The Methodists and Revolutionary America, 1760-1800

The Shaping of an Evangelical Culture

Dee E. Andrews

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781400823598
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Religion

The Methodists and Revolutionary America is the first in-depth narrative of the origins of American Methodism, one of the most significant popular movements in American history. Placing Methodism's rise in the ideological context of the American Revolution and the complex social setting of the greater Middle Atlantic where it was first introduced, Dee Andrews argues that this new religion provided an alternative to the exclusionary politics of Revolutionary America. With its call to missionary preaching, its enthusiastic revivals, and its prolific religious societies, Methodism competed with republicanism for a place at the center of American culture.
Based on rare archival sources and a wealth of Wesleyan literature, this book examines all aspects of the early movement. From Methodism's Wesleyan beginnings to the prominence of women in local societies, the construction of African Methodism, the diverse social profile of Methodist men, and contests over the movement's future, Andrews charts Methodism's metamorphosis from a British missionary organization to a fully Americanized church. Weaving together narrative and analysis, Andrews explains Methodism's extraordinary popular appeal in rich and compelling new detail.

PART I

Origins

CHAPTER ONE

Raising Religious Affections

THE ANGLICAN SOCIETIES, THE WESLEYS, AND GEORGIA

At the end of the seventeenth century, the Church of England, winner of more than a century and a half of religious conflict, faced an unprecedented dilemma. While the Anglican Church remained established by law, and the numbers of subjects belonging to dissenting churches in England, Wales, and Ireland were relatively few, the church’s old rivals, the Congregationalists and Presbyterians, and new contestants, the Baptists and Quakers, had survived the turmoil of the English Revolution and its aftermath, with chapels and meetinghouses in every county of the realm. Whigs and Tories alike believed that Catholic power was in reascendance, while London filled with German and French Protestant refugees from the religious wars in Europe. The universities, the church’s intellectual well-springs, were as absorbed with the revelations of the Scientific Revolution as they were with the training of Anglican ministers. In Ireland, Anglican influence was manifestly weak among the general population. Anglican clergy and their wealthy supporters were convinced that vice—gambling, drunkenness, and prostitution—was on the rise.¹

In the American colonies the religious landscape was, if anything, more complex. With the expansion of mercantile networks into new territories after 1660, Britain’s North American empire—from the English West Indies to Nova Scotia and the Appalachian foothills on the continental western frontier—loomed as an enormous but strangely undaunting challenge for ambitious Europeans, religious and otherwise. The English conquest of these territories, in process in the Anglo-French wars, opened up entire new areas for the exercise of Anglican authority over the European, African, and Indian inhabitants. Yet, to the frustration of their Anglican opponents, in 1700 Congregationalists, Quakers, even the Dutch Reformed, and others, exercised as great authority in America as did Britain’s official church—if not more.²

As at no time in its past, the church faced the prospect of a permanent splintering of its flock. Worse yet, it confronted the possibility of an irreversible reduction of its power in society. The new attitude of many “enlightened” English observers at the end of the seventeenth century was summed up in John Locke’s liberal code: a church, any church, Locke wrote, is “a free society of men, joining together of their own accord for the public worship of God in such manner as they believe will be acceptable to the Deity for the salvation of their souls.” Regarding the place of an established church in civil society, he added, “the church itself is absolutely separate and distinct from the commonwealth and civil affairs.” In Locke’s radical redefinition of church and state, the Anglican Church was one among equals.³

In this social and intellectual context, a dual development occurred for British religious institutions. First, while Parliament continued to regulate the Dissenters and discriminate against Roman Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Unitarians, and atheists, it now granted dissenting churches two things: the right to exist, as set out by the provisions of the Toleration Act; and temporary membership in the Anglican Church for politically ambitious Dissenters, as set out by the Occasional Conformity Act. In essence these statutes guaranteed automatic status as a legal Christian to any British subject espousing belief in the Trinity. Hence Nonconformists were no longer perceived by the Anglican majority as dangerous schismatics separated from the one true church, but as Christians called by a particular name in legal distinction from the established church. English religion, that is, was denominationalized.⁴

