Mr. Kern is right - as the Frederick county shows, people were being asked to deny a central Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation as proof of their protestantism.  You don't have to scratch very deeply in 17th or 18th-century English politics to find contention over the issue of Roman Catholicism.  The whole revolution of 1688-89 and all of its implications for subsequent American history and constitutionalism turned in large measure on the need to find and justify a Protestant monarch with Stuart lines (William of Orange) after James II inconveniently had a son and heir who would be raised in the Catholic faith and therefore would cause problems. That was realpolitick, too.
  If one is interested in the Scots Irish Presbyterian religious situation in mid 18th-c Va, Pilcher's book on Samuel Davies is a good place to start.  I think people are unaware that, for example, Peyton Randolph as attorney general at mid century was busily harrassing Presbyterians in Virginia.  Trinterude's study of the Old Light-New Light clash within Presbyterianism -- Forming of an American Tradition -- is also important, though in grad school I remember it as almost unreadably detailed.
Jon Kukla


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Jon Kukla ....................... Executive Vice-President and CEO
1250 Red Hill Road ........ Patrick Henry Memorial Foundation
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