The Baptism Of Early Virginia Summary

Rebecca Goetz in her book The Baptism of Early Virginia examines how Virginia planters manipulated their Christianity to create an idea of race. This new ideology “effectively re-imagined what it meant to be Christian, but they also invented an entirely new concept- what it meant to be white.”(Goetz, 2) Skin color became the prominent factor in what Goetz calls “hereditary heathenism,” which she defines as the permanent incompatibility of Africans and Native Americans with Christianity. This process of restricting baptism to white colonists laid the foundation for an ideology of racism which dominated Virginia society by the end of the seventeenth century. The ever present theme of this book is change, an evolution that swept Virginia from …show more content…
She recognizes the potential danger and innate limitations in relying heavily on judicial proceedings; specifically, that those individuals that end up in court may not be representative of society as a whole. (Goetz, 9) However, she believes that by using these records she can trace how changes in the meaning of vocabulary including; Christian, heathen, pagan, infidel, and Negro reflect an evolution of Virginia planter’s racial ideology. Her research and citing of primary sources is admirable for scholarship of this length; however, a pragmatic reader may be concerned about what may most generously be described as a noticeable lack of secondary source citations. Although, it should be noted the text of this book does not suffer from these omissions as the author clearly demonstrates her expertise of the topic, and the section located prior to the Index titled “Essay on Sources” is particularly helpful for young scholars looking to research seventeenth century Virginia. (Lindman, …show more content…
There are times when Goetz falls short of a convincing conclusion. In her review, Lindman criticizes Goetz’s ambiguity in defining the term ‘white,’ adding that “Goetz could have done more to examine the ways in which white privilege, as much as red and black subordination, was constructed through religion in early Virginia.” (Lindman, 1518) In addition, population totals for enslaved Africans is a noticeable omission throughout the book, and as a result she drastically overestimates the importance of African slave labor to the Virginia economy in the mid-seventeenth century. Her contention that planters withheld Christianity from African slaves out of a paralyzing fear of losing their labor force implies that Africans constituted a significant percentage of available workers at the time, which the current historiographical evidence does not