Reading & Libraries I || Literacy and Dissent

Literacy and DissentAuthor(s): Brett SuttonSource: Libraries & Culture, Vol. 26, No. 1, Reading & Libraries I (Winter, 1991), pp. 183-198Published by: University of Texas PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25542330 .

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Literacy and Dissent

Brett Sutton

Historical evidence suggests that Protestant dissenting movements were in

fluential in advancing the cause of literacy among the masses. This paper reviews the historical argument and then undertakes an ethnographic analysis of attitudes about literacy in a community of Primitive Baptists in the rural

southeastern United States. The analysis demonstrates that this group, which

theologically resembles some of the important dissenting movements of the

past, firmly rejects print as a medium for conveying religious knowledge. The

case demonstrates the complexity of the relationship of orality, literacy, and

society and suggests that the path from nonliterate to literate culture is not

unilinear.

Historians examining the relationship between education and religion have drawn attention in particular to the link between Protestant dissent

and the rise of literacy. Although the evidence for this case is broad, both

chronologically and geographically, it is also diffuse and rather shaky as an

explanatory argument. Indeed, no single-issue approach to literacy is likely to yield elegant explanations, because of the historical, social, and psycho

logical complexity of the phenomenon itself. But the theological element in

literacy movements is evident enough and bears further attention. This ac

count of the issue begins with a brief overview of the primary historical evidence and then continues with a more detailed traversal of the borders of

literacy, orality, and theology, using ethnographic evidence from a single

case. This approach not only illustrates some of the complexities of the rela

tionship between Protestantism and attitudes toward literacy, but also sug

gests an alternative interpretation of that relationship. In tracing the

evidence, I will follow, in general, two themes. The first theme has to do with the complexity of cultural phenomena; one of its key points is that

Brett Sutton is assistant professor of library and information science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Libraries and Culture, Vol. 26, No. 1, Winter 1991 ?1991 by the University of Texas Press, P.O. Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713



184 L&CI Literacy and Dissent

examining reading practices sociologically on the small scale permits the

construction of a more comprehensive and multidimensional picture of

literacy in society than can be achieved through the broader comparative

approach.1

The second theme is embedded in the more general issue of the relation

ship between culture and communication technologies, which includes

writing. We have a tendency, in these rational times, to see causal relation

ships between the mechanisms of communication and cultural phenomena.

Ruth Finnegan has suggested as a remedy the careful examination of con

textual evidence: "This emphasis on the significance of social and cultural

contexts means rejecting the assumption that automatic and inexorable

consequences flow from the technology itself, whether this is writing, print, or computer networks." Such an approach, she says, "queries the assump

tion that there are necessarily progressive historic stages in human society based on evolving communication technologies."2 The evidence I will pre sent is contextual in this sense, and its purpose is to sidestep questions of

causality and large-scale historical explanation and to focus instead on the

relationship between culture and literacy in a single test case.

The Historical Case

I want to begin by reviewing the argument that Protestantism and

literacy are parallel strands in the same thread. I do this neither to confirm nor to deny the argument, but simply to report it. The details are beyond

the scope of this essay, but the general argument runs as follows: traditional

Catholicism, for the average parishioner, was primarily oral, experiential,

visual, and dramatic. In spite of the church's substantial production and

preservation of written texts, literacy in Catholic contexts was reserved for

the priesthood and was not generally available to the laity. Among the goals of the various dissenting movements that arose to challenge Catholic

authority was the reduction of an oppressive ecclesiastical hierarchy, which,

the reformers believed, prevented contact between believer and God, and

an important aspect of this goal was free access to sacred texts, primarily

the Bible. This led, on one hand, to the production of religious works in the

vernacular, and, on the other, to efforts to improve the reading skills of

believers so that they might read them. The Lollards of the fourteenth cen

tury, for example, under the direction of John Wycliffe, valued literacy as

an essential part of spiritual life and made the production in manuscript form of Bible translations, commentaries, and sermons one of their chief

occupations. The first English Bible was Lollard work. The Lollards were

committed to text specifically as a source of knowledge, and they rejected

as

idolatrous many traditional uses of the Bible as sacred object, such as the

practice of forcing reformed heretics to swear upon it.3



185

The other great reformers were also committed to making sacred texts

available in the vernacular. Lutheranism and popular literacy were strongly linked, and the church contributed to the effort in a variety of ways, rang

ing from educational reform to publishing on a grand scale. One estimate

concludes that in the single year of 1523 Lutheran printing presses turned

out 498 different imprints, averaging a thousand copies each, about a third

of them written by Martin Luther himself.4 John Calvin, like Wycliffe, condemned high church images as idolatry, asserted that only through

