Scully Awarded Brewer Prize

Dr. Randolph Scully’s recent book, Religion and the Making of Nat Turner’s Virginia: Baptist Community and Conflict, 1740-1840, has been awarded the Frank S. and Elizabeth D. Brewer Prize for best first book in church history by the American Society of Church History.

The book reconstructs the dynamics of the biracial, evangelical religious world that emerged in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Virginia and argues that this context is essential to understanding meanings of the antebellum South’s most shocking slave uprising. In doing so, it posits a model of evangelicalism’s rise in the South that emphasizes the persistent conflict within the movement about the appropriate worldly implications of Christian concepts of faith, conversion, fellowship, and authority.