SOUL-SEARCHING

How the American church found its followers.

- BY MICHAEL LUO

From one view, the so-called separation of church and state only incentivized Christianity's creep into public and political life.

Jeremiah Moore was an irritant to the Crown. Colonial authorities in Virginia apprehended him repeatedly for being, as one magistrate put it, in 1773, a “preacher of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.” This was a true statement, but incomplete. Moore was a Baptist evangelist, admired for his knowledge of the Scriptures and for his satirical edge from the pulpit. Brook Wilensky-Lanford, the author of “A God-Shaped Nation: Five Hundred Years of Religion in America” (Atlantic Monthly Press), describes Moore as “large and gregarious, and always spoiling for a fight.” He ranged all over Fairfax County and, at one point, pastored in a place called Difficult, in between Falls Church and Leesburg. His alleged crime was preaching without the authorization of the Church of England, the colony’s official church. An exasperated judge told him, “You shall lay in jail until you rot.” Yet Moore, imprisoned in Alexandria, remained full of zeal, preaching through latticed windows to crowds outside.