Gregory A. Wills.  Democratic Religion: Freedom, Authority, and Church Discipline in the Baptist South, 1785-1900.  New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

        Gregory Wills, in his book Democratic Freedom, examines the centrality of church discipline among antebellum era Southern Baptists.  The author in particular focuses his study on the state of Georgia because of the numerous Baptist congregations located in the state. Wills alleges that Georgia served as microcosm of how Southern Baptists practiced their specific brand of church discipline throughout the region. Baptists expected that members and non-members alike would recognize church discipline when it came to questions of creedal authority.  The writer concludes that the antebellum era Baptist church while organized along democratic lines insisted that its democracy be ordered.     

       Wills spends the first portion of his narrative in describing the origins and organization of the Baptist church.  Baptists found their historical traditions rooted in a movement that wanted to preserve and expand the idea of the primitive church. The idea of the primitive church, which supporters maintained went back to the first century, emphasized localized authority and autonomy. This tradition was transferred to America when Congregationalists and Puritans migrated to New England during the seventeenth century. The First and Second Great Awakenings saw the emergence and expansion of the Baptist denomination.  Baptists eschewed the hierarchical system favored by Methodists and Presbyterians. Instead, major questions of church policy rested with Baptist congregations.  Baptists also rejected the idea of an educated clergy because of their belief that anyone if divinely called could spread the word of God. Baptists insisted that their denomination emphasized democratic principles because it rejected the hierarchy of other churches.

       In fact, the Baptists challenged the social system of the Old South. The planter class, who insisted on a deferential social order, had little use for antebellum era Baptists. Planters criticized Baptists for their uneducated approach to the gospel and emphasis on egalitarianism. Baptists remained, for several decades, the foremost critics of southern society. In the end, the Baptists, in the 1840s, turned to defending the planter class when northerners increasingly attacked the institution of slavery. While Baptists insisted that they endorsed democratic institutions and republicanism a denominational exclusivity accompanied this commitment to those principles.

       Baptists divided the world between sinners and saints. One could enter the realm of the saints and the Baptist church by submitting to denominational authority. Southern Baptists expected their members to give up worldly pursuits and pleasures. This included a rejection of gambling, drinking, and dancing. In addition, Baptists had to believe in immersion baptism and closed communion. Any deviations from the Baptist creed would result in church sanctioned discipline.

       Southern Baptists, of the antebellum era, did not hesitate to mete out all forms of discipline. Churches acted as judges as they considered violations of denominational orthodoxy. Baptists strived to keep the church pure against the influences of an ungodly outside world. Penalties ranged from censure to excommunication from the denomination. Until 1850, discipline and denominational order remained the center of the Baptist experience. When Baptists sought to purify the outside world the emphasis on church discipline diminished.

        Baptist efforts, after the Civil War, centered on evangelical missions intended to reach those outside of the church.  Interest in creedal discipline lessened as the church turned outward. Large Baptist churches also found little time to deal with questions of denominational order. Younger Baptists rejected and resisted church prohibitions against dancing. By 1950, church discipline had diminished in importance.

       Wills’s work presents an interesting portrait of antebellum era Southern Baptists. He ably shows how democracy and order coexisted in the denomination. The book is also well researched with the author’s use of church records. The writer, despite his use of some rather dense prose, renders a piece of interesting scholarship on Baptist history. 

Robert H. Butts

 Religion in the South is a topic that many historians have examined and explored with many different approaches. Gregory A. Wills, who received his Ph. D. in the History of Christianity from Emory University and currently teaches church history and directs the archives and special collections department at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, examines the Southern Baptist church in his book Democratic Religion. In this book Wills examines how the Southern Baptist Church’s definition of democratic religion did not evolve with the changes of the United States from the colonial times to the turn of the twentieth century.  Baptists based their definition of a democratic religion on an exclusivist model that essentially communicated that they were the elite that could demonstrate truth and purity.  They also believed that to have freedom they had to voluntarily subjugate themselves to the church body, even to the point of punishment, instead of individualism. With these aspects, Baptists in the South maintained an exclusive organization that differs from what they are today.

