Give Me That Old Time Religion!

Augusta Stone Church

It’s late summer in the Shenandoah Valley, and our family has come up the cabin for a long weekend. Our cabin is perched at the base of a hill and faces a narrow vale that’s framed by a wall of mountains. Many of the neighboring fields are full of corn, but the center of the vale lies unplowed. The uneven grass in this field is full of bumps and dents, reminding me of a thick quilt spread over unruly sheets. Tufts of darker greens, probably spring onions, lie among a lighter, smoother blend of grasses. The deadheads tall wildflowers flop here and there.

A part of the field near the road has been recently cut. Cattle have been sent here to graze. Occasionally, one of the heifers will startle and attempt to run. This is always a treat. Few things in life seem as oddly entertaining as a cow trying to bolt. Most of the time, these heifers stand by the fence and eye me dully, yellow tags protruding from their ears.

“Nice earrings, girls,” I tell them.

I follow the main road—mountains to my right now, gentle hills on my left. As I walk, I search among the wildflowers for familiar faces. Like me, many of these flowers are the descendants of immigrants. Their ancestral seeds came from overseas, stuck to farmers’ boots. The seeds found fertile ground here. They fill every crevice between the roads and fences, competing with one another for that last square inch of space. I see bursts of tender pink petals and deep purple thistles, gentle lavender and snow-white Queen Anne’s lace. I pass tiny yellow buds, six to a head, with stems as tough as wood. Against the fence, a downy purple tuft, many fingered and splayed like an open palm, lies in a bed of ivy. Beside me rests a seedpod with a four-inch spread, a king of weeds. Each delicate parachute carries a seed. I break the seedpod from the stem and hold it in the wind to make a mighty wish. The seeds dance in the air and glide slowly to the crowded floor. Which of these flowers produced this noble seed bearer? I pull up roots,

searching for clues. The root is thick and long with tiny white droplets sticky to the touch. I glance toward the cows knowingly. So there is milk above ground and milk below?

What else don’t I know about this Valley?

I have been pulling up roots lately, my roots as well as the flora. My family’s story does not resemble a neatly cut field of grass. Our story is messy and complicated—and therefore far more interesting to me. Untangling the roots of the Steele family has led me to ask the big questions: What did my ancestors think about politics, sex, and religion?

Politics, sex, and religion, oh, my! Aren’t those the very subjects our parents warned us not to talk about with strangers? But how will a stranger become a friend if we never ask them the big questions?

Of late, I have been mulling over the family’s spiritual roots. It’s impossible to know the Steeles without considering their religious views. Even so, telling someone’s religious story without telling my own hardly seems fair. So let’s begin with me.

The week before my sixteenth birthday I jumped on a bus with a bunch of friends and headed to a youth camp at Saranac Lake in the Adirondacks Mountains of New York run by a non-denominational Protestant organization known as “Young Life.” My life was never the same. In one short week away from home, I leapt across the chasm from nominal Protestant churchgoer to enthusiastic Evangelical Christian. In Evangelical Speak, I “became a Christian.” My mother highly disapproved. “Our people have never been religious,” she told me when I shared with her my new status. My father kept his own counsel, as was his habit. When I told my girlfriend, Jay, she said, “You can’t become a Christian. That’s like saying you became a girl when obviously you’re already a girl. Duh!”

Although we were not a religious family, we had faithfully attended a dry-as-toast Presbyterian Church in Richmond throughout my childhood. My parents believed that going to church would instill good morals in a child. My father had grown up attending the Presbyterian Church in Steeles Tavern, as had the previous four generations of his family before him. He took his kids to church because that’s what his people had always done.

During the church services in Richmond, I ignored the preacher, a Charlton Heston look-alike with a sonorous voice and a large mole below his right eye. I sat in the pew flipping through my lovely white leather, zippered Bible, reading the versus and looking at the pictures. I came to love the cadence of the King James version of the Bible, the poetry of verses like John 3:16. “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” I ran my fingers across the reproductions of Fra Angelico, Giotto, Rembrandt and Vermeer. We did not have much art on the wall at home, and my parents did not take us to museums, and so the pictures in my Bible were the first paintings I truly studied as a child. My conclusion was obvious: Jesus people sure knew how to paint!