Scripture, directly perceived, might the faithful discover the essential

knowledge of God, and issued blistering criticisms of Catholic claims that

images might serve as a surrogate Bible for the illiterate masses.5 Calvin's

Geneva was a home away from home for exiled English dissenters, and the

birthplace as well of the Geneva Bible, a highly antipapist English transla

tion.6 An interesting bit of library history is that among the financial con

tributors to the translation effort was John Bodley, father of Thomas

Bodley, builder of the Bodleian Library. Even though literacy was not, in itself, the primary goal of dissenting

movements, the effect of Protestant activity was

frequently to improve

education and literacy rates. Corroborating evidence for this product of

what Kenneth Lockridge calls "the Protestant impulse" comes from New

England, Scotland, and Sweden, all Protestant strongholds.7 It is, admit

tedly, a mixed picture, and in some cases the evidence is a bit sketchy (does the ability to affix one's name to a will really indicate literacy?), but the

general weight of the record seems to support the hypothesis that Protes tantism and literacy were correlates. This is particularly true for the Puri

tans, who, faithful to Reformation principles, placed great emphasis on the individual believer's unmediated access to the Word, both spoken and writ

ten. Thomas Foxcroft, pastor of Boston's First Church, wrote in 1719:

"The Word Written and Preacht is the ordinary medium of Conversion and Sanctification. Now in order to obtain these Benefits by the Word, it is

requisite, that Persons be diligent in Reading and Hearing of it."8 A variety of scholarly examinations of Puritanism have documented this

diligence, and particularly its consequences for literacy and education.

John Morgan states boldly that "by stressing familiarity not only with the content of the word but also with word-as-print, the Puritans helped to pro

mote the cultural revolution of the early modern period."9 This effort had

many dimensions: an attention to personal experience that yielded written life histories in manuscript and occasionally published forms, a respect for an intellectually disciplined piety that favored and educated ministry, the drive for improved public education culminating in the famous New

England school laws, and the leading role of the social and public libraries of New England.10 The popularity of works ranging from children's catechisms such as John Cotton's Spiritual Milk for Boston Babes to the con




voluted writings of the philosopher Petrus Ramus testify to the importance of literacy and education in Puritan society.11

A Contemporary Case

For a closer look at attitudes about literacy among a group of Protestant

dissenters, we turn to a contemporary case, a religious community in the

rural southeastern United States.121 want to be clear, right from the start,

that I am leery of the slippery slope of cross-historical comparisons. We are

dealing here not only with very different cultural conditions than are present in the historical arguments, but with very different kinds of evidence as

well. I present this case on its own merits, not in order to make any par

ticular claims about historical continuity. The comparison does insinuate

itself, however, driven mostly by the resemblance between the social and

theological conditions of this community and those that motivated Protes

tant dissent, and also by my subjects' own insistence on the purity of their

dissenting pedigree. But the distinctiveness of the local context is primary. In fact, the priority of local, messy, contradictory contextual conditions

over lean and streamlined causal principles is precisely the point. The church that is under discussion here is a community of Primitive

Baptist churches located in the uplands of the southeastern United States,

including both black and white communities, but black for the most part. These churches represent a relatively small dissenting movement within

American Protestantism.13 The Primitive Baptist Church emerged as an

identifiable group in the first half of the nineteenth century, embodying no

new religious ideas but committed to preserving traditional ones. Among

the Baptists of that era, postrevolutionary efforts to establish large-scale

missionary movements touched off a series of tumultuous schisms between

1820 and 1840, during which the Baptists sorted themselves out roughly into

two camps: the more progressive missionary Baptists, by far more numer

ous, and the antimission conservatives, at first called Old School Baptists,

but eventually known as "Primitive" Baptists, after their commitment to

the primitive apostolic church described in the New Testament.14 Now, as

then, a minority whose imminent demise is continually being predicted,

they survive under a theology whose most salient doctrine is predestination,

the concept that all salvation is foreordained and falls only upon the elect.

As a consequence of this view, the church rejects Sunday schools, revivals,

infant baptism, and all forms of proselytizing. Like their dissenting ancestors, the Primitive Baptists harbor a strong

sense of alienation from the mainstream church, which they consider anti

scriptural, if not corrupt. A general sense of martyrdom pervades the

Primitive Baptists' view of their role in the world; the church feels a sense of

solidarity and sympathy with persecuted dissenting and heretical move



187

ments, such as the Lollards, Donatists, Albigenses, and Waldenses, whom

they consider to be their true spiritual ancestors.15 The values of the church

recall those of dissenting theologies of previous centuries: individualism, local autonomy, self-discipline, introspection, doctrinal rigor, and the quest for unmediated spiritual knowledge. Although there are some theological differences, the Primitive Baptists resemble in many respects the Puritans

of England and New England, sharing with them a Calvinist sense of

spiritual destiny as a people,

an intolerance for alternative groups, and an

obsession with seeking the signs of grace in personal experiences.16

The Primitive Baptists seem to be driven by the same forces as the

Puritans, but the structure of their response is far different. The obsession

with the Word is there, and the intensive self-analysis, but what is missing is the use of the written word as a

primary medium for these inquiries.

