The Mason Spirit

Randolph Ferguson Scully, Assistant Professor, History

In Religion and the Making of Nat Turner’s Virginia (University of Virginia Press, August 2008), Scully portrays a new interpretation of the rise of evangelical Christianity in the early American South by reconstructing the complex, biracial history of the Baptist movement in southeastern Virginia. Focusing on this region and its religious history, the book highlights the subject of intense national scrutiny of the 1831 revolt led by the enslaved preacher and prophet Nat Turner. Scully explains how the conflict of interrelated ideas about race, slavery, household, family, and patriarchy that constituted the state’s social order took over and shaped Virginia.