Page 19 - MABE GENEALOGY

The Mabe genealogy line, from England (1600’s) to the United States (1700’s), Virginia and North Carolina.

Early Religion in Virginia

Church of England in Virginia

Contributed by Edward L. Bond, a professor of history at Alabama A&M University.

The Church of England was the established church of the Virginia colony. It
came to Virginia as early as 1607, when the first English
colonists settled Jamestown, but was not formally established by the House
of Burgesses until 1619. Religious life in Virginia reflected the economic,
geographic, and political circumstances of the colony. People from all
segments of society attended Anglican services (although slaves often
worshipped in segregated galleries or attended a separate service). Because
Virginians tended to settle in plantations scattered throughout the
countryside rather than in towns, parishes were typically larger than those in
England. This made it difficult for those who lived in outlying areas to make
the weekly trip to their parish's main church. Instead, most parishes
maintained multiple "chapels of ease" to accommodate far-flung
parishioners. The Church of England in Virginia was subject to laws passed
by the General Assembly and, unlike in England, was supervised at the
parish level by vestries (boards of local parishioners). In Virginia a vestry
had the authority to choose—or refuse to induct—a minister for its parish.
This led to a tense relationship between the congregation and the clergy. The
status of the Church of England in Virginia improved late in the seventeenth
century, after the bishop of London appointed Minister James Blair to
represent his interests in the colony, and on the eve of the American
Revolution (1775–1783), the church was as powerful as it had ever been.

Background

When English men and women of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth
centuries began to establish colonies in North America, they, like other
Europeans, took their national churches with them to the New World. For
English settlers this meant the Church of England, a peculiar form of
Protestantism that had emerged out of the English Reformation. This hybrid
church blended elements of both Protestantism and Roman Catholicism,
retaining an episcopal form of church government (a church governed by
bishops) and combining reformed Protestant theology with the
Christological cycle of the Roman Catholic liturgical calendar—purged of
some of its Marian festivals and celebrations of saints days. (While
historians used to claim that the church's theology borrowed heavily from

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