Forging a Christian Order: South Carolina Baptists, Race, and Slavery, 1696–1860 by Kimberly R. Kellison (review)

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• Forging a Christian Order: South Carolina Baptists, Race, and Slavery, 1696–1860 by Kimberly R. Kellison
• Nicole Myers Turner

Forging a Christian Order: South Carolina Baptists, Race, and Slavery, 1696–1860. By Kimberly R. Kellison. America’s Baptists. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2023. Pp. xiv, 226. $50.00, ISBN 978-1-62190-759-6.)

This book is a history of South Carolina Baptists from the colonial period to the start of the Civil War. In it, Kimberly R. Kellison argues that South Carolina Baptists, and especially the Reverend Richard Furman (1755–1825), were at the vanguard of advancing arguments about “a Christian version of slavery” as a paternalistic institution and as the cornerstone of social order in a slave society (p. 1). These ideas were privately embraced during the colonial period and came to public expression in the early 1800s through Furman’s political advocacy. Chronicling the emergence of this Christian slavery and the ways it became the dominant argument among not just South Carolina Baptists but Southern Baptists writ large, Kellison contributes a rich local narrative with national and international scope to the historiography on proslavery thought.

Over six chronological chapters, Kellison presents the development of southern Baptist proslavery ideology through the people, churches, and associations in South Carolina. Denominational development of the Charleston Baptist Association (1752), the national Triennial Convention (1814), and the South Carolina Baptist State Association (1821) provides a backbone to the narrative. These developments were achievements given the enduring regional cultural conflicts between the Lowcountry elite and upcountry folk over educational requirements for ministers, foreign missions, and denominationalism. For Furman, these organizations provided the platforms for political engagement as a “religious statesman” tasked with upholding morality in the public square (p. 59). When legislative changes made in response to enslaved rebellions like Gabriel’s in Virginia (1800) threatened enslaved people’s ability to gather for worship, Furman publicly articulated his views about slavery in petitions and other writings. He argued that it was a biblical institution characterized by obligations that would keep enslaved people from rebelling and would maintain white supremacy. As Furman codified his views of Christian slavery and social order, intensifying arguments over the immediate abolition of slavery saw the splintering of the national Triennial Convention into the American Baptist Free Mission Society (1843) and the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC, 1845). After that break, the formal association (which some South Carolina upcountry church leaders continued to oppose) became the foundation of Christian slavery. The newly formed SBC reckoned with the Christian slavery of their imagination through debates about enslaved marriage, concluding—in deference to the institution of slavery—that these marriages could be dissolved.

While South Carolina Baptists crafted a vision of Christian slavery that upheld obligations of paternalism and obedience under the umbrella of white supremacy, enslaved people expressed other ideas about Christianity, community, and social order. The enslaved joined churches, participated in disciplinary meetings, and pursued leadership roles—actions that bespoke their pursuit of spiritual and social equality and that undermined the premises of the white supremacist ideology of Christian slavery.

This local study provides a grounded and textured look at the articulation of proslavery ideology over two centuries, satisfying the need to see both these [End Page 407] developments and the unique temporal, social, and political events that drove them. Particularly, this study illuminates how the push for denominationalism was intertwined with protecting slavery and reinforcing white supremacy. This foundation prompts further examination of the lived religion of Christian slavery, as the proclamations about this religion, as exemplified in formal petitions to government officials, debates in the convention minutes, and instructions in the wills of southern ministers, are belied by the resistance enslaved people exhibited. Given the complex narratives of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century African American religious history, one wonders how much more fraught the Southern Baptist articulation of Christian slavery might appear considering the insights offered by Ras Michael Brown, Jason R. Young, James Melvin Washington, Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh, and Yvonne P. Chireau. These prompts extend from the insights about slavery and religion that Kellison’s close and careful reading affords. Consequently, Forging a Christian Order: South Carolina Baptists, Race, and Slavery, 1696–1860 pushes scholarship...