 The main discussion throughout the book involves the discipline in the church as both a noun and a verb. Discipline as a noun promoted purity in the church, which furthered their missionary goals.  In other words, a good appearance of the church attracted people to its cause.  Discipline as a verb not only helped purify the church by punishing and excommunicating people who had no discipline, but it also added to the democratic nature of the church because almost all the members subjected themselves to the disciplining doled out by the church during its conferences. Another goal that discipline provided the Baptists was unity because it kept the members in line, punished dissenters, and forced those who did not agree with the doctrine out of the church.  Even though discipline was a huge part of the Baptist church, it proved to be the first aspect that changed.  Near the turn of the century urbanization, industrialization, and secularization contributed the transformation of the Baptists.  These changes in society changed the goals of the church.  Instead of being exclusivist, they had to become efficient to compete with the other churches now next door.  Since discipline was unappealing to the masses, the church transformed it into nurture to attract more people and more money.  Overall, Baptists in the South remained unchanged and exclusivists from colonial times till the turn of the century when the major changes in the United States forced them to reorganize or become lost.

A good aspect of the book includes its organization and its inclusiveness.  Wills organizes the book in a manner that looks at the topics in both a topical and chronological order.  This allows the reader to comprehend clearly every aspect of the church while seeing the transformation that took place at the turn of the century.  Another positive aspect of the book’s organization is how the author structured his argument.  Though the author admits in the introduction that the focus of the book is on Georgia, he does a good job relating the rest of the South to his description.  The other good aspect of the book is its inclusiveness.  Wills did not ignore the roles that blacks, both slave and free, and women played throughout the study.  This bolsters his argument and makes the book appealing to a wider audience.

All these aspects contributed to the quality of the book but one aspect, its sources, took away from its argument.  Wills exhausted all the sources about the Baptists but had only a few that discussed the events that occurred outside of the church.  A good example of a book that influenced his conclusions but did not appear in his endnotes was Robert Weibe’s work The Search for Order.  In the book, Weibe examines urbanization and the secularization of the church during the Gilded Age.  The author almost completely left out sources like these.  Though the church was exclusive, some events outside of it had to have some impact.  Relying on church sources too heavily could have distorted some of his conclusions.  Another small criticism of the book is that it did not include a bibliography.  Though minor, it is an inconvenience to the reader.  Overall, I found this book very informative and easy to read.  I would incorporate this book into an undergraduate course on the Old South or even the Gilded Age to better understand the changes that occurred during the turn of the century.

Charles Grear

Democratic Religion: Freedom, Authority, and Church Discipline in the Baptist South, 1785-1900. By Gregory A. Wills.  1997

In his book, Democratic Religion: Freedom, Authority, and Church Discipline in the Baptist South, 1785-1900, Gregory Wills explains the relationships among democratic principles, individual responsibilities, Calvinistic faith, and church discipline primarily among the nineteenth century Baptists.  He begins by clarifying the seeming contradiction between the Baptists belief in religious freedom, and their strict Calvinism during the antebellum era.  The Baptists believed in religions freedom from the point of view of state authority.  The government had no right to establish a religion or to direct the religious beliefs and activities of any citizen.  They also believed that no religion had the right to force itself on the members of society.  The rhetoric of the Revolutionary period was very strong in the beliefs of Southern Baptists.  But this should not be confused with the right of a church to discipline its members and ensure strict adherence to the beliefs of the church.

Even as the church enforced their doctrines, it was done in a strictly democratic manner.  Each Baptist church conducted their affairs on an autonomous basis with the congregation acting as the authority and controlling element.   In this approach, the Baptists sought to return to the original, or primitive, church of Christ thereby eliminating the innovations that occurred over a period of ten centuries.  The use of the term ‘primitive’ explains the effort to reestablishing the practices and beliefs and of the apostolic church by which they intended to achieve a high level of church purity.  To some extent, this ideal is fundamental to all Protestantism and evangelic religion.

Church business was conducted through a very democratic process during conference days usually held once a month.  Typically, all members were encouraged to attend and white males were usually required.  At these sessions, members would address issues of church government and matters of fellowship. Government issues related to election of church officers such as deacons, elders and pastors. Matters of fellowship were concerned with the admission of new members and disciplinary actions against current members. All white male members could vote in these conferences and in many cases, women and slaves could also vote on issues of fellowship.  This democratic form of church government was far more egalitarian than was the norm in the overall society at that time.  Through a process of selection and pruning, the membership was maintained at the level of piety required by the tenets of Calvinism and Baptist theology.  This process coupled with the belief that the church is not of this world is referred to as exclusivism, and was an essential element of the Southern Baptist church of the nineteenth century.