What we find, on the contrary, is a profound suspicion of the written word,

backed up by doctrine, policy, and practice, which amounts to a coordi

nated rejection of at least some forms of literacy. What generated solidarity among the early Protestants was the common bond of shared text. The

Puritans wrote sermons, kept diaries, produced spiritual autobiographies,

and published Bibles, psalters, and catechisms.17 What generates solidarity among the Primitive Baptists is a common bond of shared experience

whose focus is communication that is primarily oral, physical, public, and

collective, reaching its peak in lively three-hour church meetings filled with

improvised chanted preaching, congregational hymn singing, and, in some

churches, shouting accompanied by various states of altered consciousness.

Forms of communication that are bound to written text have little utility in this setting, nor do those that reside at the private, personal level. Print is

barely tolerated in spiritual matters, even among skilled readers, and there

is no sympathy for the argument that printed language

can serve as a

medium for religious knowledge. All use of print in the religious setting is

pushed to the margins of experience by the intensity of community wor

ship. Here the Word is fragile and organic, not analytic: spoken, chanted,

and sung, not set down on the page. Writing is suspect in part because it is

a conscious product of the reflective self, which according to doctrine is cor

rupt and not to be trusted. With print you can be deceived, but dramatic

outpourings of speech represent direct encounters with the spirit and thus are inherently trustworthy. The spoken word is spiritually valid by virtue of its own dramatic intensity and its unavailability to conscious control. One

of the reasons, in fact, that it is so hard to learn about the Primitive Baptists is that, with a few exceptions, they have not produced a literature or de

nominational history.18

But before pursuing any further the issue of theology and culture, it is

necessary to consider an alternative explanation. Is it not possible that this

view of writing is simply an artifact of cultural conditions that have nothing




to do with religion? There is some evidence for this. In general, the rural

South has possessed a

traditionally oral culture and has remained under

educated in comparison to other parts of the country. But this argument,

however parsimonious, is only partially valid. Many of the older members

of the church community, it is true, have had little or no formal education

and are functionally illiterate, as are many of their neighbors who are not

Primitive Baptists. For others, low-level reading skills serve a functional

role but are too weak to play any part in recreation or learning. Where this

argument breaks down is with the younger, better-educated members of

the church who value reading (in its place), who are good at it, who have

jobs that require better than average reading skills, who desire good educa

tions for their children, and who even occasionally

use the library. Among

this group are successful businessmen, white-collar workers, and school

teachers: even without advanced educations, they are intelligent and dis

cerning individuals. The problem that needs explaining is why even the

church members most adept at reading nevertheless express a profound

alienation not just from religious writing, but from all use of writing in the

acquisition of learning and wisdom, which, along with drinking, dancing, and running for political office, they classify as "worldly" behavior.

Two Kinds of Literacy

That learning in any serious sense of the term can be conveyed by print is

something that the Primitive Baptists explicitly and emphatically deny. This is perhaps revealed most obviously in attitudes about the training of

ministers (called elders). In the first place, the radical form of congrega tionalist polity practiced by the Primitive Baptists, along with the tradi

tional Baptist model of the locally called farmer-preacher, leaves no room

for formal education of elders. But more than that, formal education is felt

to be alien to the qualification and training of preachers. Elders are called

by God, qualified through direct visionary experience, selected and ordained

by their fellow members, but never seminary-educated. Since preaching

is a calling, not a profession, Primitive Baptist elders are not paid. Surviv

ing today is a long-standing rejection of formally educated, professional

ministers, who at best are mistrusted or dismissed as "hirelings" and at

worst are accused of working in the service of Satan. The Primitive Baptists still hold to the attitude, dating back to the origin of the church, that

knowledge of self, truth, and God is not accessible by the usual intellectual

paths.19

Primitive Baptists, like the Puritans, believe profoundly in learning, in

the sense that one's whole life is a process of gradual discovery of the state

of one's soul. But this sort of learning is personal and intuitive, not struc

tured and formal. The children of church members, although they are



189

taught verses from the Bible, do not study it and in fact receive no formal

religious education. They do not attend Sunday schools, because there are

none, but merely absorb what they can by attending church with their

parents. Nothing, after all, can influence their state of salvation, which has

been foreordained.

The essential medium of revelation for Primitive Baptists is experience,

beginning with the personal visionary experience of grace, emotionally

charged and surreal, and continuing with the public narrative descriptions of those experiences in the setting of the church. The visions, both initially as perceived events and publicly

as poetic narratives, become dramatic

validations of the workings of grace.20

Some dimensions of the concept of experience relate to written text.

