A Cautious Enthusiasm

"Historians of religion in the early modern era have produced monumental schiolarship on Catholicism, Protestantism, and, wedged in between, Anglicanism. These great contending Christian traditions were top-down movers of nations and empires. Only recently, however, have scholars discerned bottom-up forces of Christian spirituality which were not parties to Reformation struggles but instead were localized folk movements shaping families and communities in a more intimate way. Samuel C. Smith's discovery of pietism and evangelicalism in colonial South Carolina joins the late Rhys Isaac's path breaking work on Baptists and Methodist in Virginia and Daniel Thorp's on North Carolina Moravians in demonstrating the social efficacy of primitive Christianity in the colonial South. The influx of piety into the colony, Professor Smith insightfully suggests, was a liberating experience but also a troubling one. The Spirit that these believers found to be a palpable reality offered them comfort in the form of caution in their politics, in their ethical deliberations, and in their troubled yearning for a safe and sanctified slavery. With curiosity and insight, the author probes the psyches, consciences, and devotional disciplines of all sorts of people. His investigation moves wherever the irrepressible evidence of spirituality leads him, often across boundaries of authority, wealth, gender, race, and sensibility. In this book, we visit a colonial South Carolina notable for its authenticity."—Robert M. Calhoon, author of Political Moderation in America's First Two Centuries

"A carefully considered exploration of the pliant, bridge-building spiritualities of evangelical dissenters in the colonial-Revolutionary Carolina Low Country, as influenced by Continental pietist enthusiasm and Roman Church mysticism — tracing this influence upon lay Anglicans in the established power structure, Smith contributes a valuable new dimension to the history of the Awakening."—Kevin Lewis, University of South Carolina

"Smith is thoroughly convincing in demonstrating the flexibility of an Anglican evangelicalism rooted in pietism and Catholic mysticism within South Carolinian elite society."—Gregory A. Michna, Books on the South