John Leland: A Jeffersonian Baptist in Early America, by Eric C. Smith. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022. xiii + 264 pp. $99.00.
Eric Smith serves as the Senior Pastor of Sharon Baptist Church in Savannah, TN, and as Associate Professor of Church History at his alma mater, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Smith has written two other books on Baptists in early America, Order and Ardor: The Revival Spirituality of Oliver Hart and the Regular Baptists in Eighteenth-Century South Carolina (University of South Carolina Press, 2018), and Oliver Hart and the Rise of Baptist America (Oxford University Press, 2020). This biography of Leland fills a gaping hole in Baptist studies, as it is the first book-length treatment of this enormous figure. What Smith seeks to do in this biography is simply tell the complicated and fascinating story of John Leland (1754–1841). “What he was, by any estimation, is one of the most interesting, entertaining, and influential religious figures on the landscape of early America” (10). John Leland lived an extraordinary life, not just because he lived through unprecedented change, but because he was a significant part of that change.
This biography is mostly chronological, though in the middle chapters it is more thematic and so moves forward and backward on Leland’s timeline. Leland’s life began in New England in the turbulent period after the Great Awakening. From the very beginning, Leland is presented as a cavalier opponent to the established church. Smith recounts the humorous incident when the three-year-old Leland fled his own baptism by sprinkling because of his awareness that one could not force religion. Leland’s father was from the established Congregational Church in Massachusetts, but his mother was more influenced by the New Lights and George Whitefield. Leland’s own struggle with conversion resulted in a powerful experience of the new birth and an acceptance of many Baptist ideals.
As a young man, Leland moved to Virginia, where he spent fifteen years mostly as an itinerant minister. It was here that he began to develop and blend his new light evangelicalism, Baptist principles, and Jeffersonian individualism. He also began to confront the abuses of the Anglican Church in Virginia. Leland experienced enormous success as a populist preacher in this frontier context. His ability to control a crowd and lead them to action established him as a political force to be reckoned with. So much so that his partnership was sought out by James Madison and Thomas Jefferson both on state and national levels. Smith argues that these early experiences in Virginia instilled in Leland his famous viewpoints on the rights of conscience. In fact, Smith makes a compelling case in chapters three and four that Leland gained the substance of his convictions from Jefferson and Madison, baptized them in his Baptist beliefs, and then used these as the foundation of his religious and political involvement for the rest of his life. Smith even asserts: “When push came to shove, Leland was at his core a Jeffersonian republican first and a Baptist second” (104).
How this played out in Leland’s life is demonstrated in subsequent chapters. Smith’s main assertion that Leland was an individualist is chronicled in the many ways that Leland resisted even his own Baptist brethren. A sampling of the instances where Leland showed his disdain for the church in favor of individualism include how he resisted the need for ordination, never sought permission from any church to baptize any of the 1,500 people he baptized, eventually stopped administering and receiving communion because he saw it as unhelpful personally, resisted and lambasted Baptist associations, and even started to see the historically key Baptist practice of church discipline as too oppressive of individual piety. Because Leland lived for so long, he saw Baptists move from being marginalized and persecuted to being a significant bloc of cultural insiders with their own quasi-establishment. Leland was a champion of the former and despised the latter. He had always been able to identify with the rural, populist strain of Baptist life that emphasized the experience of the new birth over anything else. He fought tirelessly for decades to see the oppressive state-sponsored religion disestablished. And, as Smith shows, no one else could claim anywhere near the success that Leland could in these endeavors. But as Baptists became powerful and institutionalized, Leland despised their organizations, missionary efforts, and especially education. He saw it as a re-institution of all that he had fought so hard to disestablish in his early ministry. “Leland did not want a quasi-established Protestant majority in America; he wanted a free America” (219). He became a contrarian to the very movement he had helped to flourish.
How Leland’s deep commitment to individualism played out in various venues distinguishes him from the Baptists’ other key voice in the fight for religious liberty, Isaac Backus. This historical comparison is another of the key benefits of Smith’s book. Both men were clearly against the religious establishment and their oppression of religious minorities. But Backus had more in common with the established social order and their desire to have some sort of corporate public religion. Leland adamantly opposed the idea of a Christian commonwealth because he believed all people had a right to their beliefs. He rejected those things that gave appearance of a national religion, such as national fasts, national thanksgivings, government-paid chaplains, tax exemptions, and especially Sabbath laws. Both Backus and Leland saw some separation of church and state, but Smith ably shows that not even Leland would drive a hard and fast “wall of separation” between the church and state. “It is unhelpful to call Leland a ‘strict separationist’ if that term implies the creation of a totally secular public square. After all, Leland preached the gospel on the floor of Congress, voiced biblical arguments as a Massachusetts state legislator, and never (that we know of) even used the term ‘wall of separation,’ though the phrase was coined specifically for New England Baptists like him” (94). Smith’s careful presentation of this complicated debate is commendable, and this is merely one of many highly relevant theological discussions that Leland engaged, and which Baptists today also engage. Wrestling with Leland’s ideas in their context (even when he was inconsistent) is a most helpful exercise.
This brief review can only scratch the surface of the many fascinating debates and events that Smith’s book presents. For instance, I have not even mentioned the famous Cheshire Mammoth Cheese that Leland’s townspeople made and which he delivered to Jefferson for his presidential inauguration, or of Leland’s somewhat shifting antislavery views. Instead of relating all those stories here, I would recommend that readers pick up this book. Not only is the subject matter fascinating and the issues presented applicable today, but the book is also written in a highly readable style. The price of the book is unfortunate (and one can hope it will decrease over time) because this would be a helpful book not only to historians looking to read the first biography of Elder John Leland but also to interested pastors and laypeople who want to know more of their own American and Baptist history and the ideas that we have inherited and how these ideas shape life. My thanks to Eric Smith for this much needed resource.
