Brandon Taylor

Lately I’ve been reading colonial sermons—the ones delivered before England’s civic and commercial leaders in the early 1600s. These were formal occasions with a pointed purpose. The preacher stood in front of investors, company officers, royal officials, and sometimes the monarch himself. What he said was carefully composed.

In 1609, as the Virginia Company sought to expand its charter and attract new investors, it turned to the pulpit. Several sermons were preached that spring in support of the colonial mission, including one by William Symonds at Whitechapel. These sermons framed colonization as a scripturally grounded enterprise. Morality, scripture, and commercial ambition were tightly bound in the language of divine calling.

William Symonds’s sermon from 1609 opens with Genesis 12:1, God’s command to Abraham to leave his country. Symonds casts the Virginia colonists as a faithful echo of that departure. They, too, leave home and go out into the unknown. Virginia becomes another Canaan, and those who fund the expedition are invited to see themselves as participants in divine history.

These sermons do not operate like ordinary doctrinal teaching. They set expectations. They justify risk. They assure listeners that colonialism has not only political but theological urgency. The Virginia Company offered land and profit. The sermons supplied rationale and blessing.

It’s tempting to read all of this as sheer opportunism. But that lens flattens the record. Some of the preachers involved likely did believe that the Virginia mission held spiritual weight. Their sermons reflect a theological worldview in which commerce and conversion were not always in tension. What sounds to modern ears like strategy may have felt, to them, like responsibility.

When John Donne preaches at Whitehall in 1622, the style shifts, but the purpose holds. Donne takes more time, ranges more widely, and engages his audience with greater subtlety. Still, the sermon works to reinforce the Company’s aims. He presents English involvement as both necessary and redemptive. His voice is not prophetic, but strategic.

So what is a sermon for?

In this context, it guides attention. It frames the stakes. It provides moral clarity to actions already in motion. The form absorbs spiritual language and applies it to corporate ambition. These sermons allow expansion to feel orderly, even sacred. They don’t invent empire but they do help sustain its story.