A Mere Kentucky of a Place: The Elkhorn Association and the Commonwealth's First Baptists by Keith Harper

Abstract

Reviewed by: A Mere Kentucky of a Place: The Elkhorn Association and the Commonwealth's First Baptists by Keith Harper Jeffrey Thomas Perry (bio) A Mere Kentucky of a Place: The Elkhorn Association and the Commonwealth's First Baptists. By Keith Harper. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2021. Pp. 197. $49.00 cloth; $49.00 ebook) In this brief but valuable history, Keith Harper examines the Elkhorn Association of Baptists, the trans-Appalachian West's first such organization rooted in Kentucky's Bluegrass Region. He focuses primarily on ministers, using their experiences to uncover how they, and Kentucky Baptists more broadly, navigated the shifting cultural, social, and political landscape of the post-Revolutionary period, all the while trying to balance "being a good 'Christian'" within the prevailing world of acquisitiveness and debates over slavery's righteousness (p. xvii). Ideologically Jeffersonian Republicans, these ministers, far from seeking simply religious liberty, migrated to Kentucky to take advantage of its bounties. While they held some democratic impulses, the institutions they established were not radical democracies, but a blend of local self-rule and deference to ministers and the governing association. Harper's analysis of "Elkhorners" falls in line with recent scholarship by Janet Moore Lindman, Randolph Scully, Jewel Spangler, and others, arguing that Baptist society was cut through with the same social and economic tensions as "worldly" society—not a set apart utopia of democratic values. Harper begins with an overview of the prominent ministers who left Virginia during and immediately after the Revolutionary War, men he argues were seeking both "moral and material advancement" in Virginia's western-most county of Kentucky (p. 15). Brief backgrounds of well-known Kentucky Baptists—from the Craig brothers, John Taylor, David Barrow, William Hickman, and several others—frames chapter one, as Harper discusses the Baptists' persecution and [End Page 315] political activities in Revolutionary Virginia. Though seeking a New Eden, Baptist migrants instead arrived in Kentucky and faced continued conflict with Native Americans, the vagaries of weather, distant and unresponsive governing authority, as well as the often-corrupt designs of absentee-land speculators. The Craig brothers and others began establishing churches in the 1780s, organizing the Elkhorn Association deep in the heart of the Bluegrass Region in 1785, which attracted wealthy migrants hoping to transplant the power structure from the East. Though Elkhorn Baptists constituted churches based on communal values and spiritual equality, Harper notes that they also accommodated the secular context of southern honor and Jeffersonian republicanism. "Honor" was reserved for white males, and rarely cut across class lines. Meanwhile, pursuit of riches on the land required church leaders to synthesize their communal values with economic opportunity. Whether slavery would be permitted in Kentucky vexed some Kentucky Baptists ahead of the state's 1791 constitutional convention. Despite an early memorial against allowing bondage in Kentucky, Elkhorn Baptists' resistance soon dissipated. Not only were Baptists willing to engage in political issues, as landed gentry joined Elkhorn's churches in greater numbers, they failed to effectively combat slavery. They were "at best reluctant activists and reformers, if they became such at all" (p. 37). Some Kentucky Baptists continued to protest against slavery, though their voices were largely silenced by the 1810s. Doctrinal disagreements proved just as serious to church stability as debates over slavery. While associations like Elkhorn were simply advisory councils, they also fostered a "ministry culture" and sought to purify their member churches' theology. The turn-of-the-century revivals proved fruitful opportunities to fill membership rolls. These often free-wheeling revivals were important, but also invitations to faction and dissension, as subsequent debates over Calvinism and Arminianism demonstrate. In the end, Harper argues the Elkhorn Baptists' embrace of the missionary movement after 1810 was a less [End Page 316] controversial "rallying point" that "challenged neither slavery nor individual acquisitiveness," helping forge a consensus among Kentucky Baptists while shaping their denominationalism through the nineteenth century (p. xix). Relying on a variety of primary sources, Harper dives deep into the personalities that shaped Kentucky Baptists' experience from the Revolutionary period through the 1810s. Readers will enjoy this book's narrative qualities and fine-grained focus on Elkhorn's history (no existing work examines the Elijah...