The study of southern Baptists in early America has resulted in several monographs that document the rise and development of Baptists from a small marginal sect in the eighteenth century to one of the largest denominations in the antebellum South. According to Jessica Madison, this scholarship has created a “‘switch’ assimilation theory” in which Baptists deserted their radical egalitarianism for social respectability and conventional patriarchy (viii–ix). She takes scholars such as Jean Friedman, Susan Juster, Christine Heyrman, and me, among others, to task for emphasizing the “gender conflict” within congregations. Instead, she argues that the Baptist community was based on an undervalued notion of “moral economy,” which she defines as a “reciprocal relationship church members were to share in all walks of life. Men and women alike were to be in subjection to the expectations of their station” (xi). Analyzing thirty Baptist church books from four regions of North and South Carolina, the author maintains that these sources “reflect the views of a representative sample of laymen and women” as well as “the consensus regarding appropriate behavior (or moral economy)” that “appears to have been remarkably uniform across time and space” (xi, xvi). The author offers data of discipline cases from the church books to support her assertions regarding accusations of gossip, heresy, and lying. She also examines census and tax records to gauge the wealth and slave ownership of white Baptists. She concludes that, though church discipline declined in Carolina Baptist churches by the 1820s, there “was no great switch during the period wherein churches abandoned a position of gender equality for advocacy of an oppressive double standard” (154).

This dissertation-cum-book lacks serious engagement with the relevant scholarship on the history of American evangelicalism, slavery, race, and gender relations in the eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century South. Though some important books from the last subfield are mentioned, such as Kathy Brown's Good Wives, Nasty Wenches and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996) and Stephanie McCurry's Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations and Political Culture in the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), there is no substantive discussion of how gender was expressed and experienced in relation to evangelicalism in the early South. Nor does the author seem to be conversant with the research on the history of masculinity, even though one chapter is entitled “Crucifying the Carnal Man.” Similarly, there is no attempt to place Carolina Baptists within their local context with discussion of recent work, such as Thomas J. Little, The Origins of Southern Evangelicalism: Religious Revivalism in the South Carolina Lowcountry, 1670–1760 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2013) and Samuel C. Smith, A Cautious Enthusiasm: Mystical Pietism and Evangelicalism in Colonial South Carolina (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2013).

The author's central argument regarding the gender equity evident in church discipline needs further explication. Though Madison makes assertions similar to Monica Najar's work on Baptists in the Upper South, she does not cite the latter's book, Evangelizing the South: A Social History of Church and State in Early America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), until the conclusion. In comparison to Najar's large database (4,000 discipline cases from seventy-eight churches in four states), Madison's small sample size means many of her claims remain unconvincing; such as discussing “falsehood” cases (taken from eleven churches over a forty year period in which thirteen women [eleven white, two black] and twenty-three men [twenty-two white, one black] were accused; all the women were excommunicated, only ten men were excommunicated), and then concluding that “discipline cases for offenses of contention reveal a uniform standard for all church members, male and female” (56). Madison references my dissertation at times as a foil to prove that male and female Baptists were treated equally in church discipline. However, citing my dissertation rather than my book, which differ substantially from one another, ignores the argument I have made that the Baptist religion was simultaneously oppressive and liberating for all members (Bodies of Belief: Baptist Community in Early America [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008], 2–3). Furthermore, though Madison states Carolina Baptists never “reversed their policy of female suffrage” as happened in New England and the Mid-Atlantic, no evidence is provided from these records to show they advocated it in the first place. Because women joined and left congregations on their own and related their conversion experiences before other members, Madison declares this gave them a “voice” in the church, again with little evidence to support this assertion. She is correct in noting “the subjection of women must be understood within the context of a larger system of subjection”; however, this does not mean gender and race played no role in the congregational politics of early Carolina Baptists (30).

While the author addresses an important concept within the early American Baptist community, her discussion of this “moral economy” remains unpersuasive. This book represents a missed opportunity to expand the literature on Baptists in the Lower South during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.