Origins of the Mountain Preacher (1981)

Preachers and lay members of the Old Regular Primitive Baptist Church at a Sandlick Association meeting near Holly Cemetary in Perry County, Kentucky, c. 1925 (Astor Dobson Collection) ORIGINS OF THE MOUNTAIN PREACHER by Robert H. Hartman In his review of Appalachian literature from its beginnings until the mid-twentieth century, Cratis Williams makes note of the portraits drawn in fiction of the mountain preacher. There is a sameness about these portraits that borders on the monotonous . In his own words, Williams sums up the character of the mountain preacher as "a Calvinist fundamentalist . . . , an emotional, irrational man of ranting zeal who always clung literally to the Bible."^ From James Hall's preacher, Zedekiah Bangs ^ down to Battle John Brand, mountain evangelist in Harriette Arnow's Hunter's Horn,3 the preacher in the hills of Appalachia is seen as narrow, harsh, condemnatory , and distrustful of all education and ideas not contained in the Bible (as he per55 ceives it). He is a figure conspicuously devoid of human compassion. He lacks common sense and common grace. His preaching is emotional to the point of being ludicrous. His religion is one of dissent and negation, one of continually harping on the people's sins which cover about everything that brought simple pleasure to the people, such as playing the fiddle and dancing. At times he seems to be little higher in status than the village fool. How did such a figure come about? Why did he take on the kind of character he did? My purpose is to trace the origins of the mountain preacher in order to gain some insight into his development, his role, and his person. The key, I think, lies in the history of the people from which he sprang, a history marked by persecution, conflict, and alienation. Although he is a direct descendant of the Great Awakening, we can go back even further in time to the emigration of the Scotch-Irish from Ulster to America, a period in which the historical events so intertwined with the character of the people as to render a substantial determination of their destiny. While they were colonized in Ulster, the Scotch-Irish were continually threatened by the Catholic peasants of Ireland on the one hand and treated cruelly by the Anglican landowners and officials on the other. Caught between the two, they struggled to maintain their identity by clinging all the more fanatically to the Scottish Calvinism of their heritage, and Calvinism that became, indeed, "the badge of their nationality in an inhospitable land.'"* The experience did not improve their religion, however; in fact, as they became more and more orthodox in their doctrinal views, their personal piety diminished, making them more susceptible to the temptations they were to meet later on the frontier in America. Here they were faced with an absolute lack of constraint, a freedom never hitherto experienced, and they had to face it without adequate leadership. According to Cowing in his study of the pre-revolutionary climate in America, "very few Scotch-educated clergy joined the exodus to America. Well-educated young clerics do not forsake the motherland unless piety is in the ascendant and God calls them into his vineyard . . . ."$ The ancestors of the mountaineer were not to have the advantage of the early Puritans who were accompanied by an educated and able clerical leadership. In the face of the conditions offered by the frontier, what leadership accompanied the migration responded with an ever-hardening orthodoxy. All comers to the ministry were required to subscribe to the Westminster Confession. Moreover, as a response to the total openness of the frontier existence, what educated clergy there were made a fateful choice: they opted to increase the external requirements of confession, thus divorcing religion from morality virtually altogether and making of religion itself little more than a formal declaration.6 I am suggesting that, as a general background, the very nature of the migration of the Scotch-Irish to America contains the seeds for what is to develop later in the form of mountain ministry and religion. Coming as an already oppressed people, they became increasingly alienated. And they lacked the credentials of education and leadership...