In backwoods Kentucky, the churches and preachers were as primitive as the schools and teachers. There were three major varieties of religion: “very ignorant Baptists, very noisy Methodists, and very dogmatic Presbyterians.” The two Baptist ministers whom the Lincoln family knew best, William Downs and David Elkin, hardly served as models of Christian decorum. The bibulous, disorderly, lazy, and slovenly Downs founded the Little Mount Church only after the Rolling Fork congregation had expelled him. Elkin was hard-drinking, ignorant, impoverished, indolent, and dressed sloppily. Elkin’s grandson testified that “when my grandfather went to preaching he did not know but one letter in the alphabet and that was the letter O, and he knew it because it was round.”
Source: Abraham Lincoln ∶ A Life ▫𓂃