Going to church doesn't always make you good

By Eddie "Bush" Bernard

The first and only suspension of a church member came about seven years after the church's founding. Dr. S. E. McKinley, a native of Kentucky, was suspended from membership on June 11, 1853, after admitting that he had been drunk in church.

McKinley moved to Thibodaux in early 1853, joining the church on March 19, 1853, transferring his membership from the New School Presbyterian Church of Columbia, Tenn.

McKinley was the son of John McKinley, who served as a United States Senator for Alabama from 1826-31, a member of the U.S. House of Representatives for Alabama from 1833-35 and an associate justice on the United States Supreme Court from 1837 until his death July 19, 1852.

The younger McKinley opened a medical practice in Thibodaux, but his tenure there was short-lived. On May 29, 1853, the Session of the Presbyterian Church of Thibodaux called for McKinley to appear before it on June 11 to answer charges that he "has been grossly intoxicated in this place, as appears from the declaration of several individuals and from his own confession," according to the minutes of that meeting.

He appeared before the Session on June 11 and confessed.

"As his offense was of a grave character and generally known, and has been the cause of scandal to the Church, it was decided to suspend him, and accordingly he is suspended from the privileges of church membership until he shall have given satisfactory evidence of the genuineness of his repentance," the minutes of that meeting state.

McKinley never regained his membership in the church. By the fall he had moved to Plaquemine where he became editor of the Iberville Gazette. He corresponded frequently with Jonathan White, who, interestingly enough, vouched for McKinley's character in the June 11, 1853, edition of the Minerva: "Our friend and neighbor Dr. McKinley is pursuing the even tenor of his way by unmitigated efforts to assuage human suffering; and, as his card on another page of our journal indicates, is permanently fixed in our young city."

McKinley did not remain "permanently fixed" in Thibodaux and evidently soured on the Presbyterian Church as a whole because in 1854 he quit the Iberville Gazette to start his own newspaper, the Republican Omnibus and Catholic Herald.

It does not appear that the Catholic Herald ever got off the ground, however. It was supposed to publish its inaugural issue on Sept. 7, but it had not done so by Sept. 30, 1854, when the Minerva ran an item that had been published that week in the Atlanta Tri-Weekly Examiner noting that McKinley was in Georgia visiting.

Seven months later, the Minerva ran a notice of McKinley's marriage in New Orleans on April 5, 1855, to Jane F. Morrison of Assumption Parish. The marriage notice said McKinley was a resident of Georgia, but it did not say whether he had resumed his medical practice or had continued in his profession as an editor. They were married by a Rev. Kerr.

McKinley's name doesn't appear in any church records after 1853.

Return to church history