Church discipline was about ecclesiastical, not social, control although sometimes it was hard to separate them.  The disciplinary process was intended to be applied strictly and uniformly throughout the church membership, although statistical analysis demonstrated some inconsistencies. Generally when an infraction was alleged, there would be a hearing at which every effort was made to be fair and honest in dealing with the miscreant.  If the accused were found guilty, the options were either a rebuke or excommunication depending on the seriousness of the infraction.  Excommunication was not uncommon and was considered necessary to maintain the purity and exclusivism that was required by the church.

Generally, Baptist of that period considered any religious belief which was incompatible with church membership to be a form of heresy. Southern Baptists remained faithful to the five points of Calvinism including total depravity, unconditional election, particular redemption, irresistible grace, and the perseverance of the saints. When the Arminian Remonstrants challenged this and established freewill churches, their efforts at fellowship with the southern Baptists were soundly rejected.  Also, the doctrines of close communion and the invalidity of alien immersion set them aside from other evangelical Protestants, and were very much resented.

African Americans are a major part of the Southern Baptist tradition in both the antebellum and post war periods.  Originally, blacks were members of white churches.  Sometimes they created separate groups within the larger white church.  Later, they created black churches, and during the reconstruction period the move toward separateness intensified.  However, Wills contends that spiritually, the black Baptists had more in common with white Baptists that they did with black Methodists or Presbyterians.  He stated that “After emancipation, black Baptists expressed ideas and practices strikingly similar to those of antebellum white Baptists.  Slave religion was far more than a form of social resistance.  Black Baptists rejected slavery and the doctrine of racial inferiority, but in ecclesiology and theology they shared a broad consensus with white Baptists.  They ordered their churches according to the Baptist ideal of democratic religion.”

The Southern Baptist church experienced significant changes between the middle of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  Their understanding of church democracy as being expressed through ecclesiastical authority moved toward a belief that it was, more correctly, one of individual freedom.  This change was, of course, part of the greater transformation of Western culture.   Although the Baptists eventually experienced significant changes from their nineteenth century ideals, a residue of the old system still remains.  Offenders continued to experience democratic authority, only now it is more likely to result in therapy than in outright excommunicated.  Also, many continue to resist such things as the ordination of women, toleration of homosexuality, and the recognition of alien immersions as valid baptism.  To again use Wills’ own words, “Although selectively applied and attenuated, the heritage of democratic authority continues to make its presence felt in American evangelicalism.”

Gregory Wills has created a very readable and cogent story about the tenets of the southern Baptists church.  He has explained how it developed from early Puritanism, embraced the five points of Calvinism, and applied the ideal of democratic authority in church government.  He provides a good insight of the role of women and African Americans in the total picture.  And, he shows how the church changed over time and under the pressures of modernity and progress.  The book is well documented and should be a standard work for students of either religious history or the history of the Old South.

Gary J. Ohls

Democratic Religion:  Freedom, Authority, and Church Discipline in the Baptist South, 1785-1900.  By  Gregory A. Wills.  Religion in America Series, ed. Harry S. Stout.  (New York and Oxford:  Oxford University Press, c. 1997.  Pp. ix, 195.  ISBN  0-19-510412-9).

 In Democratic Religion Gregory Willis studied Baptist church authority from the end of the colonial era to the beginning of the twentieth century. He relied largely on sources concerning Baptists in Georgia, arguing that by limiting the breadth of the study he increased its depth. Willis provided an index and endnotes but neglected to furnish a bibliography.