Jesus people knew how to write, and paint and compose music, but I preferred to wander through the woods on my maternal grandmother’s farm. That was my real sanctuary. The wind blowing through the trees sounded like chorus of women’s voices, spiritual ladies of the wood who reassured me that they would always look out for me.

Still fond of trees!

As a child I knelt beside my bed at night and felt a beam of light connecting me to God. I can still remember how physically tangible that imaginary beam of light felt to me—and also how sad I was when it disappeared. Things grew murky as I grew older. As I approached the ripe old age of sixteen, I was longing to be made new. Made new! At sixteen! Looking back on it now it seems ridiculous, but I wanted to start over with a clean slate, to invent myself anew. So I was clearly open to being zapped.

Not every person seeking faith has a zappy first experience, but I sure did. One night at the Young Life camp, I stood alone on the dock by the lake and prayed to accept Jesus into my life. Within moments my whole body responded like I’d swallowed a warm torch. I felt physically altered, transformed. A burden had been lifted from me; my mind grew clear. I felt incredibly peaceful. Soon afterwards, I saw the aurora borealis for the first time, hanging over the camp at Saranac Lake, the wiggly pink and purple lights obviously meant to celebrate my spiritual rebirth. Everything was now on a different cosmic footing.

Like everyone else in the born-again community of believers, I did not remain at that feverish pitch of new beginnings for long. I grew up and met myself. I discovered other flawed people. God never vanished, but I grew wary of the hubris of conviction on either side of the argument for or against the existence of God—or any power larger than ourselves. I have settled on showing up with the measure of faith that I can muster at the time. I have kept open, looking, searching, and abiding. I still welcome mystery and wonder, if offered in a quiet, orderly fashion. I traded the zap for contemplation and a measure of tradition—and a cup of coffee on the back porch while communing with the trees. My search for meaning has become rather subtle. The presence of God does not manifest as a life-altering zap.

I offer my story of faith because my experience with old time, Evangelical, born-again religion provides me with a historical foothold to understand my forebears. Back when I climbed into that bus to head to Saranac Lake in the Andirondack Mountains, I had no idea I was riding on the coattails of the Great Awakening—that radical social phenomenon of early American history that had such a lasting effect on American culture. But I would be hard-pressed to describe life in the Shenandoah Valley without discussing the experience that swept across Britain and the American colonies with a series of Christian revivals.

The revivals of the Great Awakening emphasized a personal experience with Jesus. These religious awakenings followed on the heels of the Enlightenment. When I bite off the world “Enlightenment,” I feel like I have to lie down. There is simply too much to unpack from that overloaded suitcase of ideas. But let me give this a try. Once upon a time, most people relied on sensory experiences to gather truth about the world. Because they could not possibly gain all the knowledge they needed by their personal experiences, they also relied on other people’s experiences as well. To guide them throughout their lives, they drew upon traditions that grew out of personal and corporate knowledge. After the Enlightenment, certain methods of reasoning began to trump those experiences. Enlightenment thinkers emphasized a scientific and logical view of the world while downplaying other sources of information, including community and religious sources. Traditions became less important.

Rationalism shifted knowledge away from sensory-driven experiences of the average person. No longer could you sum up a new situation by generalizing about what you had already encountered in life, or even what your ancestors had encountered. The path to truth became intellectual, deductive and intuited, which lead to convictions that were often considered indisputable. (“We hold these truths to be self-evident…”) Whereas your ancestors knew they could make mistakes (people are fallible), now near-perfect answers could be obtained by the right reasoning. These convictions could change when new evidence was produced but the attitude of infallibility remained. But—here’s the bad part—that reasoning lay beyond the grasp of the average person, who was kind of stupid and had to rely on smarter, better educated people—especially people who could offer rational arguments—to figure out the truth. Elites versus your average person. Does this sound familiar?

