Book Review: “Politics and Piety” by Aaron Menikoff
All Baptists have a pietistic bent, but many also employed political action for societal improvement.
Politics and Piety: Baptist Social Reform in America, 1770-1860. By Aaron Menikoff. Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2014. 978-1-62564-189-2
Book and Author
Aaron Menikoff is the Senior Pastor of Mount Vernon Baptist Church in Atlanta, GA, and he is heavily involved today in church cooperation as well as pastoral training. His pastoral career (beginning in the early 2000s) was preceded by a brief political one, serving as a legislative assistant for the late United States Senator Mark O. Hatfield during the mid-1990s. Menikoff earned his Ph.D. in American Church History from The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in 2008, and this book is the published version of his dissertation. It displays his solid academic research, his natural political interests, and his compelling ecclesiastical passion.
Correcting an Omission
With this book, Menikoff tells a side of the Baptist story that many historians have overlooked and even denied. It is widely understood that Baptists are a pietistic bunch, but Menikoff argues that the “story of politics and piety in Baptist approaches to social reform [particularly during the early nineteenth century] is… more complex. All [Baptists] agreed that true religion [i.e., Christianity] was necessary for the sake of society but not all agreed how piety should exert itself in public affairs.”[1] In his own observations of the historic material, Menikoff concludes, “To my surprise, I discovered that nineteenth century Baptists in the North and the South were social reformers… Rank and file Baptists cared about more than personal faith, they longed for a virtuous nation.”[2]
Menikoff mainly focuses on Baptists in America during the early nineteenth century and their efforts to combat social ills of their time – namely chattel slavery and intemperance. Of course, Baptists “prioritized the evangelism of sinners,” but, Menikoff argues, “they sought direct action as well.”[3] That is, Baptists also applied political pressure to achieve their social aims. As Menikoff articulates it, “all Baptists shared faith in the power of personal piety to indirectly reform society but many also advocated direct social and political action” (emphasis added).[4]
Menikoff also argues that it was neither a desire for social control nor a perfectionist vision of ushering in the second coming of Christ, but a natural “evangelical impulse” that motivated Baptists to apply their private pietism in the communities around them.[5] He says that the gospel has both “a spiritual and a temporal effect.”[6] “At bottom,” writes Menikoff, “[Baptists] believed that a virtuous nation, centered on the gospel, would prosper… [Thus], virtue was the essential link between piety, evangelism, and social reform.”[7]
Menikoff engages here in an ongoing and heated debate among Baptists (and broader Evangelicalism). His book offers a corrective to what he calls a historical “omission.”[8] While some historians perceive latter nineteenth-century Baptists as shifting from an earlier Baptist posture toward social and political action – namely an aversion – Menikoff compellingly argues that earlier Baptists took a similar stance. He says, “Baptists… did not merely wait for society to change as evangelism had its intended effect. They raised their political voices… and challenged their church members to support the state for the sake of society’s welfare.”[9]
Baptist Precedent
This debate is resurfacing in popular American culture today, especially among Baptists. Like nineteenth-century Baptists in America, those of the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries are not unanimous on the relationship of church and state or on the use of political action for the improvement of society.
Baptists have always prioritized evangelism and persuasion, underscoring their theological conviction that every man must be convinced in his own mind on matters of faith. So too, Baptists have universally believed that true societal improvement – the sort that is meaningful and lasting – will only result from changed hearts and spiritually-transformed lives. However, as Menikoff has demonstrated here, it is not un-Baptist to employ societal and political pressure in an effort to improve society. Quite the contrary. Among Baptists, there is rich and extensive precedent for it.
[1] Menikoff, Politics and Piety. p. 11.
[2] Menikoff, Politics and Piety. p. xii.
[3] Menikoff, Politics and Piety. pp. 2-3.
[4] Menikoff, Politics and Piety. pp. 2-3.
[5] Menikoff, Politics and Piety. p. 8.
[6] Menikoff, Politics and Piety. p. 8.
[7] Menikoff, Politics and Piety. p. 9.
[8] Menikoff, Politics and Piety. p. 196.
[9] Menikoff, Politics and Piety. p. 195.