This collection of essays attempts to offer a corrective to certain stereotypical interpretations found in Baptist historiography. While somewhat limited in scope, this volume provides helpful clarity to complex issues in Baptist history. As editor Keith Harper promises in his introduction, these essays highlight diverse expressions of “being Baptist” and demonstrate that “Baptist identity is not static” (2), but ever-evolving from one generation to the next.

Harper has organized this book into three sections—“Key Themes,” “Biography,” and “Historiography.” Bill Leonard opens the collection by succinctly tracing early Baptists' views on the relationship between government and churches. Leonard then concludes with a discussion of the dilemmas facing twenty-first century American Baptists as they negotiate church-state issues in a religiously diverse society, encouraging both separatist and accommodationist Baptists to recall early Baptist arguments for religious liberty. Jewel Spangler follows Leonard with a study of church records to determine how Virginia Baptists practiced congregational polity in the late eighteenth century. Baptists preached a democratic message that appealed to Revolutionary era Virginians, but practice often fell short of oratory. Spangler's research reveals that while there are examples where Baptists defied gender and racial norms, the white patriarchal social structure reigned supreme in church power structures.

In the “Biography” section of the volume, James Byrd addresses the evolution of Baptist historians' treatment of Roger Williams. As Baptists moved from outsider to insider status in America during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Baptist historians proudly proclaimed Williams as one of their brethren, portraying Williams first as the ultimate defender of religious liberty, then as a selfless and benevolent patriot, and finally as a persecuted prophet. Curtis Freeman's essay examines E. Y. Mullins's difficult task of helping the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) navigate the tricky waters of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy that devoured so many other denominations. Mullins successfully led the SBC by appreciating both common sense realism and experiential theology, and combining the two in his concept of “soul competency,” which became the defining mark of Southern Baptists in the mid-twentieth century. Elizabeth Flowers offers an engaging study of how Southern Baptists have depicted famed missionary Lottie Moon as a martyr, a southern belle, a preacher, and a model of domesticity. Flowers deftly examines twentieth-century SBC history, using Lottie Moon's malleable legacy to reveal the shifting roles of women in SBC life. Christopher Evans provides an enlightening essay on Walter Rauschenbusch's legacy as a Baptist, with special attention on Rauschenbusch's critique of dispensationalism as a pessimistic theology that prompted its followers towards a selfish disregard for the social wellbeing of their neighbors. In his essay on Martin Luther King, Jr., Edward Crowther argues that King's role in the Civil Rights Movement was the logical outgrowth of his life as a Baptist minister dedicated to the social gospel movement. King's actions later in life were consistent with the beliefs he developed as a student when he first began to question the moral, cultural, and social norms of the United States. Overall, these five essays provide refreshing studies of prominent figures in American Baptist life. Each essay is well researched and challenges readers to reconsider long-held interpretations.

The final section of the volume includes five essays on Baptist historiography. John Crowley summarizes four major historical works written by Primitive Baptists that serve not only to preserve the historical record, but also to defend Primitive Baptist beliefs. James Patterson examines how historians have viewed Landmark Baptists as high-church Baptists, as a group departing from historic Baptist ecclesiology, and as proto-fundamentalists who paved the way for the late twentieth-century controversy in the Southern Baptist Convention. Patterson argues that each of these portrayals of Landmark Baptists is flawed, revealing more about the agendas of the historians than Landmark Baptists themselves. In the next essay, Paul Harvey analyzes how twentieth-century black Baptists “had to weave a version of their own history out of a complicated tangle of threads, not all of which were particularly amenable to the civil rights narrative” (254). While many black Baptist churches had historically focused on otherworldly concerns, leaders of the Civil Rights Movement created an alternative history in which black Baptists had engaged the social issues of their day, providing precedent for churches to protest injustice. Alan Scot Willis considers how Southern Baptist literature reinterpreted early American history, reconstructing the nation's founders into Christian dominionists, in an attempt to thwart the threat of communism during the Cold War. Finally, Barry Hankins chronicles treatments of the most recent Southern Baptist controversy, noting the different emphases of moderate and conservative historians and providing the most substantial historiographical study of this controversy to date. The essays in this section demonstrate how Baptists, particularly in the twentieth century, have allowed present-day concerns to overwhelm historical accuracy.

The major critique of this volume is its narrow regional and historical focus. Ten of the twelve essays deal specifically with Baptists in the southern U.S. The other two essays discuss colonial New England and early twentieth-century New York Baptists; no mention is made of Baptists west of the Mississippi. Similarly, the essays focus largely on twentieth-century Baptists. Eight of the essays examine subjects limited to the twentieth century, and seven of those focus solely on twentieth-century southern Baptists. While a wider scope would have been welcome, the essays reflect first-rate scholarship and are engaging as a whole. In his introduction, Harper states that he hopes that “these essays will offer fresh perspectives on who Baptists were in the past so that we may more clearly see who they are in the present” (8). Through a Glass Darkly successfully fulfills Harper's purpose. This collection provides clarifying portraits of past Baptists and sheds light on the ways Baptist history has been used in contemporary struggles.