Enter religious leaders who embraced rationalism, offering near-perfect answers to scriptural complications. In addition to academic answers for questions of scripture, they offered to validate experiential truth by stressing conversion stories based on personal experiences. Can’t trust your senses? Have to rely on people who are supposedly smarter than you? Ridiculous! Here’s a way to feel confident again and wrestle the reigns of your life out of the hands of people who style themselves as your superiors. Accepting the new tenets we offer, will provide you with a new family of believers, a tribe to replace the established communities that failed to address the uncertainties of a fast-changing world. Evangelists offered respect and love—after a bonafide conversion. They presented a higher truth (direct knowledge of the divine) and could debate temporal truths (especially scripture) using Enlightenment principles. Putting it this way, how could the Great Awakening, or some such movement, fail to sweep across America at this time?

Finding such an answer to why these amazingly powerful revivals busted through the small towns of colonial America, rushing like a mighty wind up and down the seacoast and into the hinterlands beyond the mountains, doesn’t address the possibility that the spirit of God might’ve been moving across the land.

So, there’s that!

While I cannot bring myself to pigeonhole the revivals into an easily explainable sociological event, I still want to know how they happened. Societal movements account for big changes among large swaths of individuals, but individual people do shape these movements. The Great Awakening was given specific shape by Charles and John Wesley, George Whitfield, Jonathan Edwards, and Samuel Davies of Virginia. How did these people shape my people? How did they shape me?

Charles and John Wesley

After his ordination, George Whitefield made a trip to America where he became an itinerant preacher and evangelist. After he returned to England, Whitefield’s popularity exploded. He employed a dramatic crowd-pleasing style, sometimes engaging in imagined conversations from the pulpit. His powerful voice could reach across large crowds. Because of overcrowding in church sanctuaries, he often preached outdoors. Other Anglican ministers stressed moral living while Whitefield preached conversion, claiming that personal regeneration could occur in an instant. If only converts would repent and believe! When Whitefield returned to the colonies a second time, he harnessed the power of the press for the sake of revival. He mass-marketed his message, gaining even more popularity. He sometimes preached to crowds that numbered in the tens of thousands. Throughout his ministry, he energized a once-waning Christian faith in the colonies and persuaded listeners to join local churches. He died young but not without taking over the leadership of Princeton.

George Whitefield

You have to be in the right place at the right time. Whitefield’s preaching tour came during the height of several local revivals. (I’m going to buzz by Jonathan Edwards because he remained a northerner.) In Virginia, revivals gained ground because of the preaching of Samuel Davies, a Presbyterian evangelist for the “New Light” or “New Side,” a style of faith promoted by Whitefield.

Samuel Davies became ordained as an evangelist to visit vacant congregations in a sparsely settled area in Virginia, not too far from my hometown of Richmond. He was reluctant to go. At the time, Davies was young, inexperienced, sickly, and newly married. He set out anyway. His ministry was amazingly successful, especially considering his circumstances. He lived in the saddle, visiting many congregations. Like Whitefield, Davies preaching attracted people far and wide.

“I exhort you, I entreat you, I charge you, I adjure you, I would compel you to come in.” (Davies)

Davies was known for his zeal. But

unlike other enthusiastic preachers of the Great Awakening, his zeal was tempered by great personal dignity. He could speak with commanding authority or radiate tenderness, coming across to his listeners as a sincere and humble man. By all accounts, he was a fantastic orator, renown for his use of vivid language. He was a rock star of his time. Everyone wanted to hear Samuel Davies preach.

No television. No movies. No radio. No good roads. Listening to an eloquent, educated man had to have been a rare treat.

Samuel Davies used workable similes and relatable analogies, as well as a strong rhetorical style, emotional and persuasive. He could paint a big picture of a loving God who wanted to rescue his endangered flock. If only they would let him! He exhorted with dramatic flare. He convinced individuals that their house was on fire and then offered them a spiritual ladder leading to freedom. He spoke of certain calamity coupled with an other-worldly restoration. His “almost irresistible eloquence” moved his listeners to turn their lives upside down. Thousands allowed themselves to be guided by this earnest, skinny, sincere, eloquent, commanding, young preacher.

