Law in American Meetinghouses: Church Discipline and Civil Authority in Kentucky, 1780-1845

by Jeffrey Thomas Perry

Overview

A revealing look at the changing role of churches in the decades after the American Revolution.

Most Americans today would not think of their local church as a site for arbitration and would probably be hesitant to bring their property disputes, moral failings, or personal squabbles to their kin and neighbors for judgment. But from the Revolutionary Era through the mid-nineteenth century, many Protestants imbued local churches with immense authority. Through their ritual practice of discipline, churches insisted that brethren refrain from suing each other before "infidels" at local courts and claimed jurisdiction over a range of disputes: not only moral issues such as swearing, drunkenness, and adultery but also matters more typically considered to be under the purview of common law and courts of equity, including disputes over trespass, land, probate, slave warranty, and theft.

In Law in American Meetinghouses, Jeffrey Thomas Perry explores the ways that ordinary Americans—Black and white, enslaved and free—understood and created law in their local communities, uncovering a vibrant marketplace of authority in which church meetinghouses played a central role in maintaining their neighborhoods' social peace. Churches were once prominent sites for the creation of local law and in this period were a primary arena in which civil and religious authority collided and shaped one another. When church discipline failed, the wronged parties often pushed back, and their responses highlight the various forces that ultimately hindered that venue's ability to effectively arbitrate disputes between members. Relying primarily on a deep reading of church records and civil case files, Perry examines how legal transformations, an expanding market economy, and religious controversy led churchgoers to reimagine their congregations' authority. By the 1830s, unable to resolve doctrinal quibbles within the fellowship, church factions turned to state courts to secure control over their meetinghouses, often demanding that judges wade into messy ecclesiastical disputes.

Tracking changes in disciplinary rigor in Kentucky Baptist churches from that state's frontier period through 1845, and looking beyond statutes and court decrees, Law in American Meetinghouses is a fresh take on church-state relations. Ultimately, it highlights an oft-forgotten way that Americans subtly repositioned religious institutions alongside state authority.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781421443089
Publisher:	Johns Hopkins University Press
Publication date:	02/08/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
File size:	3 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Jeffrey Thomas Perry is an assistant professor of history at Tusculum University.

Jeffrey Thomas Perry (GREENEVILLE, TN) is an assistant professor of history at Tusculum University.

Table of Contents

A Note on Sources
Introduction
Chapter 1. "The Want of Discipline": Baptist Churches and Local Law in Frontier Kentucky
Chapter 2. Churches' "Perplexing Difficulties": Race, Gender, and Household Relations
Chapter 3. A "Habitation of Justice?": The Market Revolution and the Search for Dispassionate Arbitration
Chapter 4. "The Putrid Carnage of Contention": Religious Insurgency and Church Authority
Chapter 5. "A Great Curse to the Neighborhood": Church Property Disputes and State Authority
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Appendix
Notes
Index

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

This well-researched and engaging text constitutes a valuable microhistory, using issues arising from parochial concerns within congregations to both challenge and clarify prevailing understandings of the interplay between law and religion in the early republic.
—Mark Douglas McGarvie, American Bar Foundation, author of Law and Religion in American History: Public Values and Private Conscience

With a lively cast of 'brother' and 'sister' Baptists, Law in American Meetinghouses chronicles the rise and fall of church discipline in the early republican West. Regulating far more than gossip or sexual ethics, Baptist churches adjudicated commercial disputes and punished misdemeanor-like offenses, creating a kind of American ecclesiastical law that could be asserted even against nonmembers. Property was central, Perry shows, both to the churches' power to create law and to their eventual retreat into a private realm of moral suasion as competing sects jockeyed for control of church property and the disciplinary practices it secured. This book is essential reading for scholars of both legal and religious pluralism in early America.
—Kellen R. Funk, Columbia Law School

A strong, admirable book full of fine-grained details about what legal and religious secularization actually entailed in the early American republic. Offering a new, fully rooted perspective on Baptist church courts, this book will appeal to specialists in legal, religious, and American history.
—Thomas S. Kidd, Baylor University, author of America's Religious History: Faith, Politics, and the Shaping of a Nation

Mark Douglas McGarvie

This well-researched and engaging text constitutes a valuable microhistory, using issues arising from parochial concerns within congregations to both challenge and clarify prevailing understandings of the interplay between law and religion in the early republic.

Thomas S. Kidd

A strong, admirable book full of fine-grained details about what legal and religious secularization actually entailed in the early American republic. Offering a new, fully rooted perspective on Baptist church courts, this book will appeal to specialists in legal, religious, and American history.

Kellen R. Funk

With a lively cast of 'brother' and 'sister' Baptists, Law in American Meetinghouses chronicles the rise and fall of church discipline in the early republican West. Regulating far more than gossip or sexual ethics, Baptist churches adjudicated commercial disputes and punished misdemeanor-like offenses, creating a kind of American ecclesiastical law that could be asserted even against nonmembers. Property was central, Perry shows, both to the churches' power to create law and to their eventual retreat into a private realm of moral suasion as competing sects jockeyed for control of church property and the disciplinary practices it secured. This book is essential reading for scholars of both legal and religious pluralism in early America.

Editorial Reviews

Law in American Meetinghouses is a welcome addition to the historiography of Baptist church discipline...Perry's work provides a much more complete portrait of southern and American religious society.
—Journal of Church and State

From the Publisher