Law in American Meetinghouses: Church Discipline and Civil Authority in Kentucky, 1780–1845 by Jeffrey Thomas Perry

Abstract

Reviewed by: Law in American Meetinghouses: Church Discipline and Civil Authority in Kentucky, 1780–1845 by Jeffrey Thomas Perry Robert Elder Law in American Meetinghouses: Church Discipline and Civil Authority in Kentucky, 1780–1845. By Jeffrey Thomas Perry. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022. Pp. xii, 208. $64.95, ISBN 978-1-4214-4307-2.) Any historian intent on mining the rich records of congregational life left behind by nineteenth-century southern Baptists had better have a sense of determination bordering on obsession. This makes Jeffrey Thomas Perry’s accomplishment in this book all the more remarkable, since the grit required to decipher church record books is not always paired with the analytical ability to interpret their significance. Drawing especially on record books from seven Kentucky churches, Perry has constructed a database of over 2,600 disciplinary cases. In this deeply researched study, he uses the decline of church discipline in Baptist churches in Kentucky as a window into how individuals and churches experienced the evolving relationship between church and state in the first half of the nineteenth century. Law in American Meetinghouses: Church Discipline and Civil Authority in Kentucky, 1780–1845 joins other excellent state-level studies of Baptist life such as Randolph Ferguson Scully’s Religion and the Making of Nat Turner’s Virginia: Baptist Community and Conflict, 1740–1840 (Charlottesville, 2008) and Gregory A. Wills’s Democratic Religion: Freedom, Authority, and Church Discipline in the Baptist South, 1785–1900 (Athens, Ga., 1997). But Perry’s book makes a unique contribution that extends well beyond geography. From the end of the eighteenth century until around 1830, the men and women who joined Baptist churches in the rapidly growing state of Kentucky made a Lockean bargain that had both spiritual and civil dimensions, giving their local congregations “immense authority over their public and private lives” in return for “watchcare” over spiritual matters and the adjudication of civil disputes in their communities (pp. 17, 33). Perry shows how Baptists “envisioned churches as law-producing sites and the practice of discipline as a viable alternative to local and state courts” (p. 38). At times, his argument risks getting lost in the carefully documented twists and turns of these cases, but there is little question about the weight of his evidence. By the 1830s, the rise of a domestic ideal that viewed the household as a garden walled off from wider society meant that churches were less willing to pry into the now-private lives of their members, especially when it came to sex. Meanwhile, the spread of new ideas about market relationships meant that churches were less willing to impose Christian ideals on their members’ business dealings, preferring to leave such matters to civil courts. Perry shows that after 1830, cases tended to focus on matters of doctrine or the fulfillment of church duties such as attendance, at least for white church members. However, churches still showed a vigorous interest in the private lives of their enslaved congregants. For instance, Perry finds that after 1831 a full 91 percent of adultery charges in his dataset were made against Black church members. [End Page 138] According to Perry, the most decisive factor in the decline of church discipline and the transformation of the relationship between church and state in Kentucky around 1830 was religious controversy, especially the rise of the Stone-Campbell Movement. As Perry writes, “the ‘democratization’ of American Christianity had given birth to a religious insurgency that unwittingly weakened churches’ authority in matters of local governance” (p. 112). In chapter 5, perhaps the most original chapter in the book, Perry documents how democratization and disestablishment led, ironically, to the return of state involvement in religious matters. Kentucky congregations rent by religious controversy appealed to state courts to adjudicate property disputes according to an 1814 law that recognized congregations as legal entities but forbade trustees from excluding congregants from church property in the event of a schism. “By seeking out state assistance,” Perry writes, “Baptists, who had fought so passionately for the separation of church and state during the Revolutionary era, inadvertently opened the door for civil authority to shape ecclesiastical affairs” (p. 153). Perry’s persuasive and important account of...