At the same time, the Anglican Church—traditionally the purveyor of sacred ritual, arbiter of social morality, and protector of the poor in Britain and its colonies—began to compete with the dissenting churches in the propagation of the gospel at home and in America. They did so by forming missionary societies, the first, the Society for the Reformation of Manners, organized in 1691 by a cohort of clergymen and pious merchants and professionals. In 1698 and 1699, Dr. Thomas Bray, Anglican commissary for Maryland, established two further missionary spin-offs, Dr. Bray’s Associates and the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (SPCK), to support gospel work in the colonies, provide libraries to parishes in England and abroad, and educate poor children. The agency most pertinent to this study, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG), was organized by Dr. Bray and a board of lay and clerical advocates in 1701 to command the work of Anglican evangelization abroad. From these groups a series of religious societies for the encouragement of virtue and the discouragement of vice proliferated throughout England, so that by the 1730s some thirty to forty reforming societies existed in London alone.⁵ These clublike groups were bolstered by growing support for toleration and the historical conviction that the Anglican Church was at long last fulfilling the mandate of Primitive Christianity as the chief among multiple churches or “administrations” bound together in Christian charity. Thus one such persuaded Anglican wrote: “In the Primitive Ages of Christianity they say, there was, under Variety of Administrations, an illustrious Union of Affections; Light and Love were not so disjoined; Humility made them willing to stoop mutually to one another . . . .”⁶ As large sections of the church splintered into myriad parts, the original Primitive mission would survive, and members of the Anglican societies would emulate the first Christians by ministering to the unchurched and heathens, in Britain and abroad. Hence the chief task of the representatives of the religious societies and the church in America was to promote religious commitment not only among parishioners but among potential parishioners, slaves, and, wherever possible, Indians.

The SPG missionaries and their counterparts around the world, however few in number, served as models of religious inspiration for many pious Anglicans. Not least of these were the members of one Anglican household that was to have an enormous influence on the evolution of English evangelicalism, the Wesleys of Epworth, Lincolnshire. The paternal head of the Wesleys, the Reverend Samuel Wesley, son of a dissenting minister, was educated at Newington Green, a Congregational school in London where he was a schoolmate of Daniel Defoe. Wesley had returned to the Anglican faith as a young man, matriculated at Oxford, and, for a time, considered a career as a missionary in India.⁷ Susanna Wesley, also the child of Puritans—her father, Samuel Annesley, was the pastor of a large and distinguished London congregation—had likewise returned to her family’s ancestral Anglicanism, a decision she confirmed by marrying Samuel in about 1689. At the Epworth rectory the Wesleys raised a family of nine offspring. In their mother’s words, the Wesley children “were always put into a regular method of living, in such things as they were capable of, from their birth.” In the manner of a religious order, the Wesley children were trained to eat, nap, take medicine, and ask assistance of the servants by means of a regimen superintended by their mother. The aim, as Susanna herself stressed, was to “conquer their will, and bring them to an obedient temper.”⁸ Samuel’s missionary interests were satisfied by his founding of a small religious society, associated with the SPCK, for prayer and Scripture reading and for the translation of pious tracts from Dutch and German into the “vulgar tongue” for distribution among the English.⁹

In her experiments with behavior modification and family management, Samuel’s wife Susanna sustained a strong Puritan strain, probably drawn from her own childhood, that would have been familiar to many New Englanders.¹⁰ But by the birth of her later children, two other influences were equally important. Like many eighteenth-century Christians and members of the Anglican religious societies, Susanna evinced a fascination with the Primitive Church, both for the belief that revelation had played a direct role in the affairs of the early church and as a model of practical Christianity. In an extended dialogue composed for her daughter in 1711/12 and foreshadowing her son John’s theological preoccupations, Susanna carefully set forth a proof of God and the necessity of both enlightened reason and revelation in Christian belief. “Christian religion,” she wrote, “as distinguished from natural religion,” that is, the religion of Adam in Paradise, “is a complete system of rules for faith and practice, calculated for the present state of mankind.” “It is revelation,” she continued, “has instructed us in the knowledge of our own condition [since Adam’s fall]; how human nature became corrupted; and by what means it is capable of being restored to its primitive purity.” In short, “our Saviour came, not to teach us a new, but to retrieve the old, natural religion, and to put us again under the conduct of right reason, by the direction and assistance of his Holy Spirit.” The soul might be returned to its uncorrupted state by practical piety, a disciplined will, and openness to divine love.¹¹

