Provides an illuminating look at the diverse world of Black religious life in North America, focusing particularly outside of mainstream Christian churches From the Moorish Science Temple to the Peace Mission Movement of Father Divine to the Commandment Keepers sect of Black Judaism, myriad Black new religious movements developed during the time of the Great Migration. Many of these stood outside of Christianity, but some remained at least partially within the Christian fold. The Black Coptic Church is one of these. Black Coptics combined elements of Black Protestant and Black Hebrew traditions with Ethiopianism as a way of constructing a divine racial identity that embraced the idea of a royal Egyptian heritage for its African American followers, a heroic identity that was in stark contrast to the racial identity imposed on African Americans by the white dominant culture. This embrace of a royal Blackness—what McKinnis calls an act of “fugitive spirituality”—illuminates how the Black Coptic tradition in Chicago and beyond uniquely employs a religio-performative imagination. McKinnis asks, ‘What does it mean to imagine Blackness?’ Drawing on ten years of archival research and interviews with current members of the church, The Black Coptic Church offers a look at a group that insisted on its own understanding of its divine Blackness. In the process, it provides a more complex look at the diverse world of Black religious life in North America, particularly within non-mainstream Christian churches.

Between 1776 and the mid-1800s, the number of Baptists in the United States grew at a staggering rate, rising from fifty thousand at the outbreak of revolution to more than a million as the nation edged toward civil war. As the Second Great Awakening swept through the Old Southwest, it generated religious enthusiasm among Methodist and Baptist converts who were intent upon replacing old forms of Protestantism with an evangelical vibrancy that reflected and often contributed to the unsettled social relations of the new republic. No place was better suited to embrace this enthusiasm than Kentucky. In Born of Water and Spirit, Richard C. Traylor explores the successes and failures of Baptists in this area, using it as a window into the elements of Baptist life that transcended locale. Traylor argues that the achievements of Baptists in Kentucky reflect, in many ways, their success and coming of age in the early national period of America. The factionalism that characterized frontier Baptists, he asserts, is an essential key to understanding who the colonial Baptists had been, who they were becoming in the late eighteenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries, and who they would become after the Civil War. In this highly nuanced study, Traylor looks at the denomination in light of what he calls its "Baptist impulse"-the movement's fluid structure and democratic spirit. These characteristics have proven to be its greatest strength as well as the source of its most terrible struggles. Yet, confronting theological clashes, along with the challenges that come with growth, forged the Baptist identity and shaped its future. The first three chapters examine the primary elements of the impulse: rituals of conversion, baptism, and communion; the Baptist preacher; and the significance of the local church to the sect. Following these chapters are explorations of the reformations and forces of change in the early to mid-1800s, the role of women and African Americans in developing the group, and the refinement and reorientation of priorities from 1840 to 1860. This important denominational history will be of great value to scholars of American religious history and the history of the early American republic.

As the story goes, an itinerant preacher once visited the Bluegrass region and proclaimed heaven to be "a mere Kentucky of a place." The Commonwealth's first Baptists certainly thought so as they began settling the region a decade before statehood. By 1785 a group of pioneering preachers formed the Elkhorn Association, widely regarded as the oldest Baptist association west of the Alleghenies. Often portrayed in the historiography as the vanguard of a new frontier democracy, the Elkhorn Association, on closer inspection, reveals itself to be far more complex. In A Mere Kentucky of a Place, Keith Harper argues that the association's Baptist ministers were neither full-fledged frontier egalitarians nor radical religionists but simply a people in transition. These ministers formed their identities in the crucible of the early national period, challenged by competing impulses, including their religious convictions, Jeffersonian Republicanism, and a rigid honor code-with mixed results. With a keen eye for human interest, Harper brings familiar historical figures such as John Gano and Elijah Craig to life as he analyzes leadership in the Elkhorn Association during the early republic. Mining the wealth of documents left by the association, Harper details the self-aware struggle of these leaders to achieve economic wealth, status, and full social and cultural acceptance, demonstrating that the Elkhorn Association holds a unique place in the story of Baptists in the "New Eden" of Kentucky. Ideal for course adoption in religious studies and students of Kentucky history, this readable work is sure to become a standard source on the history of religion on the Kentucky frontier.

This two volume hardcover set traces trhe lives and ministries of over 170 of the leading Baptist preachers in America from Hansard Knollys (1599-1691) to John Lightfoot Waller (1809-1854). Articles are written on such notable Baptists as Isaac Backus, Roger Williams, John Gano, William Rogers, Richard Furman, Jesse Mercer, Luther Rice, Adoniram Judson, Spencer Cone, George Dana Boardman and numerous others. Articles are written by such notables as Governor Winthrop, Cotton Mather, John Quincy Adams, George Bancroft, Richard Furman, Alvah Hovey, Francis Wayland, Benjamin Rush, Henry Fish, J.B. Jeter, J.L. Dagg, Richard Fuller, Basil Manly, Samuel Miller, and numerous others. " I think the book has great historical information, and gives us from the pen of many other Baptists an evaluation that show as much about their personal interests in ministry as it does about the subject they are addressing." -Dr. Tom Nettles