The Gentlemen Theologians

E. Brooks Holifield

September 25, 2025

Illustration generated using Microsoft Copilot on 14 Aug 2025. No human artist of record. Used in compliance with Microsoft Copilot terms of use.

In the fall of 1974, while casting about for a second writing project, I discovered in the Emory University library a volume by the Southern Presbyterian minister Thomas Smyth. It attracted my attention because it stood apart from the emotionalism I had associated with antebellum Southern religion. Its contents were conventionally Presbyterian, stiffly rationalistic, and stylistically stolid.  Within a couple of years, I was traveling to archives all over the South, tracking down about one hundred antebellum Southern ministers who authored such volumes.  They became my “gentlemen theologians.”

I still stand by the book, but today I would do a variety of things differently. First, I would make it clearer that I was writing about a tiny minority of urban clergy in a largely rural and uneducated region.  They were leaders in their denominations and towns, but how important were they in the broader religious culture? I’m still not sure.

The theologians read one another's books, and other clergy also read them, as did young men preparing for ministry in colleges and courses of study. But who else was familiar with the ideas?  If I were writing today, I would try to find out. In research for a later article, I found wide interest among lay people in oral debates over some abstruse theological questions. Looking into the religious sentiments expressed in the diaries and letters of antebellum American children and teenagers, North and South, I also found impressive knowledge of theology, especially among young women. It would be helpful, for the sake of comparison, to add something about the religious rhetoric of Black and white populist preachers. Did they hold the same ideas as the urban elite? How did they differ? I offered provisional answers to these questions in Theology in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003). A revised edition of The Gentlemen Theologians (Wipf and Stock, 2007) would certainly pay more attention to the audience.

I would take a different approach to the social context. The book did not ignore context.  It located the theology in an urban setting, and I would not change that.  A good number of urban congregants thought of themselves as refined people, and they scorned ignorant exhorters in the pulpit.  They encouraged a more learned style of preaching. It was no surprise that the gentlemen theologians worked for a good portion of their careers in urban or academic settings. There they found the material and social conditions—and the encouragement—that made their writing possible.

I would now give greater emphasis, however, to the social environment created by slavery. I devoted a mere half chapter to the pro-slavery arguments of the prominent clergy. Looking back, I see that the explicit pro-slavery arguments were only one expression of the congruity between rational orthodoxy and the defense of slavery. Aware that the theology was also prevalent in the Northern states, I was reluctant to view it as tied to Southern interests. William James has convinced me, though, that the same concepts can vary in meaning depending on how they are used in different settings

Today I would argue that central elements of the theology, in the Southern setting, supported a slave society. These elements include, for example, the following: (1) biblical literalism, (2) a predilection for  proof-texting, (3) a primitivist hermeneutic that accentuated the restoration of biblical institutions, (4)  a disdain for historical-critical methods of reading the Bible, (5) a providentialism that interpreted current social arrangements as an expression of God’s will, (6) an individualistic view of conversion as an experience that removed the believer from “worldly” concerns, and (7) a focus on the atoning work of Christ rather than the troublesome teachings of Jesus. 

Antebellum Southern theology cannot be interpreted simply as an ideological cover, but it nevertheless served ideological purposes. 

I tried to be rigorously fair in describing the ideas of the theologians. I would now be more open about my own liberal critique of rational orthodoxy. If I had anticipated the continuing strength these nineteenth-century ideas would have in the twenty-first century, I might have been more inclined to point out their contradictions and logical shortcomings. Many assumptions of these theologians still find expression in arguments over race, sexuality, gender, evolution, the rights of women, the books in our libraries, attitudes toward science, denominational divisions, and God’s special relation to America as a chosen nation.  So long as I remained within the nineteenth-century frame—and refrained from simply imposing twenty-first century standards—more critical evaluation could have illumined the exposition of the ideas. 

Before closing, I should mention one unfortunate flaw in the book that has tormented me for almost half a century. A simple error in math meant that I overstated the economic standing of the Southern urban clergy in relation to doctors and lawyers. My discovery of the error was dismaying. After I picked myself up from the floor, I rushed to acknowledge the error. I revised my calculations, did research on professional wealth in the North, and compared the distribution of wealth in the two regions.  The Southern urban clergy were indeed wealthy, far wealthier than their Northern counterparts, but not than lawyers and doctors. Why were they so wealthy? Partly because many of them owned other people. (See here and here)

The book was intended as a mild corrective of the tendency to view antebellum Southern religious history solely from the vantage of the emotionally ecstatic camp meetings.  Whether it succeeded at that is not for me to say.