While her husband was away on business in London, Susanna Wesley began to convene her children for Sunday prayer and sermon readings, and she soon attracted members of the parish who crowded into the rectory to hear the minister’s wife “preach.” Samuel objected to the practice for its appearance of impropriety and because of what he called Susanna’s “sex.” Foreshadowing her son’s later indifference to parochial rules, Susanna firmly replied and at some length: “[A]s I am a woman, so I am also mistress of a large family. And though the superior charge of the souls contained in it lies upon you, as head of the family, and as their minister; yet in your absence I cannot but look upon every soul you leave under my care as a talent committed to me, under a trust, by the great Lord of all the families of heaven and earth.”¹²

One of the significant influences on Susanna’s religious evolution at this time was the missionary tract, Propagation of the Gospel in the East, discovered by one of the Wesley children in Samuel Wesley’s library. From this brief but colorful narrative, Susanna learned of the efforts of two Lutheran ministers to establish charity schools for the “Training up of Children” in Tranquebar on the southeastern coast of India. At the request of German settlers living in the area, they also initiated an “Exercise of Piety in our own House,” which became so popular that the Danish church in Tranquebar permitted them to preach on its premises. Building a chapel on the outskirts of the settlement, the missionaries, in keeping with the new culture of toleration, invited everyone to attend, “let him be Heathen, Mahometan, Papist, or Protestant.”¹³ Susanna reported to her husband, “I was never, I think, more affected with anything than with the relation of their travels; and was exceeding pleased with the noble design they were engaged in.” It now came to her that although she was “not a man nor a minister of the gospel, and so, cannot be employed in such a worthy employment as they were,” there was evangelical work she could do. A missionary within her own household, Susanna initiated weekly meetings with each of her children to examine their spiritual state. She also began to speak “more freely and affectionately than before” with neighbors continuing to attend her impromptu meetings, their numbers growing to more than two hundred listeners at a time.¹⁴

Susanna Wesley’s effortless application of missionary methods to household management reflected the degree to which devout members of the established church, not least importantly Anglican women, imbibed the changes transforming religious culture after the Glorious Revolution: the increasingly interdenominational inspiration for religious proselytizing (the Tranquebar missionaries, for one example, were German Lutherans rather than Anglican employees of the SPG), the appeal to the English of the “reformation of manners,” the fascination with “heathens” on the peripheries of empire, and the understanding that the call to the unconverted might be made closer to home, in the household or cottage sphere, possibly by an amateur preacher, possibly by a woman.

The multiple inspirations that informed the imaginations of two of the Wesley children, John and Charles, born respectively in 1703 and 1707, may be discovered in their mother’s household evangelizing. Beginning life as prototypes of young East Indians—unshaped and ripe for the gospel—the Wesley boys learned early that their mother’s chief task in rearing them was to turn their wills, forcibly if necessary, to God. Her role, that is, was to convert them.¹⁵ The Wesley brothers were to become the most ambitious and successful shapers of religious discourse in eighteenth-century Britain. But initially they were hardly distinguishable from other pious young men attracted to the Anglican reforming societies as they settled into comfortable collegiate careers at Oxford, their father’s alma mater. In 1725, John was ordained deacon and, in 1726, elected a fellow at Lincoln College. The brothers enjoyed the life of gentlemen scholars until about February 1730, when John, inspired by the Pietist writings of William Law, joined Charles and two of Charles’s fellow students at Merton College in the forming of their own religious society, one of several extraecclesiastical prayer groups at the university. Their stated aim was to aspire to the practice of “holy living,” described by Law and set out in late medieval and English Reformation tracts like Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ and Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Living and Holy Dying. Among Charles’s fellow undergraduates, the Merton College group came to be known by the sarcastic sobriquet “The Holy Club.”¹⁶

The ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Introduction How American Was Early American Methodism?
• Part I: Origins
• Part II: Social Change
• Part III: Politics
• Conclusion A Plain Gospel for a Plain People
• Appendixes
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Index