Primitive Baptists often told me that one's ability to learn from the reading of a passage of Scripture has less to do with the text or the reader's skill than

with the availability of grace at the moment of reading. We would say that

reading is an interpretive act; the Primitive Baptists say that understanding is delivered whole from an outside source. One of the leading elders, an in

telligent and articulate man with an astonishing ability to recall Scripture, claimed that he never understood the Bible until the Lord "opened it up" to him during a time of spiritual turmoil that culminated in his joining the church. It was a unique intersection of text and experience that yielded

understanding. For this elder, as for Luther and Calvin, Scripture is essen

tial; the main difference is that here the true experience of Scripture is con

veyed primarily by spiritual means. Sometimes the printed text itself is ex

pendable. It is as likely that a member's most profound experience of the Bible will consist of hearing verses spoken on the wind as of reading it from a printed source. This amounts to a theory of religious education that helps account for the Primitive Baptist distrust of print. Primitive Baptists say that, just as Christ was never

taught by man, the elect need not submit to

worldly religious education.

Even the acquisition of technical literacy skills may be attributed to the work of the spirit. One elder, now himself an old man, recalls his father, who, on his very first day of school?this would have been around the turn of the

century?was struck on the head by his teacher for disobedience and never

returned. Yet he found his way to a neighborhood man who taught him to read and write. Some years later a local school official happened to see a letter the young man had written, admired his penmanship, and invited him to

become a teacher. He did so and taught school for twenty-seven years, never

having been to school himself. The story, repeated often in the community, is not told as a defense of literacy, but as proof that, if God wants you to read and write, the lack of formal schooling is no liability. The credit in this story goes not to the teacher for his willingness to teach, nor to the learner for his

aptitude or hard work, but to God, for scripting the entire event.




This is an interesting story, but rather atypical, because it gives more

credit than usual to the values of education and literacy. More represen

tative of Primitive Baptist attitudes about learning are stories, now nearly legends, about magnificent intellectual accomplishment achieved without

benefit of schooling. Typical is the story of an elder, now deceased, who never went to school, could neither read nor say his ABCs, but was miracu

lously able to read both the Bible and the hymnbook without effort, at least at inspired moments. Literacy here is not a skill, but a spiritual gift, like the

ability to preach or sing, which can be offered and withdrawn by the spirit, and in some circumstances cultivated, but never learned.

There are, in other words, two strata of learning in this community: the

conventional worldly sort, which church members accept as important

enough but do not respect spiritually, and the essential spiritual sort, for

which normal literacy skills are useless.

Reading and Writing

Aside from the keeping of church records, Primitive Baptist practice has

very little to do with the written word. Except for the Bible, which is an ex

ception because it is the work of God, books are rare in Primitive Baptist households. The only book besides the Bible used with any regularity is a

pocket-sized, text-only hymnbook (the singers use traditional tunes, another index of orality), in continuous use and unchanged since its

publication in 1841.21 Significantly, the hymnbook, though ever-present, is

rarely used during singing because the congregations know most of their

favorite texts by heart. The use of pedagogical or supplementary religious literature is next to nonexistent. In all my visits to the homes of church

members, only once did I encounter a religious work other than the Bible,

which happened to be a reprint of Gill's Complete Body of Practical and Doc

trinal Divinity, a work by the eighteenth-century Baptist John Gill that was

available from a mail-order company operated by a more progressive

Primitive Baptist organization. This book was in the possession of an elderly

preacher, himself only a marginal reader. On glancing through the book, I noticed that he had written "TAKE HEED" in blue ballpoint pen across

one of the pages?not in the margins but in large letters across the text

itself. It seemed to me to be not typical scholar's marginalia, but a gesture more narrative and responsorial than reflective, oral in spirit if not in fact.

My impression was that the book had for him as much iconic as literary value.

Minutes are the only written records the Primitive Baptists keep, and

they tend to be rather cursory and awkwardly written, a contrast in every

way with the oral narrative brilliance of the worship services.22 Because of

the general lack of interest among Primitive Baptists in formal commen



191

tary, there is no significant publishing effort, and only a few denomina

tional periodicals, which hardly anyone in this community reads. Pub

lishers serving the community tend to provide annual association minutes,

hymnbooks, and little else. I have heard of two Primitive Baptist libraries

and visited one of them, which had few visitors, most of whom were in

terested not in the small collection of religious books, but in the genealogical

possibilities of extensive runs of association minutes, some of them going back to the nineteenth century. Primitive Baptists are characteristically

disputatious and love to argue about doctrine, but are inclined to reject

writing about religion as "only man talking" and of little spiritual value.

Oral debate is a valid and noble medium for these discussions. Elders will

sit long into the night arguing theological points, but these are communal

settings, participative and nonlinear; the model of the studious, reflective

minister, quietly at work in his study, does not apply here.

