Virginia Magazine of History and Biography
Volume 109 / Number 2
ABSTRACT:
The Spiritual Fruits of Revolution: Disestablishment and the Rise of Virginia Baptists
- By Charles F. Irons, pp. 159–86
When the Revolution came to Virginia, Baptists in that colony already faced a battery of internal crises. The combination
of internecine feuds and the disruptions of war threatened to undo the accomplishments of colonial preachers, who had
established three-score churches with approximately 5,000 full members by 1775. Creed-oriented, liturgical Regular
Baptists descending from Pennsylvania's Philadelphia Association clashed with the more charismatic, anti-creedal
separates from North Carolina's Sandy Creek Association. Separate Baptists, accounting for roughly two-thirds of
Virginia's Baptists, could not agree among themselves, either. John Waller led several hundred of his brethren to
form an independent, Arminian church in 1775, and the Separates excommunicated popular preachers Jeremiah
Walker and Dutton Lane in the same year.
By the end of the war, however, enterprising denominational leaders -- especially pastors from the Richmond-based
Dover Association -- had harnessed the popular feeling against Britain to bring unity to their fractured communion and
to advertise their churches to American patriots. Baptists joined together during the contest to petition the state government
for increased religious freedom. Citing the need to continue such legislative action following the war, men from the Dover
Association pushed their coreligionists across the commonwealth to form new, statewide agencies. From positions on the
General Committee of Baptist Associations and its successor, the General Meeting of Correspondence, the Dover
men -- particularly William Webber, Reuben Ford, Robert Semple, and John Courtney -- worked for far more than
political ends. They took advantage of their position of leadership to heal wounds within the Baptist fellowship, resolve
doctrinal controversies, and advertise Baptist churches as patriotic alternatives to the nascent Episcopal Church.
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