Thomas J. Little. The Origins of Southern Evangelicalism

This volume joins a steady stream of historical studies that examine Anglo-American evangelical religion. Unlike most, however, Thomas J. Little's book focuses on the early American southern settler colony of Carolina. As the subtitle suggests, the author intends by “evangelical” to denote the emergence of revivalism in this region. The context for Little's account is the range of conflicts among European (mostly English) settlers fighting for the established status of the Anglican Church and the resistance this drew from a variety of other Protestants seeking to secure their own foothold of legitimate religious power in the region. Little's work features five substantial chapters and a brief conclusion. In his first chapter, Little explains that religious authorities prioritized the recruitment of more white settlers to the colony in the late 1600s. Many were drawn from the Caribbean islands of Barbados and Bermuda, and others came from colonies to the north of Carolina. All brought with them a variety of Protestant traditions that exacerbated a growing scale of religious competition. In chapter 2, Little discusses how this increasing variety of religious groups motivated the most powerful settlers to establish the Church of England as the official religion of the settler polity. Rather than solving the tensions of competing grabs for authority, however, this inspired a vigorous wave of dissent, largely in the form of anticlericalism. Little clearly accounts for how this opposition, moreover, helped sustain the growth of multiple Christian sects in the colony.

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