Text and Performance

The mode of communication that serves as the model for all other forms

in the Primitive Baptist church is the sermon. Preaching is the featured part of the Sunday meeting, and the ability to preach represents the supreme

spiritual gift. All other events, both verbal and nonverbal, are situated

within the context of preaching and are dynamically linked to it.23 Sermons

are improvisational and metric, designed for the ear and not for the eye. An

elder would be ashamed to plan a sermon in advance and would never, ever

write anything down, because that would demonstrate the failure of faith.

One elder, intending to shock the congregation, told them as he began to

speak, "I believe in a wrote-down sermon." After pausing for effect, he

continued, thumping his chest, "not in pencil and paper, but wrote down

in the heart. Nobody can't erase it out. Don't need sunlight or lamplight to

read it. You can read it with your eyes closed."

Primitive Baptists, like the Puritans, are sensitive to the state of their

souls with respect to grace and thus eagerly anticipate spiritual validation of

their elect status. For traditional Protestants, this quest led to the wide

spread production of written narratives of personal spiritual experience.

The Primitive Baptists, too, are constantly occupied with personal ex

perience, but experience for them is visionary and the narratives are

typically spoken, not written. Especially in the black branch of the church, the personal visionary experience is a medium for regenerating the spirit in

the public setting of the church meeting. The urge is not to preserve the

narrative in print, but to speak it, and in speaking to relive it and revive it as a

spiritual event. These narratives are "texts" only by extension and

contain many more dimensions than the verbal: pitch, tempo, rhythm,

gesture, and congregational response are as much a part of the event as the



192 \j&CILiteracy and Dissent

text itself. A piece of print pales by comparison. Preaching, in fact, often includes vision narratives, poetically recreated. Like the Puritans, Primitive

Baptists are obsessed with the urge to share the personal experience, to

validate it by making it collective, but their view of writing as a worldly ac

tivity leads them to reject the temptation to write it down. Here is one elder's account:

And another thing?all of these writeups can get a man confused.

Tell you the reason why. Year of nineteen, I believe it was, and fifty seven, I made a little small crop of tobacco here. I got that harvested, and my wife [was] out working, a thought just came to me that I

would write a book on my experience, and I'd put it on the market. . . .

But, you know, year and year, the time come, I thought on it

more and more. And I was just, in my imagination . . .

just about

ready to start writing on this book, I say, maybe tomorrow. So that

night, when I laid down, I prayed to the Lord about it. Was it right? And you know, that night, up there at the ceiling, a large family Bible, open, just came right on down, and right across my heart. And

you know, that desire left me. There wasn't a word spoke, but God

just showed me, "I already done written my law in your heart, writ

ten it in your mind. That's enough for you to go by." And so the desire left me to write that book.

This was not a question of poor reading and writing skills rationalized. The

speaker was a good reader, although not a habitual one. But for him

writing was incapable of doing justice to the experience.

The Bible

This brings us to the important issue of the Bible. The Bible, of course, is at the center of the history of Protestant literacy. Access to the Scriptures in

the vernacular was a keystone of the dissenting tradition and a focal point of

literacy efforts. But here, as in other areas, the Primitive Baptists simply do

not fit the model. Primitive Baptists trust the Bible not because it is written, but because it is God's word. No corrections or refinements to this work are

necessary, and they reject other translations as representing human in

terference. One elder made this critical distinction in rejecting secondary works that deal with the Bible: "See, there's a Bible history, and a Bible.

Now, you take that Bible history, it's got the same words as the Bible, but

it's got them written different. Man's written that."

Mysterious and inspired in its creation, the Bible cannot be read spiri tually without spiritual preparation. It is commonplace in this community to hear stories of reading without understanding. One elder, whose father



193

encouraged him to learn to read, reports that he had read the entire Bible

by age fifteen, but confessed that he never felt that he was any closer to God

for it. Only after a series of dramatic visionary events did he feel he had a

real grasp of the Bible. "If reading the Bible could make you wise," he

said, "I'd be the wisest man talking."

There are two consequences of this view. One is that there is not much

value in simply reading the Bible as a daily routine. No one in this com

munity ever suggested that you should read the Bible because it is good for

you or that you should approach it in a systematic way. Pious though they

may be, some members readily admit to having given up altogether on per sonal Bible reading for a range of reasons, from lack of interest to old age to

weak nerves. Some said it just put them to sleep. The other consequence is

the inverse: if you do read the Bible and it does you good, it is because the

spirit has, in effect, forced it on you. Bible reading in church will never put you to sleep. When elders read the

morning Scripture during a

meeting, they do not select a passage in ad

vance, but wait to see what the spirit directs them to read. Sometimes they

select a passage in aleatory fashion, literally reading the first passage they

happen to turn to (for the readers, it is a special passage, directed to their

attention by the spirit). Further, elders rarely read the text through, but

take it as a starting point for improvised commentary that may be combined

with other passages and with personal experience and delivered in the

style of chanted preaching. Some preachers "read" from memory. I heard

one elderly

man on at least three separate occasions select as his Scripture

lesson Luke 15:11-24 (the parable of the prodigal son), which he appeared to be paraphrasing. Only when I heard him recite the text verbatim as part of a sermon, without the Bible open in front of him, did I conclude that he

was not actually reading but reproducing the text from memory.

