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  • In Subjection: Church Discipline in the Early American South, 1760–1830 by Jessica Madison
  • Robert Elder
In Subjection: Church Discipline in the Early American South, 1760–1830. By Jessica Madison. (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2014. Pp. xviii, 178. $30.00, ISBN 978-0-88146-500-6.)

In this account of Baptist church discipline in the Carolinas before 1830, Jessica Madison sets out to describe what she calls the “misunderstood ‘moral economy’” that animated Baptist efforts to keep their churches pure as they struggled to sustain the divide between the church and the world in the late colonial and early national South (p. x). Against previous accounts of church discipline that have described an inequitable system that held women to a higher and harsher standard than men, Madison employs extensive research in church records to argue that Baptist church discipline should instead be understood in terms of “subjection,” which she defines as “a voluntary submission in a relationship of mutual consent” that applied equally to men and women within the church (p. x). Significantly, Madison argues that while Baptists recognized crucial differences between male and female ways of being in the world and in the church, they nevertheless strove to achieve their ideal of communal harmony and purity in a way that produced a relatively more egalitarian model of gender relations than existed outside the church, where male license and female subjugation were taken for granted.

The greatest virtue of Madison’s approach is her sensitivity to the theological understanding of discipline that was so evidently important to Baptists and so often underestimated by historians. The moral economy that Carolina Baptists tried to implement in their churches was drawn from an understanding of scripture in which social relations between church members held spiritual significance. Several interesting conclusions emerge from Madison’s research. For instance, while scholars studying other regions have described a gradual shift in women’s participation in church matters during this period, usually in favor of male authority and to the exclusion of female agency and autonomy, Madison finds no such pattern in the Carolinas. Madison also draws useful and interesting distinctions between upcountry and Lowcountry regions in the Carolinas, using tax records to connect economic instability in the upcountry to higher rates of drunkenness in church records there. There is also an illuminating section on how churches dealt with issues of money, including tithing and financial disputes between members.

Despite these contributions, Madison’s evidence that churches applied the ideal of subjection equally is not entirely convincing. She certainly proves that men were often charged for the same offenses as women, including sexual offenses, and were sometimes excommunicated for their failure to repent. However, as Gregory A. Wills especially has shown, the outcomes of these cases were often quite different for men and women. Madison often [End Page 138] gives less than satisfactory explanations of the evidence in an attempt to explain away this trend. For instance, in explaining the fact that thirteen out of thirteen female defendants in her sample were excommunicated for “falsehood,” compared with only ten of the twenty-three male defendants charged with the same offense, she writes, “It may be that half of the falsehood cases against men were of less consequence or more easily resolved than the others” (p. 50). Similarly, Madison notes that more men overall were charged with heresy but that only about half were excluded, while women were excluded without exception when charged. She writes, “whether rates of excommunication were deliberately or coincidentally disproportionate by gender is a matter of speculation” (p. 55). This kind of speculation, found throughout the book, along with inconsistent documentation and uneven engagement with relevant scholarship, hampers what is potentially a significant contribution to our understanding of church discipline in its proper historical and religious context. Madison’s attempt to show that Baptists practiced rigorous gender equality in their discipline is all the more puzzling in light of her welcome and wise reminder that this was not their primary concern. In this sense, she adopts the modern lens of the very historians whom she seeks to debunk, defending these Carolina Baptists against accusations they might not have been interested in refuting...

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