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.ÿþto determine the numbers of churchgoers and, even more elusive, the extentof individual religious commitment.The BaptizedFor Anglicans everywhere, baptism conferred membership in Christ s ChurchUniversal the mystical, visible and invisible body of believers, dead, alive,and yet to be born rather than affiliation with a specific local congregation.In the opening prayer of the baptism liturgy, the minister called upon theAlmighty to   mercifully look upon this Child, wash him, and sanctifie himwith the holy Ghost, that he being delivered from thy Wrath, may be receivedinto the Arke of Christs Church.  8 Arguably then, any baptized eighteenth-century Virginian would have responded affirmatively to the question   are youa member of the Church? To determine membership as an eighteenth-century Anglican might haveunderstood the term, one would need to tally the baptized, an effort which, asobserved earlier, immediately encounters major obstacles.The few survivingparish registers suffer from incompleteness, lack of standardized entry proce-dures, and errors in copying and recopying from that century to the present.Hope of a representative sample is illusory.But limitations do not precludeclosely examining extant registers for clues offered to the questions of mem-bership and affiliation.Most tantalizing is the fact that these registers indicate a very high rate ofbaptism among the white population.White Virginians from all walks of lifeand throughout the period routinely had their infants and children baptized.William Douglas, St.James Northam Parish parson, recorded between 105 and199 baptisms each year in the two decades immediately preceding the Revo-lution for an annual average of 141.9 Estimates based on tithables put Gooch-land County s white population at around 1,800 in 1755 (614 white tithablesout of a total of 1,549 tithables).10 If the proportion of white tithables heldsteady at 37 percent, then the white population in 1775 would have been inthe neighborhood of 2,550.11 Applying what is estimated about general whitebirth rates, one concludes that annual baptisms nearly approximated annualwhite births.12 Here again is evidence contesting the traditional portrayal ofeighteenth-century Virginians as disdainful of ceremony and indifferent tothe claims of institutional religion.What seventeenth-century law mandatedbecame customary in the century preceding the Revolution.13.Adherents 243 [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]

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