Spoken Scripture is such a constant feature of the Primitive Baptist com

munity that it is possible to grow up "knowing" the Bible without being a

reader. Coexisting with the text itself is an oral version of the Bible, based in tradition and not always consistent with the written version. The dif

ferences between the Bible as collective knowledge and the textual version

are dramatized when an elder reads aloud. I have already mentioned one

example; here are some others. Luke 18:1 says, "Men ought always to

pray, and not to faint." The last word, in the seventeenth-century sense,

means to give up, but in these churches the word is read in the contem

porary sense, meaning that those who pray should retain consciousness.

This is not nonsense in the Primitive Baptist environment, where members

under the control of the spirit sometimes do lose consciousness, one of the

signs of grace. Another example is 2 Timothy 3:3, a list of sinful traits into

which men will fall in the last days. One of these wicked attributes is to be

"incontinent," which Primitive Baptists read as "incontent," a change




that still supports the meaning of the passage. In Proverbs 11:6, in the

phrase "transgressors shall be taken in their own naughtiness," the last

word is read as "nothingness," again a reasonable interpretation. It is dif ficult to dismiss these alternate readings

as mere errors, because they are

rooted in tradition, are shared by many readers, and, most important, are

meaningful for members of the community. It is perhaps a form of creative

adaptation that is best described by the term "hermeneutic," although perhaps not in the sense intended by Schleiermacher. What it suggests is

that biblical knowledge can be built up, layer upon layer, through the idiom of speech, without regular reference to text.

When church members do read, it is not to understand the Scripture as

an objective idea, but as a

steppingstone to self-revelation. The best Scrip

ture is personalized. One sister explained that she got worried, once, about

not reading her Bible more often and was visited by a vision in which she heard voices calling out to her what turned out to be a verse from the fifth

chapter of Matthew. The voice also was singing, "If you lack of knowledge, I'll guide you to the end." After that experience she no longer worried

about Bible reading: "If God's gonna lead me, I don't need the Bible."

Likewise, a younger elder admitted to me: "I don't usually read. I read

when something come on me to read. Pick it up and read with understand

ing, when God gives it to me to read. I told [my wife], it's not for me to do

that [read in private], because, if it was, God would make me willing to do

that. The words of the Bible is dead without living testimony. The book can

be burnt up."

The Bible plays a role in numerous visionary experiences, either as a

component of the vision itself or as validation for it. Another sister reported a long narrative in which she saw herself dying, with a church rising up over a dark horizon bathed in white light. An angel approached, who said

to her, "I came down from heaven not to do my own will but the will of

Him that sent me." When the vision had passed, the woman went to her

Bible and opened it at random, and saw before her John 6:38, the exact

passage spoken to her by the angel. A similar experience happened to a

man who, attempting to avoid the call to preach, experienced a vision in

which the Lord commanded him to read Matthew 25. He disobeyed, but

the next day, when he opened up the Bible at random, his eyes fell upon Matthew 25. The passage turned out to be the parable of the talents, whose

message is that one ought

not squander one's gifts. Church members rarely

look up specific verses; rather, Bible reading is an interactive experience in

which verses are more likely to seek out the reader, rather than the other

way around.

For most readers, the Bible is not a body of knowledge, but a mirror

reflecting personal experience. One is "given" the Bible, sometimes literal

ly. A preacher reports this vision: "I was in the pulpit, and I could see all



195

the way through the roof of the church, all the way into heaven, and the Bible

came down. When it came down, I was holding my hands up to it, and it

landed right in my hands. And it was written in red. And then the hymn book came down, and it was also written in red. So, the Lord gave me a

Bible, and he also gave me the hymnbook." Similar is the following vision

account, taken from the handwritten manuscript of an elder from another

region. In the narrative, he has just seen himself looking out a round win

dow over a large crowd of people. He hears the people saying, "God is go

ing to call one." He continues: "Then I saw a table descend from above

. . . and on top of the table was a large Bible. No one could read it through,

and a large number of people gathered around trying to make it out. Then

a white furry animal descended, and went straight to the book, licked the

words off the pages. He ran straight to the window I was looking out and

licked the words upon the glass before my eyes. A voice of multitudes said, 'He has chosen.'

