"In this study, historian Edward L. Bond provides an inside view of religion in America's first colony. Focusing or religion as various expressions of individual and corporate relationship with the divine, the author gives the reader a picture of religion and society in colonial Virginia. In the process, he clarifies our understandings of Virginia's established Anglican Church, discusses the theology and devotional practices of the colonists, and explains the role of religion in colonial polity.

Such an approach allows the reader to see both the conservative and progressive elements in the way the earliest colonists in Virginia defined their individual and corporate relationship with God." "Throughout Bond's analysis, he shows that by the end of the seventeenth century Virginians, though viewing themselves as Anglicans, nonetheless gradually discovered that they were defending an ecclesiastical institution much different from the one they left behind in England."--BOOK JACKET.