“The first step is to convince the sinner of a need for change. In the kingdom of God, we can change from a thoughtless, ignorant, hard-hearted, rebellious sinner into a thoughtful, well-informed, tender-hearted, dutiful servant of God. Of course, the sinner may try to reform his own life. He may even flatter himself that he has changed. But alas! He finds his heart is a stubborn thing! Eventually, he will lie at the throne of grace, entirely at God's mercy. Virtues may then be planted within him that will grow slowly, although sometimes through violent struggle. The old self dies hard! But with God’s help, we can pass through a great change in temper and practice to become a new creature. The haughty, stubborn, deceitful heart can be made humble, pliable, simple, and honest, like that of a little child.” Samuel Davies, “The Nature and Author of Regeneration,” (Rearranged and paraphrased by me)

As thousands of people accepted his offer, a new fervor took hold in Virginia and began to transform traditional religious establishments. Protestants jumped ship, moving from one church to another—but mostly away from Anglican traditions. Davies became the leading voice of dissenters in Virginia. Picture this skinny, sickly, northern boy playing politics among the landed Virginia gentry. He sure had gumption!

Davies might’ve been young but he was shrewd. He played the toleration card. The Church of England called the shots in Virginia. Other denomination had to ask permission to meet, hat in hand. After arriving in Virginia, Davies registered with the colonial government and sought the protection of Britain’s Act of Toleration that provided some legal rights to English Dissenters. It helped that he was willing to go into the backwoods where Anglican clergy feared to tread. Davies came out in support of the French and Indian War, convincing dissenters—those Scots-Irish Presbyterians who weren’t naturally sympathetic to British causes—to unite with other Protestants against enemy tribes and French Catholics. Shawnee! Papists! The Anglicans who were in power in Virginia promised to open doors for Davies if backwoodsmen, including Valley sharpshooters, would please pick up a gun and fight!

Davies played a big role in paving the way toward religious toleration in America, preparing colonists for the legal separation of church and state. Davies was big on personal freedom. His religious convictions led him to place a high value on personal choice. How could anyone pick the best religion, if they didn’t have the right to choose? He championed freedom of thought for all people. Although he owned two slaves—and I offer no excuses for rationalizing the owning of people as chattel—he was a strong believer in spiritual equality, even of slaves. He ministered to thousands of darker-skinned people, advocating education for all. He baptized hundreds of slaves who were then encouraged to join his congregations where all converts had a place at the communion table. Together! He even allowed slaves to preach to these biracial congregations.

Try to make sense of our past through the lens of the present and your head spins. A slave owner who respected and listened to slaves as fellow parishioners? It’s hard to pigeonhole some people.

Not all Presbyterians embraced the emotional revivals brought to Virginia through Samuel Davies. As Samuel Davies converted the masses, the Steeles resolved to keep to the old ways.The Steeles worshiped at South Mountain Meeting House as part of one of the first Presbyterian congregations in the Valley. The Old South Mountain Cemetery houses three generations of my line of Steeles. The Steeles remained Old Siders.

The Old Side distrusted the New Side’s enthusiastic style. Religion was serious business, wagered these traditionalists. Prayer, piety, scripture, and Calvinism—that’s the ticket to proper faith and the afterlife! The New Side swung open the door to new coverts. Anglicans! The unchurched! People who couldn’t read! Old Siders worshipped as extended families within a geographical community. New Siders shared fellowship with people whose grandparents weren’t even cousins! Why would anyone want to hang out at church with a bunch of strangers?

Rev. John Craig was an Old Sider. He was ministering to my family as early as 1740. Educated at Edinburgh University, Craig was the first and only Presbyterian pastor in western Virginia in those early years. He preached his first Virginia sermon to the South Mountain congregation. Craig served an area of sixty square miles, comprising two congregations, the Tinkling Springs and my family's South Mountain congregation. He kept a busy schedule, visiting South Mountain every two months. He kept apart from New Side Presbyterians. He didn’t care much for Samuel Davies.

“The place was a new settlement, without a place of worship, or any church order, a wilderness in the proper sense, and a few Christian settlers in it with numbers of heathens traveling among us, but generally civil, though some persons were murdered by them about that time. They march about in small companies from fifteen to twenty, sometimes more or less. They must be supplied at any house they call at, with victuals, or they become their own stewards and cooks, and spare nothing they choose to eat and drink.”

