The Old Regular Baptists of Central Appalachia (review)

Book Reviews Dorgan, Howard. The Old Regular Baptists of Central Appalachia. Knoxville : University of Tennessee Press, 1989. This book is one of a series of studies which the University of Tennessee has been publishing on Southern religious practice. Included in that series, of course, is an earlier book by Dr. Dorgan, Giving Glory to God in Appalachia. Both books are based on the many years of field work the author has been conducting from his home base at Appalachian State University. The Old Regular Baptist Church is a distinctive Protestant denomination which draws most of its membership from that area where Kentucky, West Virginia, and Virginia meet in the heart of the Southeastern mountains. The customs of the church differ in many ways from those of more mainstream denominations . A visitor to the Old Regulars would be immediately struck by the lined singing, the rhapsodic preaching style, and the warm informality of their services. In a recent telephone conversation , Dorgan told me that we should know more about the Old Regulars because they have worked so hard to preserve the pure traditions of their faith. In contrast to some other denominations, and certainly to much of the television ministry, the Old Regulars have struggled to retain a simplicity and sincerity which speaks "from the heart and soul." More than most Christians, they are dogged adherents of "the old-time way." A speech and communication teacher at his college, Dr. Dorgan may originally have been attracted to the Old Regulars because of their distinctive worship practices, but he learned to love the people he was writing about. His book is no dry piece of scholarship. With a simplicity and sincerity of his own, Dorgan also speaks from the heart and soul. This authorial stance, however, creates a challenge he has to face throughout his book: he must show respect and sensitivity to his sources at the same time he honestly describes a denomination that, like the rest of us, is imperfect because it is also human. The best thing about the book is that Dorgan manages to achieve this delicate balance. It is almost as if we are riding with him as he takes his trips out into the countryside to visit the people he has come to know so well. Information about Old Regular services is presented in ethnographic detail. He takes us to a regular monthly service at the Bull Creek Church northwest of Grundy, Virginia , and a memorial meeting at Mary Lou Church in Buchanan County, West Virginia. We visit other congregations in North Carolina, Tennessee, and Kentucky . We are taken to business meetings , communions, footwashings, and creekside baptisms. Through all our travels, Dorgan refuses to let us lose sight of the hills which encompass these events and may give them some of their meaning. The hills, Dorgan believes, are an important force in making the Old Regulars what they are today. In looking beyond these individual Old Regular services to the 67 forces which gave them shape, Dorgan sees patterns which could have developed only in Appalachia. "Religion and region, practice and place," he writes, "merged to create a spiritual expression originally not heard outside the Cumberlands ." There are, in fact, Old Regular Baptist churches outside Appalachia, and Dorgan has since attended one of them, the Ypsilanti church in Michigan. An account of his visit will soon be published in the Appalachian Journal. But the church, of course, is attended by Appalachian out-migrants who maintain strong ties to their ancestral homes. This summer I also attended an Old Regular service—this time in the shadow of Mt. St. Helens in Washington state. Years ago a considerable number of lumbermen migrated to the Pacific Cascades from the Welch and Beckley areas of West Virginia and the Wolf Pen Creek area of Kentucky. Their descendants still live in or near the little towns of Mineral, Morton, and Silver Creek. In the regular worship service at Western Union Church, in the communion and footwashing which followed it, and at the potluck dinner held later, I could just about close my eyes and imagine myself back in Eastern Kentucky. Fifty years ago, Woodrow Clevinger, himself the descendant of Appalachian out...