Charlestonians had a “fashionable but shameful vice,” so the intellectual Eliza Lucas Pinckney, probably America's first agriculturalist with claims to greatness, mused in 1741: They ridiculed religion, “pretending” to disbelief. In the late 1760s, James Iredell of North Carolina, a future U.S. Supreme Court justice, penned a scathing indictment of the supercilious wealthy coastal planters who considered religious people “morose,” “unreflecting,” and “unsocial” or “unsound.” In the 1820s Margaret Hunter Hall, British aristocrat, found wealthy residents of Charleston, Columbia, and Savannah still indifferent to religion, and as late as 1839 the Reverend Moses Drury Hoge protested French infidelity among the Virginia gentry.

But by 1836, President Thomas Roderick Dew of the College of William and Mary announced that “the enlightened portion of the world” considered infidelity a sign of weak mind or heart: “The argument is now closed forever, and he who now obtrudes on the social circle his infidel notions, manifests the arrogance of a literary coxcomb, or that want of refinement which distinguishes the polished gentleman.” In the 1850s and 1860s, Bishops William Meade of Virginia and Stephen Elliott of Georgia exulted in the decline of infidelity and the advance of evangelicalism. Dew, Meade, and Elliott claimed victory in a long, hard-fought struggle that had begun with the great religious revival at Cane Ridge in 1801.