Art in a Primitive Baptist Church?

Primitive Baptist churches are best known for what they don’t have. Most famously, you’ll seldom find any musical instruments. That’s the reason that I’ve been to so many: Primitive Baptist congregations in this part of the country have been strong supporters of Sacred Harp singing since they don’t use any instrumental accompaniment in their worship (for theological and cultural reasons that others have written about in detail).

One thing I’ve always assumed but never thought too hard about was that Primitive Baptists were also strictly iconoclastic when it comes to visual art. Primitive Baptists are not a single, centrally-organized denomination, so there are variations among congregations and associations, but in general, they follow a Calvinist-influenced perspective popular in early America that forbids artworks, especially images representing people or animals, within spaces of worship. There hasn’t been anywhere close to the degree of scholarly exploration of art in this context compared with music, since the ban on instruments cultivated unique forms of unaccompanied hymnody, whereas the ban on art, one would assume, just meant that there isn’t any art to discuss.

Yet I’ve noticed a trend in Primitive Baptist churches to display images of the church building itself. Two churches that host singings nearby are good examples.

At Poplar Springs Primitive Baptist Church near the Kansas community, there is a small painting of the church hanging on the wall just behind the pulpit.

At Holly Springs Primitive Baptist Church near Bremen, there is a photograph of the church building on one of the side walls behind the pews.

Both images avoid the taint of idolatry that a range of theologians from early Christianity to the Reformation associated with representations of humans and animals, since neither depicts anything but the church building and its surroundings. I’m reminded of the serenely spare church interiors that Pieter Saenredam painted in the Calvinist Netherlands after the Reformation, but these two images even omit the tiny worshippers that Saenredam included in many of his.

On one level, the artworks in Poplar Springs and Holly Springs are simple demonstrations of esteem for the historic buildings: we love these places enough to commemorate them with images. But what else happens when you transform a thing into an image of that same thing? If images didn’t mean something above and beyond merely documenting visually the objects they represent, there would be no need for a picture of a place where you could simply walk outside and see the real thing right there.

The signature on the painting at Poplar Springs shows that it was made by Malinda Akins in 1984, but it seems both modern and timeless. It has to be from our own era—the covered porch and rail by the steps aren’t nearly as old as the church—and although the gravestones in the cemetery look old, they are clearly newer than the building. But it doesn’t really seem like the church as we experience it now because the people and cars and coolers and all the other material objects of worship and fellowship are missing. The aesthetic, too, takes us outside the modern world since the painting, while charmingly earnest, is done in a simplified style reminiscent of historical modes of “folk” art.

The photograph at Holly Springs, although more polished in its aesthetic, also situates the church outside of time. The choice to photograph in black and white evokes a bygone era, yet the presence of the covered table and new addition to the building remind us that we’re looking at a contemporary image.

In both artworks, the sense of history pervading the present reinforces the Primitive Baptist Church’s emphasis on tradition. This is a denomination, after all, that makes frequent and emphatic use of the biblical enjoinder to seek “the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein.” Also, both artworks prominently include the cemeteries that are adjacent to each church. Expanding the view to include the rows of tombstones calls to mind the people who aren’t present in the image—the generations of congregants who built and maintained their buildings, their communities, and their faith. We are reminded that these places are sacred not just as sites of worship, but as a expressions of intergenerational human love. While portraits of their faces might be more appropriate elsewhere, images of their memorials serve just as well in this context. It doesn’t take much to see the even rows of gravestones as mirroring the congregants seated in lines on the pews when they were still alive.

No doubt folks who know more about the artists and the churches and their histories can read these artworks on much deeper levels. But even to a visitor like me, they are a reminder that these churches are more than just buildings. Works of art accomplish a kind of representation that is so much richer than mere visual transcription. Even with images that, at first glance, seem to show us nothing more than a view of the building we’re standing in, artists lead us to see through their own perspectives, transforming our vision through their experience. One could take a step back and think about how even for churches that include no images at all, numerous choices about the design, construction, finishing, furnishing, and decoration of any Primitive Baptist church direct our visual experience in deeply meaningful ways through the medium of sight. Maybe Primitive Baptists aren’t so iconoclastic after all.