and a half before the outbreak of the Revolution. She then turns in a final summary to the “second generation” whose members absorbed and made their own some aspects of the revolution's rhetoric in favor of egalitarian social relations before they themselves became increasingly conventional Protestants in much, but not all, of their social relationships and notions about Christianity in the decades following the war of American independence.

Baptist dissent, Spangler argues, took aim only at the public hierarchical structures in church and society. She sensibly concludes that in household and meetinghouse management the Baptists remained firm supporters of “the subordination of women,” treating “female members as decidedly unequal persons in the church” (152–153). Still, in her assessment of the evidence and the work of previous historians, she attempts to steer her position between the shoals of those who have seen the Baptists as progenitors of “egalitarian, democratic, and inclusive” evangelicalism, and others who conclude that Baptist success was purchased at the price of accommodation to “planter rule, patriarchy, and slavery” (197). In the end, however, Spangler's evidence compels her to conclude that Baptists may have aided and abetted the value placed on the political value of virtuous behavior and an accompanying uneasiness with conspicuously aristocratic private or public display. But, on balance, these mostly “yeomen planters” (257 n. 6) maintained and perpetuated social and racial inequality in Virginia society (228–229). Spangler knows both her secondary literature and the primary sources of this story, and the book provides a real service in bringing most recent research to bear in support of her position. Oddly enough, however, her concentration on the religious source material causes her to refer only occasionally to the other center of local life in Virginia, the county courts. She does notice occasionally that Baptists served as justices (264 n. 73; 259 n. 20), but a closer examination of this key index of social and political power might have helped her argue even more persuasively that Baptists were fairly quickly absorbed into the prevailing structures and matrices of power in this agricultural society.

Spangler knows that Virginia was also home to non-Anglophone Protestants, but her acknowledgement of German speakers appears to be confined to the Shenandoah Valley communities. As a result she misses the rather important fact that the earliest petition for exemption from the compulsory support of the Anglican Church (22 October 1776) came from the German Lutherans in (present-day) Madison County, an especially significant vote of dissent from a Protestant group that had historically enjoyed rather close ties with the established Church. These are, however, minor quibbles that do little to detract from the power of her argument. One might have wished for a more explicit reminder from her that her research seems to confirm once again the familiar argument put forth by historians such as Jackson Turner Main on the expansion of political power in post-Revolutionary states among a broader spectrum of white smallholders. If this study does not fundamentally revise our understanding of Protestantism in late eighteenth-century Virginia, it nonetheless shows just how quickly Baptist dissent, and indeed other forms of evangelical Protestantism, adjusted to the prevailing economic, racial, and social norms of the emerging new states. For that reason alone, hers is an important study not only for church historians, but for anyone interested in pondering the question of how much culture and convention continue to shape, and quite often co-opt, religious conviction. Spangler's conclusions illustrate once again in this particular North American Protestant context how difficult it seems to be for believers, no matter how much they deem themselves agents of change, or radical critics of those who have previously succumbed to compromise and accommodation, to transform economic, social, and racial self-interest, even in themselves.