(Craig from Waddell’s Annals, p.40)

The South Mountain congregation built a log structure for meetings. Some of his congregants carried long rifles to protect against Indian attacks. Like most churches in early America, the congregation sang metrical psalms from the Scottish Psalter. A man stood up in front of the congregation to “parcel out the lines.” He’d sing a line from the psalms and then the congregation would repeat the same line. When pressed to sing one of the newfangled hymns introduced by New Side evangelists like Samuel Davies, the Old Side Presbyterians of the South Mountain Meeting House adamantly refused to oblige their fellow congregates. The church split apart. Old Providence and New Providence churches emerged from the ashes.

The more traditional Presbyterians like my family continued to worship at the log building known as Old Providence. When the congregation outgrew the log structure, a stone building was constructed. To build the new stone church, young girls carried sand for the church in pack horses from the South River. Men walked beside the young women carrying guns. The congregation sent butter by packhorse to Williamsburg to raise cash for materials they couldn’t find locally, which they purchased from Philadelphia. The thick walls of the church were made of limestone blocks quarried from the property. Aunt Mildred wrote about this in her book about Mt. Carmel Church.

Old Side Calvinist embraced the idea of the chosen few, which stressed the sovereignty of God. Old Siders were big on baptism and communion. Craig spent a lot of time baptizing babies. Communion could take days. Each member who’d been living a good, Christian life since the last communion received a token from the elders with the initials of the church. Only those who could present this token at the communion table were able to partake.

Augusta Stone Presbyterian Church Cemetery

The Steele's small congregation included the families of Cyrus McCormick, who invented the reaper—a mechanical harvesting device that changed the world. (Also attending was the family of J. E. Gibbs, who invented an early sewing machine.) The stone church was built on land purchased from Patrick and Susanna Hall, Cyrus McCormick’s maternal grandparents. A small additional window was supposedly added so that Cyrus McCormick’s mother, Mary Ann, could have more light to see her hymnal. Mary Ann is remembered for her devotion and diligence in educating her children in the way of the old faith, but she also kept peacocks because they were pretty and rode her carriage at breakneck speeds through winding country roads. A truly spirited woman! Her Scots-Irish neighbors judged her for her frivolities. I hope the Steeles weren’t among them.

According to Craig, the people of the Augusta Stone Church (the new meeting house) “were fewer in numbers, and much lower as to their worldly circumstances, but a good-natured, prudent, governable people…” He had no trouble with them. Tinkling Springs, on the other hand, was a more prosperous congregation whose leaders were stingy and couldn't agree about anything. History belongs to the writers who faithfully record their version of history.

A minister usually farmed or ran a school since his salary was so meager. Craig farmed. He walked the five miles from his home to the stone church, preached from ten to twelve, ate a cold lunch with his parishioners, and preached again from 1 pm to sunset. He must’ve had amazing vocal cords. When preaching, Davies used the old-fashioned “exhaustive method” of fifty-five divisions and sub-divisions. I would have died on the spot! This style of preaching would provide a good reason for any great awakening. The children enjoyed the noon hour since they couldn't play with their friends during the week. What? One hour a week of play? Young people also courted during the noon hour—but in front of everyone! Since heating coffee on a Sunday was considered a no-no and drinking whiskey was no big deal, Aunt Mildred writes that ministers got themselves into trouble by having a little too much whiskey on occasion. Was she was referring to Rev. Craig? I wish I knew.

Rev. William Meade tells a story about Rev. John Craig that at first glance seems to have little to do with the Valley, but which has opened a squeaky door into my history, surprising me with a sidelong glance at the people with whom my family associated. If nothing else, the story has given me a more complex view of Craig, shifting him from a stodgy old fellow to a citizen of the world.

Around 1763, after the French and Indian War, an educated Algerian man named Selim found his way to Augusta County. He was discovered by a local farmer while hunting in deep woods. Salim was emaciated and scantily clad with abrasions all over his body. Another generous neighbor invited the Algerian into his home and tended him for several months. Selim quickly taught himself English so that he could tell his tale.

