Downwind from the New England Rat: John Taylor, Organized Missions, and the Regionalization of Religious Identity on the American Frontier

FALL 2009 25 Downwind from the New England Rat: John Taylor, Organized Missions, and the Regionalization of Religious Identity on the American Frontier Keith Harper O n October 27, 1819, John Taylor celebrated his sixty-seventh birthday by penning the first few lines of Thoughts on Missions, his critique of the modern missionary movement. Taylor numbered among Kentucky’s best known and most respected preachers, but he was ill and did not expect to recover. As he ordered his affairs, he sensed that something was amiss in the Baptist ranks and he felt duty-bound to alert others of his faith to certain dangers that were disrupting unity and harmony. Taylor’s disquietude began in 1812 while he lived in “the lower end” of Gallatin County, Kentucky. That November two unusual visitors, John F. Schermerhorn and Samuel J. Mills, both college-educated easterners then in their twenties, were conducting religious surveys of the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys on behalf of the Massachusetts Missionary Society and the Missionary Society of Connecticut. Taylor remembered them as sincere young men, but they failed to impress their host. Appalled to learn that Taylor received practically no compensation for his preaching, they assured him he could change this lamentable situation if he would only get his hearers to contribute toward missions. Taylor understood that his guests were not Baptists, so he held his tongue. Even so, Mills and Schermerhorn had raised concerns in his mind about organized missions , missionaries, and mission societies. When he wrote Thoughts on Missions, Taylor vividly recalled the zealous but condescending missionaries and mused, “But surely it will not be thought uncharitable to say, that I did begin strongly to smell the New England Rat.”1 Unfortunately, Taylor never explained precisely what he meant by this obvious derogation, so the New England Rat remains somewhat illusive. Sleuthing this vermin and determining what this colorful metaphor might have meant to early-nineteenth century Baptists requires a certain amount of detective work. The existing DOWNWIND FROM THE NEW ENGLAND RAT 26 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY The Bullittsburg Baptist Church, Boone County, Kentucky, one of the ten Baptist churches in which John Taylor ministered. THE FILSON HISTORICAL SOCIETY clues are found in regional prejudice, early-national politics, and internal conflict among Baptists over their own identity. A careful examination of these clues suggests that Taylor, an ardent Jeffersonian, believed organized mission work was little more than a religious form of Federalism that would seriously disrupt Baptist life as he knew it. Worse, this dramatic change would come through outsiders—New Englanders—whose politics and cultural bearing he detested. The religious upheaval of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries , commonly known as the Second Great Awakening, has inspired a variety of assessments. For instance, Jon Butler sees America as a place of considerable religious diversity and pluralism, especially in the eighteenth century. In fact, the diversity was so extensive that it took a concerted effort to rein in the republic’s religious heterogeneity. On the other hand, Nathan Hatch argues that American Christians in the early republic shared a passion for equality and democracy that reached nearly every facet of life. Given the sharp impulses toward liberty and freedom, it is remarkable that any religious group managed to cohere at all. Both agree that New England’s role, or more precisely, Puritanism’s role as the bellwether of the American religious experience, has been exaggerated. Still, earlynineteenth -century Americans wrestled with the proper way to balance religious order with individual liberty. Many celebrated the changes in American religion that allowed for its free exercise. While John Taylor may have stood alone in so publicly decrying the “New England Rat” in the Baptists’ debate over missionary KEITH HARPER FALL 2009 27 activities in the West, his sentiments spoke to the region’s contest over culture that many of his faith shared.2 At thirty-four pages, Thoughts on Missions was not Taylor’s longest work, but it was by far his most significant. This booklet earned Taylor a place alongside Daniel Parker and Alexander Campbell—neither of whom found precedent for missionary organizations in the New Testament—as the nation’s more outspoken critics of missionary...