In this important and well-written book, Jeffrey Thomas Perry studies disciplinary practices in Baptist churches in Kentucky between 1780 and 1845 to understand evangelicals’ changing imagination about law and authority. He interweaves discussions of patriarchy, market capitalism, and religious disputes to discuss the shifting lines between religious and civil authority. The book asks three main questions: it inquires about the roles discipline served in church communities; it asks why discipline changed and declined; and, most importantly, it seeks to understand what that decline meant for “broader legal developments and the relationship between civil and religious authority.” (3) The last two questions take on newer ground in the historiography and allow him to make his largest contributions to the historiography.
Perry argues that by the 1820s, Baptists were uncertain that their church structure–more particularly the communitarian ethos guiding dispute resolution—could handle the thornier issues of the liberal market economy. Responding to the structures of the economy and the desires of white patriarchs, churches increasingly abandoned their disciplinary practices. In so doing, they came to embrace civil legal authority as a necessary foundation for a liberal economic system and to “reposition the authority of their churches alongside that of the state.” (41)
Perry contends that there were three intertwined circumstances that propelled the transformation of discipline. The first was the reification of gender and racial hierarchies in Kentucky. As white Baptists increasingly insisted upon the privacy of the domestic realm, the patriarchal rights of white men, and the importance of white men's reputation, churches abandoned past disciplinary interventions into behaviors and relationships that, at times, had benefited white women and enslaved men and women. By the 1820s, Perry finds churches increasingly ceded their authority over household matters and, indeed, over white members generally. This is an intriguing argument, though it is not one of the ones that seems to drive Perry's primary analysis.
With his next chapters, Perry takes up the other two developments that transformed how evangelicals understood church and legal authority, which provides the centerpiece to his most important arguments. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Baptist churches had valued communitarianism in their pursuit of an orderly Christian community. They restricted members from suing other members and instead adjudicated disputes themselves, creating a kind of church “court.” These hearings involved interpersonal negotiations, intimate probes, and prioritizing the responsibilities of, and to, the community over the rights of the individual. In a careful and sharp reading, Perry contends that Baptists yielded oversight of economic and property disputes as they realigned what they wanted from “law.” The conditions of frontier market capitalism—competitive, speculative, embedded in a violent land grab, unstable, and rapidly expanding—shifted ideas about acceptable economic behaviors. Perry argues that Baptists increasingly preferred the practices of law found in civil courts over churches. Rejecting scrutiny by brethren, they wanted dispassionate justice, uniform practices, and impartial distance rather than intimate and layered obligations. This is a subtle shift and one that is hard to track, but Perry offers a fascinating account of the changing imagination regarding law that increasingly defined law as impartial, dispassionate, and a fundamentally civil construct.
According to Perry, religious conflicts provided the third development that persuaded Baptists to abandon their discipline practices. In the early and mid-nineteenth century, Kentucky churches were deeply divided over the teachings of Alexander Campbell and missionary work, which resulted in fierce contests over theology, religious values, and right church structure. In some places the disputes became so heated that churches split apart. Perry documents how these conflicts sapped energy as well as adherents from congregations. Bruised from years of conflict, churches had little interest in discipline that might annoy white members and so restricted themselves to oversight of religious duties and the behaviors of Black members.
Taken together, Perry argues, these shifts demonstrate how Baptists realigned churches in relation to civil authority as they increasingly narrowed religious purview, redefined law as fundamentally civil, and even found themselves turning on the state. After the schisms, both factions often tried to lay claim to church property. Factions sought out state authority, asking courts to determine which was the “true” church, crafted complicated land deeds (at times with creeds), and sought incorporation. Thus, ironically, the centrifugal forces that built Baptist churches—with their insistence on independent congregations and separation of church and state—become the very forces that required churches to rely on state assistance.
The intertwining of these issues is important and well done, though more is needed on the roles of race and slavery. Perry offers tantalizing information about the role of race and the increasing sensitivity of white members to being questioned by their churches, but it is a brief section that calls out for more. So too, the disciplinary practices leveled against (or, at times, used by?) Black Baptists needs greater interrogation. Perry points out discipline was sometimes used for the surveillance and policing of Black members but also notes at times it occurred in separate Black meetings, which could allow enslaved members to define and enforce their values and law and to “secure [their own] property claims.” (67) How ought we understand those very different meanings of church discipline? How many charges were brought by Black members against other Black members, and how many were brought by white members? Even if the records do not allow for the kind of quantitative data that Perry often develops, it would be wonderful to hear Perry or a future scholar take up the issue of Black law in light of this book's arguments.
This is a fascinating book, and it offers a timely and important contribution to the historiography. Its arguments should intrigue scholars of religion, the South, and the law in early America and inspire new questions in the years to come.
