Whig Hill

Accountability, week 2

In my last, I explained that I wanted to look beyond church courts for disciplinary action. But spending time with actual church court cases will be necessary. I’m more interested in the process (patience) and the prescriptions (forgiveness) than the actual punishments (few), and how the former contributes to a public ethos of… well, I won’t, and can’t, say non-violence, but something that is the opposite of violent behavior. To find that is where I have to go beyond the church courts and see how people practiced the lessons and behaviors they learned in public.

Well, for the former, I still have to look at cases. My goal this week is to go through archival notes I have on Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, and Quaker churches and describe the aforementioned process and prescriptions. I’m looking forward to further examining the cases of Peter and Martha May, who switched congregations over missionary principles; and Warren Harrington, who knocked up his sister-in-law, apparently. Don’t know how I’m going to use the Harrington case, but it’s been smoldering in my thoughts for a while. (This is a good place to note how much I loved how Martha Hodes wrote the first half of White Women, Black Men, and wish my work could turn out that way.)

This is all a reminder that I have yet to collect proceedings from Lutheran and German Reformed churches. That will require some archival research that will not be done this week. Besides, the primary research queue currently has “read Arthur’s Home Magazine” and “find and scour the American Sunday School Union papers” at the front.

This is where I usually say “anyhow.” So, anyhow, to see discipline in action on the secular scene, I’m going back to the Wesleyan episode I wrote on last summer and hope to integrate that stuff into this section. If I get my first goal finished, this will be the second. Very little reading this week, but quite a lot of agonizing over notes.

Week 1 summary

I got six new pages out of my tasks for this week. And they sure are terrible. Placeholder ideas, really, but I got to keep moving forward.

Again, I’m trying to describe religious discipline as more than just church trials, but as an ethic for personal and social engagement in the world. To this end, I’m trying to make a distinction between the sacred congregation/the sinful world, and sacred behavior/sin. I think this is important. In the former, we will interpret Protestant people as reluctant to enter the world and thus recoiling from modernisms. In the later (as I’d prefer it), we may interpret Protestant people as armed with necessary weapons to do battle in the world and unafraid to enter it. This is not very articulate yet, but I think it will go a way in rethinking the southern evangelical approach to modern social transformations. Which is important.

I finally went back and re-read McCurry’s chapters on religion. Good, strong, stuff, even if I don’t really buy it. She’s posited the central tension in evangelical life (in regard to women and men) as between the spiritually egalitarian promises of Protestant theology and the worldly inequalities of patriarchical society. I completely agree that the world consisted of hierarchies of unequal power. That is undisputable. I’m not certain that the theoretical promise of spiritual equality was really a viable factor in how women framed their social expectations, or that secular social realities took precedence in shaping theological expectations. But, assessing the prioritization of experiences for individual people, let alone social groups, is damn near impossible, but the task I’ve taken up.

Picked up two articles by Frederick Bode that I had printed out and set aside a while back. (One from the JSH, and the other from Georgia HQ) Holy crap, I don’t think I’ve ever read something before that I so completely and utterly agreed with. And not just agreed with because it’s interpretation I find good, new, and exciting, but agreed with because I’ve been thinking the same thing based on my own research. The difficulty is integrating his work, published fifteen years ago, into my own without feeling or seeming completely derivative.

I’ve got Saturday devoted to something else entirely, but I’ll be working on this between now and Monday, when I’ll be laying out week 2 goals. So far, so good.

Accountability, week 1

Inspired by Holly Tucker’s post about writing accountability, I thought I would give this a try. And look…I’m already a day late.

I’m just trying this out and may not continue with it, but it might go something like this:

This week I am working on Chapter 2, the chapter that deals with church discipline and congregations as social agents. I got a good jump on the introduction and historiographical review over Christmas, but need to dig into the meat of the chapter. I am trying to provide a more expansive definition of discipline than just church courts as a means social control, but as the way a congregation conceives of its relationship with “the world,” and how it uses evangelical expectations to define acceptable behavior of its members in a changing secular environment. Of course, the conditions of religious communities and the world are ever changing, which give historians something to do. I spent the last few days reading articles on church discipline in the English Protestant world, including Seventeenth Century England and Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century New England. Good stuff on how the breakdown of Catholic and Anglican Church authority increased the power of congregations to regulate themselves without state aid, but also how religious pluralism/freedom in America made universal regulation simply not feasible. This makes a nice glide into the change of moral authority from community to family in the Nineteenth Century. Anyhow, the point is to get that all written out in about two to four pages. If anyone has good suggestions for articles or monographs about religious discipline in America, I’d be glad to know them. (I’ve been using articles by J.W. Black and David Brown thus far.)

Then explain what historians have observed as discipline and its secular/social facets in the antebellum south. This means taking a closer look Jean Freidman’s and Stephanie McCurry’s books, and C.V. Smith’s dissertation, while synthesizing them with the Donald Mathews framework I am using for this section, in two to four pages. Also need to look out for other secondary literature on the subject, because what I have now seems awful thin. I do have other works at hand, but suggestions are welcome.

To get through this seems like a reasonable goal. With business cranking up again requiring many errands this week, not to mention getting ready to start class next week, this might be a little ambitious. Quite a bit of reading and note taking is involved, and I find that writing historiography reviews and summarizing other scholars’ work is my most ponderous and unsatisfying writing time.

Should I, by some miracle, get past these two things, I’ll start in describing applied discipline in some Montgomery and Anson County Baptist churches and a variety of Quaker Meetings. But I wouldn’t hold my breath on that.