In this new study of Baptists in eighteenth-century British North America, Janet Moore Lindman argues, “The success of the Baptist church was predicated on its ability to foster concurrently a radical spiritual ethos and a conservative social outlook” (7). Lindman complicates previous histories of American Baptists that tracked their evolution from early gender egalitarianism and social marginalization, to denominational institutionalization and social acceptance following the American Revolution. Instead, she claims, from the very beginning Baptists pursued a “paradox of piety” (181); they promoted an ideal of spiritual equality among Church members while at the same time being influenced by common social ideas about race and gender, which placed white men in positions of authority and white women and black men and women in positions of subordination. This paradox did not go uncontested, however. African American and white female Baptists frequently fought, sometimes successfully, to have greater influence in Church matters, especially, as Susan Juster also has argued, during the Great Awakening of the 1740s, when a focus on spiritual release and freedom of expression sometimes undermined the hierarchical order within Churches.

Using an impressive number and variety of published and unpublished sources, from Church records and personal diaries, to theological treatises and eighteenth-century histories of Baptists, Lindman compares the development of Baptism in two regions, the Delaware Valley (eastern Pennsylvania, dominated by religiously tolerant Quakers) and the Chesapeake (Virginia, dominated by intolerant Anglicans), where, she argues, differing social and religious environments offered different challenges to the establishment of Churches. The author moves among historical methods: chapters 1 and 2 are institutional histories of Baptist communities in Pennsylvania and Virginia; chapters 3, 4, and 5 present histories of the body by focusing on the “triumvirate” of Baptist practice—conversion, rituals, and discipline; and chapters 6 (on white women), 7 (on African Americans), and 8 (on white men) are race and gender histories.

In her introduction Lindman characterizes eighteenth-century Baptism as, fundamentally, a “body-centered religion,” but the Baptist body contained a paradox: the intense bodily release of conversion supported the ideal of spiritual egalitarianism, while embodying one's faith properly post-conversion required extreme bodily restraint and produced hierarchies within Churches (2). However, in part because the book's introduction does not provide an explicit overview of the chapters that follow and the connections among them, the book as a whole does not always locate the body as the central medium of Baptist faith and life; the first two and the last three chapters say virtually nothing about bodies. Although the final chapters present finely nuanced studies of how issues of gender and race played out within Baptist Churches, they offer little regarding actual embodiments of those issues. In the chapter on African Americans, for instance, Lindman mentions the segregation within mixed-race Churches (for example, separate doors and seating areas for whites and blacks) that began early in the 1800s, but she does not reflect on this spatial segregation of racially inscribed bodies, especially as it contrasted with the integration of black and white bodies in mixed-race Churches throughout the 1700s. What might it have meant that black and white Church members (apparently) kissed each other on the cheek with the “kiss of charity” or washed each other's feet—but then later refused to touch each other or even sit on the same side of the church? Such a close reading of bodily exchanges might have opened up more fully the ways Baptists embodied racial and gender differences, first in contrast to and then in alignment with secular social values, and why.

That said, the heart of the book and its most original and engaging aspect are the middle three chapters, which do present a lucid, focused investigation of bodies and embodiment. Lindman does close readings of individuals' conversions as radical physical and emotional experiences that were required for entrée into the Baptist community. New converts and established members regularly engaged in Church ritual, “a set of movements, postures, and gestures,” so that “Baptist bodies sustained appropriate belief and behavior, … spiritual identity, and sense of religious community” (73), something like Catherine Bell's description of the “ritualized body.” Nine rites were available to Baptists; the primary one was adult baptism by immersion in a natural body of water. Here Lindman excels at detailing the physical setting, physiological sensations (imagine being plunged into a river where six-inch-thick ice must first be broken open), and social and spiritual meanings that constellated in the “theater of baptism” (79). Other rites also involved close physical interactions, such as sharing of food, laying on of hands, and two already mentioned: foot-washing and kissing. Finally, the third chapter on bodies focuses on the disciplinary procedures that Baptist Churches practiced to regulate members' behavior and maintain order within the Church body. Three categories of offenses—religious, such as working on Sunday; social, such as dancing and playing cards; and sexual, such as fornication and adultery—came to be identified with racial and gender distinctions, with, for example, white women and African Americans more likely to be accused of sexual sins than were white men. Informed by “secular constructs of gender, race, and status,” Baptists developed “a hierarchy of body types” (103).

Bodies of Belief is a valuable contribution to current body studies, reminding readers that religiously inscribed bodies are always inscribed in other ways as well, such as by social constructions of race and gender, and these multiple layers of inscription produce complex, often conflicting, personal experiences and play out in paradoxical ways within institutional settings. Although her introduction's apparent promise of an explicit, sustained focus on Baptist bodies and meanings of embodiment throughout the book falls somewhat short, Lindman nevertheless offers an important history of Baptists in early North America that moves deftly between the Church meeting house and its larger social and cultural contexts.