 During the late eighteenth and most of the nineteenth century Southern Baptists, influenced by republicanism, embraced a democratic form of religion that included anticlericalism, antiauthoritarianism, and anticreedalism. That democratic nature meant that each local church was a self-governing unit, free of interference from any church hierarchy. Baptists maintained a few inviolate, universal beliefs, the most stringent of which were opposition to baptism of children and to any baptism that did not feature total immersion performed by qualified clergy. Those restrictions were expressed in the doctrines of “close communion” that forbade Baptists from joining in communion with pedobaptists, and “alien immersion,” which held that baptism by ministers of pedobaptist faiths was insufficient. (page 89)

 While local church rule was democratic, church control of its members was unashamedly authoritarian and a rejection of individualism. Baptists believed that people had rights of individual conscience as citizens of the state, not as church members, and, while Baptist philosophy was rooted in the Reformation doctrine of the priesthood of all believers, they rejected democratic individualism. Certain that they embraced eternal truths, Baptists used structures and rituals, especially censure and excommunication, that enforced the church community’s divinely inspired interpretation of scripture. Therefore, Baptists were democratic in form but authoritarian in practice. Individualism was so limited that members could not resign and could only leave the Baptist church by death or excommunication.

 However, in the late nineteenth century a revolutionary transformation changed Baptist understanding of democracy from one that stressed ecclesiastical authority to one that valued individual freedom. Church-oriented evangelism of the early nineteenth century, which was a continuation of the Puritan pursuit of a pure, primitive church, became twentieth-century evangelism that preferred the promotion of individual spirituality without mediation by ecclesiastical institutions. Democratic religion in the nineteenth century meant that each local church was unhampered by organs of oversight but democratic religion in the twentieth freed individuals from official church oversight.

 Wills began by suggesting that Southern Baptists earned a reputation for having the strongest commitment to democratic principles and individual freedoms at the same time they demonstrated the most zeal for strict church discipline of members, requiring almost total submission to church authority. Their program of autonomous local churches seemed successful as membership grew rapidly, making Baptists the largest denomination in Georgia by 1860. During that era of growth Southern Baptists instituted rituals of discipline that annually excommunicated two percent of their membership, a much higher rate of expulsion than their counterparts in the North. Members could be disciplined for almost any offense; missing meetings, dancing, drinking, fiddling, gossiping, or attending other churches. Transgressions were of two types; less serious private offenses often involved neglect of some duty, such as church attendance; and public offenses that brought scandal on the reputation of the church, such as sexual immorality, murder, heresy, etc. Most cases tried before the elders resulted in conviction.  From 1788 to 1900 only 410 acquittals were granted out of 6,300 cases.  Women were less likely to face accusation but were more likely to be convicted. In forty-seven percent of the cases the churches excommunicated the male offender but they excluded sixty-six percent of accused females. Churches also disciplined and excommunicated Blacks less frequently than White males, expelling them at the same rate as women, sixty-six percent. Blacks ended the issue of disparate treatment by leaving the White church, a process that was largely complete by 1880. Once independent, Black Baptists tended to adopt the same standards as White churches with the exception of a pronounced leniency for property crimes, suggesting that African-Americans understood the mitigating factor of poverty involved in thefts.

 Baptist discipline fell dramatically in the twentieth century with excommunications almost disappearing at the same time that church membership surpassed that of Methodists to become the largest Southern denomination. Wills suggested that the wonder was not that discipline decreased but that it had ever flourished at all. He argued that the exercise of discipline was not a pleasant chore for the church elders and that it created discord, especially when punishments varied according to the status of the accused. In addition, the church’s stand on popular amusements, such as dancing and the theater, became widely unpopular, particularly in urban areas where much of church growth appeared. By the late nineteenth-century church discipline was decreasing, replaced by an emphasis on producing cash donations (a goal to which the administration of discipline was counterproductive) and involvement of the laity by the use of standing committees.

 Wills produced a well-researched and meaningful contribution to the study of Southern religion with only minor flaws.  Although his general conclusions seemed well-grounded, he occasionally seemed to become overly expansive. In one instance he argued that church discipline was not about social control, that it was not an effort designed to constrain a wayward society.  While that may have been true for its motivation, it is doubtful that the lines can be drawn so clearly when considering the results of that discipline. In addition, the work suffered from what seemed to an effort to the fill sufficient pages for a book. Wills began this study to produce a brief article and he often became needlessly repetitive and redundant. Expanding the scope to meet the requirements of a monograph or limiting the effort to a chapter in a related work would have improved the effectiveness of his effort.
 

Texas Christian University

Harold Rich