Selim from Algeria was born to wealthy parents who sent him to school in Constantinople. While returning to the city after visiting his parents, he was taken prisoner aboard a Spanish privateer (a private ship commissioned to attack enemy vessels). Algiers had long had a habit of attacking Spanish ships and enslaving Catholics. The attack on Selim's ship was payback. At the time of his abduction, the Spanish were allied with France and so his captors put him aboard a French ship that carried him to New Orleans. After being traded around, Selim ended up as a prisoner of the Shawnee in Ohio. Somehow he escaped and “set out on an arduous journey through an unknown mountainous wilderness of several hundred miles.” He was ready to give up when the Virginia hunter found him. After hearing Selim’s story, his kind-hearted host lent him a horse and took him to visit the neighbors.

Struck by the appearance of Rev. John Craig, Selim asked to be invited to his home where he confided to the pastor that he’d dreamt of Craig. In his dream, which was a nightmare full of death, Selim imagined an old man standing alone on a prairie telling everyone how to cross the dangerous land. As a result of this dream, Selim told Craig that he, a Muslim, wanted to study Christianity. Since he already knew Greek, Craig gave Selim a Greek Testament. Two weeks later, Craig baptized Selim.

Against Craig’s advice, Selim returned home to Algeria to tell his parents about his new faith. His parents disowned him. Salim returned to Augusta County a broken man with an addled mind. No one could help him regain his sensibilities. He drifted back to Williamsburg where he’d gained friends through a letter of introduction from Rev. Craig before he left for his parents’ home. Because of his gentlemanly manners and ability to read Greek, Selim was embraced as a gentleman and considered a person of rank. He was a constant visitor at Rosewell, one of the most elaborate houses in the colonies, home to Governor Page, a member of the American Congress. Page commissioned the eminent portraitist Charles Willson Peale to paint Selim, depicting him dressed as a Native American—go figure—with a straw hat and blanket around his shoulder. The painting was lost during the Civil War but a period engraving exists.

Selim the Algerine

I keep tweaking my picture of the Steele’s world. Backwoods gentlemen? Stodgy Old Sider Presbyterians who reviled hymns? Slaveholders? Unschooled? Educated? A community that showed kindness to an exotic stranger?

Craig sheds light on who my ancestors might've been. He embraced Selim. That tells me something about Craig. The gentlemen of Williamsburg considered Craig a worthy witness of Selim’s character, not an uneducated backcountry parson. More clues to decipher. Williamsburg was a cosmopolitan center at the time, but the world also came to the Valley in the form of a Muslim man—and French Catholics, German Lutherans, and a host of other folks. Citizens of the Valley were also citizens of the world.

In the end, Craig couldn’t stop evangelical revivals from spreading through the Valley, not even to his own people. Presbyterian congregations took on new life through revivals. The newfangled hymns made the rounds. Over time, congregants embraced faith in new ways. They admired oratory skills. Wanted mental stimulation. Organized churches around missions. Expected churches to grow in numbers. They began to insist on sermons that wouldn’t bore them to death.

Just now I clicked on the Facebook page for Mt Carmel Church, my dad’s church as a child, where I found a video of a recent worship service with the preacher saying, “I bring an invitation this morning, not from me but from Jesus Christ…(who) extends this invitation to all who are sweating it out.” The tradition of the Great Awakening in the Valley is alive and well.

Rev. James Waddell, a New Side evangelists who’d been encouraged by Samuel Davies to join the ministry, took over the pulpit at Tinkling Springs. Waddell was educated at the famous “Log College” in Pennsylvania. When the colonists began clamoring for preachers, the Old Side Presbyterians refused to lower their educational standards. Since there were no suitable schools available in the mid-Atlantic states, the New Side evangelists encouraged pastors to create training schools. Some of the graduates of the Log College became trustees of Princeton University. Waddell was a brilliant student.

Tall and dignified with blue eyes and a fair complexion, Waddell spoke with unusual eloquence. “Under his preaching, audiences were irresistibly and simultaneously moved, like the wind-shaken forest.” (Waddell's Annals) Patrick Henry considered both Davies and Waddell to be great orators. James Madison reputedly claimed that Waddell spoiled him “for all other preaching.” Waddell lost his eyesight and became known as "the blind preacher."

