Jefferson Baptist Church (Location Key)

Baptists are one of the four main Protestant groups in Jefferson, along with Presbyterians, Methodists and Episcopalians. Five unnamed Baptist ministers are mentioned in various texts, but only two fictions refer to the Baptist church as a location, and neither uses it as the location for an event, so it is never described. The closest thing to a description is the account in The Mansion of Flem Snopes' contribution to the church as part of his plan to achieve respectability: the novel notes "the outward and augmented physical aspect of the edifice" which his money has paid for (461). On the other hand, a church with Flem inside it should probably be seen as a whited sepulcher. The only other member of the Baptist congregation mentioned by name is Mr. Stovall in "That Evening Sun," the deacon in the church who kicks Nancy in the mouth when she publicly rebukes him for not paying her for sex the last "three times" (291). This behavior does not prevent the Baptist minister in Sanctuary from preaching a sermon that, according to Horace Benbow's second-hand account, says that Lee Goodwin and Ruby Lamar "should both be burned" as adulterers (128).