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WILLIAMSBURG, VA: Ancient Anglican Virginia & Pocahontas's Baptismal Font

WILLIAMSBURG, VA: Ancient Anglican Virginia & Pocahontas's Baptismal Font

By Mark Tooley
https://juicyecumenism.com/2015/12/01/ancient-anglican-virginia-pocohontass-baptismal-font/
December 1, 2015

Bruton Parish Church in Colonial Williamsburg is restored to its pre-Revolutionary War appearance. Mirroring colonial society, there is a canopied throne up front for the Virginia colonial governor, whose enclosed pew box also seated the colony's privy council. Colonial gentry had pew boxes also up front. Behind them were the merchant class, behind whom were poorer whites. Blacks, slave and free, sat in a balcony. Another balcony held students from the nearby College of William and Mary, which included Indian Christian converts. The third balcony held their professors, who were all ordained in the Church of England. Church vestrymen, also typically gentry, had special pews in front. Men and women sat on opposite sides of the church. The Geneva-style pulpit, from which the preacher expounded, loomed over all.

This restoration was done in the 1930s thanks to John D. Rockefeller, Jr. But there is an original piece in the sanctuary, older than the building itself, and in fact older than Virginia. It is a carved stone baptismal font, moved to the Williamsburg church in the 1700s from the church at nearby Jamestown, built not long after the colony's founding in 1607, the first permanent church in English-speaking America.

It is believed this baptismal font came from an English church and could be 500 years or more old. So it perhaps was part of Catholic rites before the Church of England was formed and Protestantized. Across many centuries its waters have baptized many thousands, of different races, rich and poor, slave and free. In colonial times, each person was assigned a strict role in a fairly static hierarchy. But in the moment of baptism, each person was equal before God.

Pocahontas, the daughter of a great Indian chief, was very possibly baptized from this font at the Jamestown church. She was perhaps the first Indian convert to English Christianity. She later married a colonist, bore a child, went to England, met the King and Queen, and died at age 19, her short life immortalized, and her many descendants numbering among Virginia's most illustrious families. The scene of her baptism is portrayed in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda.

The baptismal font likely witnessed the creation of America's first elected legislature (one of the world's oldest), which met in the Jamestown church. Besides famine and disease that nearly killed the new colony, the font survived the great Indian massacres of 1622 and 1642, which each wiped out over 20% of the colony. It survived Bacon's Rebellion, which destroyed Jamestown. The font was present when Virginia's legislature, having been dismissed by the royal governor, met in the church for prayer in the days leading to the American Revolution. Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Henry and other Founding Fathers sat in its presence.

Virginia's capital moved to Richmond, but the baptismal font stayed in Williamsburg, surviving the Civil War, with at least one battle fought around it. Most of America's presidents have worshipped in the sanctuary before the font across the last 225 years. The font remains active.

Bruton Parish is no longer segregated by class, office, gender or race, nor is surrounding society. The baptismal font, which always represented equal worth before God, has largely prevailed. It is fashionable to disdain the past as meanly oppressive and unjust. And in many ways it of course was.

But embedded within the fabric of ancient stratified, Anglican Virginia was always the reforming and subversive message of human dignity and equality for all persons created in God's image. Europeans, Indians and Africans all were baptized from this font. No matter where they sat in the segregated church, all were the same in baptism, recorded in the church's baptism roll and, presumably, more permanent heavenly records as well.

The baptismal font at Bruton Parish is a silent sentinel, and active instrument, to half a millennium of momentous events, spiritual and temporal. It has witnessed a providential reordering of society, likely starting in a Medieval English village, and operative through 400 years in Virginia. Its early communicants were a few dozen Elizabethan adventurers struggling to survive hunger, illness and disorder. Its more recent surrounding worshippers have been the denizens of a global power whose tools of political, military and economic reach are in proximity. Malaria infested mosquitos once buzzed around it. Now it is surrounded and protected by advanced technology.

As sturdy as ever, the stone, weathered baptismal font sits unadorned and unidentified near the altar of Bruton Parish. It is mostly victorious, and its work continues.

END

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