Waddell’s most famous sermon occurred at Steeles Tavern during the Revolution. Valley men had been reluctant to leave their families unprotected to join the war effort. Scots-Irish Presbyterians weren’t inclined to join tidewater elites and fight the British anyway. Fellow Valley resident, William Campbell, bother-in-law of Patrick Henry, admired for leading his men to victory at the Battle of Kings Mountain, was sent to scour the Valley for recruits. “Shout like hell and fight like devils!” he’d told the Kings Mountain men. That story had to impress the Scots-Irish of the Valley who enjoyed shouting and fighting. When Campbell assembled his recruits at Steeles Tavern before heading south to confront Cornwallis, Rev. Waddell obliged the crowd by giving a rousing sermon that stirred the soldiers. David Steele joined up as Waggoner and headed south to join in the Battle of Guilford where the British knocked out a chunk of his skull. He survived. David and his wife, Polly, are now buried in the Stonewalled Cemetery, the oldest of the two cemeteries at Old Providence Church. Twenty-four Revolutionary War soldiers are buried in the cemetery. A good number of them heard Waddell that day.

A mix of theologies ended up in the Valley but the Episcopal church developed a bad rap. They chose the wrong side by proxy since Virginia Anglicans were in power before the Revolution. They were too top-down in leadership for the times and too Catholic in sentiment and practice. Lutherans retained many liturgical practices, which bugged the Calvinist who rejected Papist ways. Lutherans believed that salvation didn’t depend on merit but grace alone and that anyone could receive that grace. John Wesley, one of the key players in the Great Awakening, rejected predestination, which served to open the door for new converts, a timely shift in his thinking. The descendants of the early pioneers, who spread out across the country trying to escape their past, might’ve been searching for an easier yoke. Methodist and Baptist grew exponentially after the Great Awakening. Anabaptist immigrated to the northern part of the Valley. When we lived in Harrisonburg as newlyweds, Brian and I attended a Mennonite Church. I’ve seldom met such open-minded people grounded in tradition.

After three generations, my family left the South Mountain congregation that worshiped at Old Providence Church (Augusta Stone Church) and joined Mt Carmel Presbyterian Church in Steeles Tavern. Old and New Providence members, reconciled now after the old schism about hymns, built a church together. They began meeting in a grove of oak trees, tall and beautiful, on land donated by the Steeles. (In Britain, early Christian churches were sometimes built within ancient groves once used by druids, but I doubt my family realized that their Celtic forebears had worshiped in glens.) For the next five generations, my line of Steeles called Mt. Carmel home. They sang hymns accompanied by an organ, and hosted outreach programs, adopting some New Side tendencies without going completely hog wild. Tall trees still grace the property at Mt. Carmel. A beautiful graveyard lies in the back.

Eight generations of Steeles attended a total of two churches in the Valley. That’s all! Two! From the time of David and Janet Steele, the first immigrants to the Valley in the 1740s, until my grandmother, Edith, died in 1987, the Steeles occupied a total of two graveyards. Two! I have no idea where I will be buried. I’ve attended dozens of churches. In four different states, I’ve spent time worshipping in Presbyterian, Mennonite, Baptist, Methodist, Episcopalian, and non-denominational churches, while half the time, I've been attached to no church at all. What’s up with that?

Walter and Irene Steele Searon's family: my grandmother, Edith, bottom row third from left

I have letters filled with religious observations from various ancestors and family connections. David and Molly Steele lost three children to diphtheria before the eldest child turned twelve. Molly lost her husband, David five years later, possibly from grief. Her family sent her letters telling her to buck up. God is good, etc. She must’ve read them graciously since she didn’t tear them up—as I might’ve done. Walter Searson taught Sunday school. His wife, Irene Steele Searson, kept a travel journal where she jotted notes about sermons. From all accounts, Irene doesn’t come across as a "nice church lady." She had attitude. I remind myself that as a child she lost three siblings and then her father died, leaving her to care for an invalid mother.

