A Cloud of Witnesses from the Heart of the City: First Presbyterian Church, Raleigh, 1816–2016 by W. Glenn Jonas Jr. (review)

Like some mighty old oak, First Presbyterian Church stands in Raleigh, North Carolina, the City of Oaks. The church, now over two centuries old, is covered with history's nicks, bruises, and twists, but it is still, after all these years, vibrant. A Cloud of Witnesses from the Heart of the City: First Presbyterian Church, Raleigh, 1816–2016 chronicles First Presbyterian's long and eventful life. W. Glenn Jonas Jr., Charles Howard Professor of Religion and associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Campbell University in Buies Creek, North Carolina, as well as an ordained minister who has pastored at several different North Carolina churches, is well qualified to be First Presbyterian's chronicler. Fortunately for Jonas, Raleigh's Presbyterians kept very good records, and A Cloud of Witnesses from the Heart of the City is solidly based on some two hundred years' worth of primary evidence.

Jonas's account is an institutional history. First Presbyterian Church is the protagonist, and the pastors who briskly cross the stage are the main supporting actors. Generations of committee meetings and building projects flow through the narrative. Each of the book's ten chronologically ordered chapters begins with a broad overview of the era and then focuses on First Presbyterian's challenges and achievements within that period.

First Presbyterian was certainly in the world during its long history. From the first, the church was linked to Raleigh's political elite and enmeshed in the slave system; its Civil War pastor enthusiastically supported the Confederacy. The church's post–Civil War prosperity was directly tied to the New South's prosperity; it was as segregated as the New South, and in the 1960s its white members had difficulty accepting desegregation and adapting to the civil rights movement. All Protestant Christianity's controversies rattled through First Presbyterian, from nineteenth-century arguments between Old and New School Presbyterians to twentieth-century battles between Fundamentalists and Modernists. First Presbyterian is America and the American South in microcosm.

Yet, though First Presbyterian was in the world, it was not always of the world. Throughout its long life, as Jonas skillfully demonstrates, First Presbyterian not only challenged the mores of the day but also took surprising turns. For example, though the church fit into the South's slave system, early First Presbyterian had a handful of free black members. While the church echoed patriarchal norms, women often played prominent roles in church affairs and were, Jonas notes, "developing a growing sense of their own empowerment" by the later nineteenth century (p. 125). First Presbyterian encouraged a whole range of community service projects during the early twentieth century's Progressive era. In the 1960s many of the church's members were suspicious of desegregation and civil rights, but by the 1980s, First Presbyterian had assumed a leading role in Raleigh's social justice community. "Born in the old statehouse and then located for all of its history directly across the street from Capitol Square," Jonas concludes, "this church has been not only a good neighbor but also a positive presence in the city" (p. 262).

Sometimes labor historians study union locals, military historians study platoons, and historians of religion study individual congregations. In talented hands, like Jonas's, a microcosm really can reveal the macrocosm while remaining its delightfully microcosmic self. A Cloud of Witnesses in the Heart of the City is thoroughly researched and engagingly written. It is a fine example of local history that will both delight locals and intrigue people from far away.