"

Observations and Conclusions

Clearly literacy is a puzzle, and this paper is only a small piece. There are several messages it conveys. One underscores the linguists' finding that

speech is prior to reading. The Primitive Baptist community is interesting because it demonstrates this priority particularly clearly. Even for those

church members who have learned to read reasonably well, whether by vir

tue of opportunity or inclination or native intelligence, the powerful tool of

literacy turns out to be the wrong tool for the job. Solitary reading is too in

dividualistic, too alienated from both spirit and community, to serve in

conveying spiritual knowledge, however useful it may be in certain worldly

settings. The volume of words written can never outstrip the volume of

words spoken, and speech, in this community the most powerful form of

linguistic communication, cannot be supplanted by writing.

Another message is that the skill of reading is not isolable from the values associated with what is read, which means that reading is not just a tool,

but itself an object of meaning for the community. This is another way of

saying that the act of reading itself is constituted by the cultural environ ment rather than existing outside and beside it. For the Primitive Baptists, this means the impossibility of proposing a text without a context, or a text

inconsistent with a context. The contextual world of Primitive Baptist theology requires this dynamic dialogue with text, not reflective pursuit of the text as an

object. Without context, the text has no meaning. It is not the

text itself, but the experiential relationship between the text and its observer that is the source of power and knowledge for Primitive Baptists, the means

by which one becomes a "learned man" (or woman). Consistent with

predestinarian doctrine, this achievement of wisdom is the result of




unmerited grace, not individual effort. As the members say, "It's a gift, not a

get."

Literacy, narrowly considered, fails to incorporate this feature of

language, which Stephen Tyler calls the "unsaid": "Writing tempts us to

locate inter subjectivity in the structure of the written code, the 'trick of

writing' by which signs emerge as objective facts, separate from their con

texts. But in fact, meaning emerges, not in the saying, but in the act of say

ing, which includes context (the unsaid)."24 One of the attributes of

writing, one of its strangest powers, is its ability to transcend the unsaid.

This is why libraries are such powerful and mysterious institutions. Literate Protestantism has separated the text, the sign, from the context,

but the Primitive Baptists, abandoning the written word and transforming the objective Bible into an interactive, contextualized source of spiritual

knowledge, have managed to restore the unsaid by embedding its text in a

context. It is well to remember, of course, that the alienation of the Word

from a living context was not necessarily characteristic of original Protes

tantism, one of the motivations of which was to achieve a renewed par

ticipative orality. This is one of the primary links between the traditional

dissenters and the modern Primitive Baptists. For educators and librarians, the suggestion that some communities may

reject the values of literacy, and thus certain uses of libraries, for deeply

held cultural reasons is a disturbing one, because it presents barriers to

library use that may be very difficult to overcome. The model of literacy as a tool for personal improvement and competitive advantage, which seems

to be the flag we are currently flying in library and information science,

does not square with the Primitive Baptist scheme of things, for several

reasons. First, it undercuts the participative, collective communication that

is vital to the survival of the community. Second, it is supported by views of

self-sufficiency and the role of knowledge inconsistent with the Primitive

Baptist view of human corruption. The potential of literacy for opening up the world is exactly what church people reject. To read for wisdom, which

is to say worldly wisdom, since by definition spiritual wisdom is not

available on this channel, amounts to imprisonment, not emancipation.

The assumption that the path to wisdom is paved with books pervades the library profession. Consider this conference. On the cover of our con

ference program is a reproduction of a decorative shield bearing the in

scription "Books let us into the souls of men and lay open to us the secrets

of our own." Moreover, on the front of this podium from which I am

speaking is a university seal depicting an open book, with rays of light

emanating from it, surrounded by the motto "Lux et Veritas." In the con

text of Primitive Baptist epistemology, both of these phrases are false.

Primitive Baptists are extraordinarily concerned with their souls and search

constantly for the secrets therein, but have no illusions about the capacity of



197

books, written and read by mere mortals, to achieve this end. Nor is there,

for the Primitive Baptists, any question that light and truth can emerge

only from unmediated spiritual experience. Can we accommodate such a

profoundly nonliterate view of learning within our professional ethos? To

do so will require recognizing that neither literate nor oral modes of con

veying knowledge are inherently superior: each has its own unique virtues.

Notes

1. See, for example, Shirley Brice Heath, Ways with Words (Cambridge: Cam

bridge University Press, 1982). For arguments against oversimplified explanations of literacy, see Deborah Tannen, "The Myth of Orality and Literacy," in W.

Frawley (ed.), Linguistics and Literacy (New Jersey: Ablex, 1982); Brian V. Street, "Literacy Practices and Literacy Myths," in Roger Saljo (ed.), The Written World:

Studies in Literate Thought and Action (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1988); and Harvey J.

Graff, The Legacies of Literacy: Continuities and Contradictions in Western Culture and Society

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987). 2. Ruth Finnegan, "Communication and Technology," Language and Communi

cation 9/2-3 (1989): 117. 3. Margaret Aston, Lollards and Reformers: Images and Literacy in Late Medieval

Religion (London: Hambledon Press, 1984). 4. H. G. Haile, "Luther and Literacy," PMLA 91/5 (1976): 817.

5. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Grand

Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1981), 1.11.7, 9.

6. F. F. Bruce, The English Bible: A History of Translations (New York: Oxford,

1961), p. 90. 7. Kenneth Lockridge, Literacy in Colonial New England: An Enquiry into the Social

Context of Literacy in the Early Modern West (New York: Norton, 1974); R. A. Houston, Scottish Literacy and the Scottish Identity: Literacy and Society in Scotland and Northern

England 1600-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Egil

Johanssen, "The History of Literacy in Sweden," in Harvey J. Graff (ed.), Literacy and Social Development in the West: A Reader (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1982), pp. 151-182.

8. James Axtell, The School upon a Hill: Education and Society in Colonial New

England (New Haven: Yale, 1974), p. 13.

9. John Morgan, Godly Learning: Puritan Attitudes towards Reason, Learning, and

Education, 1560-1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 159. 10. Laurence A. Cremin, American Education: The Colonial Experience 1607-1783

(New York: Harper & Row, 1970); Daniel B. Shea, The Spiritual Autobiography in Early America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968); Jesse H. Shera, Founda

tions of the Public Library: The Origin of the Public Library Movement in New England 1629-1855 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949); Owen C. Watkins, The

Puritan Experience (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972). 11. Axtell, The School upon a Hill, p. 36; Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The

Seventeenth Century (New York: Macmillan, 1939). 12. The following account is based on the author's field research in these com

munities, conducted between 1978 and 1981.

13. More progressive Primitive Baptist organizations do exist, and there are

significant regional variations even among conservative Primitive Baptists, so the




following account cannot be considered to be broadly applicable to all groups bear

ing that name.

14. Elder C. B. Hassell and Elder Sylvester Hassell, History of the Church of God

from the Creation to A.D. 1885 (Middletown, N.Y.: Gilbert Beebe's Sons, 1886;

reprint ed., Conley, Ga.: Old School Hymnal, 1973); Byron Cecil Lambert, The

Rise of the Anti-Mission Baptists: Sources and Leaders, 1800-1840 (New York: Arno

Press, 1980). 15. Hassell and Hassell, History of the Church of God, p. 19.

16. Miller, The New England Mind, Morgan, Godly Learning. 17. Shea, The Spiritual Autobiography in Early America', Paul Delany, British Auto

biography in the Seventeenth Century (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969); Margaret Spuffort, "First Steps in Literacy: The Reading and Writing Experiences

of the Humblest 17th C. Spiritual Autobiographers," in Harvey J. Graff (ed.),

Literacy and Social Development in the West: A Reader (Cambridge: Cambridge Universi

ty Press, 1982), pp. 125-150.

18. Histories of local associations exist, but Hassell and Hassell, History of the

Church of God, is the only full-scale Primitive Baptist history. Characteristically, it

takes as its subject, not the Primitive Baptist Church itself, but the history of the true

church of God, of which the Primitive Baptists believe themselves to be the most re

cent incarnation.

19. The Black Rock Address of 1832, an important manifesto of the Old School

movement, explicitly rejects not only missions, Sunday schools, the publishing of

tracts, and the distribution of Bibles among the unsaved, but also theological schools: "This evidently implies that the revelation which God has made of himself

is a human science, on a footing with mathematics, philosophy, law, &c, which is

contrary to the general tenor of revelation, and indeed to the very idea of

revelation" (W.J. Berry [ed.], The Kehukee Declaration and Black Rock Address, with

Other Writings Relative to the Baptist Separation between 1825-1840 [Elon College, N.C.:

Primitive Publications, n.d.]). 20. Brett Sutton, "Language, Vision, Myth: The Primitive Baptist Experience of

Grace," in Robert L. Hall and Carol B. Stack (eds.), Holding on to the Land and the

Lord: Kinship, Ritual, Land Tenure and Social Policy in the Rural South (Athens: Universi

ty of Georgia Press, 1982). 21. Benjamin Lloyd, The Primitive Hymns, Spiritual Songs, and Sacred Poems (Rocky

Mount, N.C: Primitive Hymns Corp., 1971). 22. In academic culture, we suffer the opposite problem: complex writing but im

poverished speech. 23. Brett Sutton, "Speech, Chant, and Song: Patterns of Language and Action

in a Southern Church," in Ruel W. Tyson, James L. Peacock, and Daniel W. Pat

terson (eds.), Diversities of Gifts: Field Studies in Southern Religion (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988).

24. Stephen Tyler, The Said and the Unsaid: Mind, Meaning, and Culture (New York:

Academic Press, 1978), p. 464.



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Reading & Libraries I || Literacy and Dissent