I would not call the Steeles a pious family. They seem to have been all over the place in terms of what the church meant to them. Some embraced the Great Awakening, and some grew tired of the false promises and failed emotion-driven path to okay-ness. Who can withstand such fervor? Others sidestepped the whole show or left the church to embrace secular rationalism. Some couldn’t believe in any religion, or just wanted to have a good time. My father certainly never took to religion. Aunt Jayne told me that the preaching at Mt Carmel didn’t resonate with him. He didn’t like the pastor. Even so, he raised his children to be churchgoers. We attended a Presbyterian Church in Richmond because that’s what you do with children. You take them to church! Because the church will help mold them into good-enough people. Dad never considered I might one day find myself at a revival-style church camp and be prompted to accept Jesus into my heart. I’m sure that news came as a shock to him.

But I never asked him! We never talked about God or the church! I knew that his back hurt after sitting in a pew. I knew he stopped attending church when his kids left home. I gathered that he was uncomfortable with my sudden slide into overt religiosity, but he never actually told me. He kept his own counsel about most subjects. He wasn’t the sort of father who pushed his children in certain directions. He mostly watched. He was a good observer. He’d seen pushy parenting styles in the Valley, perhaps among his kin, and that kept him from being too intrusive. But maybe I tell myself this story to excuse his restrained parenting style.

After I reached adulthood, I wish I’d asked my father what he thought about politics, sex, and religion. I might’ve been surprised by his answers. The question itself would have amused him. Politics, sex, and religion? I can see his eyes dance as I throw out the line. He would’ve given me that quick here-and-then-gone-again smile, shrugged his thin shoulders and flashed his long fingers into the air.

Then he would have answered me.

I've heard that a true mystic is both humble and compassionate, for she knows that she does not know. I seem to know less with each passing year. My friend, Kathy, keeps reminding me that one day my grandkids will appreciate the research that I'm doing about my family. If so, what should I say to them about religion? Should I tell them that at my age, I'm not looking for a great awakening? That I prefer small steps and quiet corners? I will tell them this: God is wilder and weirder than anyone can imagine. You may be uncertain. Try to pick a good path and walk steady. Expect to fall. Brush your knees off and try again. Let love spill out when possible. Abide.

And this: You're not alone. You've never been alone. You belong.

This is part of your story.

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Dad with our family: me, my brother, Mark, and my vivacious mother, Cora

"Give Me That Old Time Religion"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpwXEdYM10c

Bibliography

Bushman, Richard. Great Awakening: Documents on the Revival of Religion, 1740-1745. University of North Carolina Press, 1989

Davies, Samuel. "The Nature and Author of Regeneration" (paraphrased by Barbara Lewis for this blog)

Foote, William Henry. Sketches of Virginia, Historical and Biographical, 1850, and Sketches of Virginia, Historical and Biographical, Second Series, 1855.

Greene, Jack P. Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.

Hofstadter, Richard. America at 1750: A Social Portrait. New York: Knopf, 1971

Nolls, Mark. The Rise of Evangelicalism: the age of Edwards, Whitefield, and the Wesleys. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2003.

Peyton, J. Lewis. "History of Augusta County, Virginia."

1882

Waddell, Jos. A. ANNALS OF AUGUSTA COUNTY, VIRGINIA, FROM 1726 TO 1871. Staunton, Va: C. Russell Caldwell, 1902

http://www.roanetnhistory.org/waddellsannals.html

Internet

Katharine L. Brown,"John Craig (1709–1774)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia, 2006

Tinkling Spring Meeting House and Augusta Stone Meeting House (Fort Defiance)

http://sites.rootsweb.com/~vaaugust/photo.html

https://www.nprov.org/history.html

https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/davies_samuel_1723-1761

http://oldprovidencechurch.org/aboutus.html

https://providencepc.wordpress.com/news/history/

https://www.jstor.org/stable/23323653?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents

https://www.mygenealogyaddiction.com/post/historical-sketches-of-montgomery-county-pennsylvania

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Providence_Stone_Church

http://littlebitsofhistory.blogspot.com/2011/12/old-providence-church.html

https://www.history.org/almanack/life/religion/religionva.cfm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Side%E2%80%93New_Side_Controversy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Log_College

http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Craig_John_1709-1774

http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Craig_John_1709-1774

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=wu.89064445497&view=1up&seq=14

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