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Methodism

Yale University Press

Contents

Acknowledgments..........................................................................................xiINTRODUCTION: Methods and Methodism......................................................................1ONE. Competition and Symbiosis...........................................................................11TWO. Enlightenment and Enthusiasm........................................................................32THREE. The Medium and the Message........................................................................55FOUR. Opposition and Conflict............................................................................86FIVE. Money and Power....................................................................................109SIX. Boundaries and Margins..............................................................................131SEVEN. Mapping and Mission...............................................................................151EIGHT. Consolidation and Decline.........................................................................178NINE. Methodism's Rise and Fall..........................................................................202APPENDIX: Methodist Membership and Rates of Change, United States and United Kingdom.....................211Chronology...............................................................................................217Notes....................................................................................................227Suggestions for Further Reading..........................................................................259Index....................................................................................................269

Chapter One

In research the horizon recedes as we advance ... and research is always incomplete. -Mark Pattison, Essays and Reviews (1861)

How is the rise of a great religious movement to be explained? As the title suggests, my approach will be to use two concepts from the field of evolutionary biology, competition and symbiosis, to explain how the Methodist species survived, adapted, and expanded. As biologists learn more about the mechanisms of natural selection and genetic mutation, they have come to place more emphasis, not on the relatively well known concept of the survival of the fittest, but on the idea that species survive in a complex symbiotic relationship with one another. Similarly, systems biologists now see the need not only to understand primitive cellular tissue but also to appreciate bigger pictures of organisms and their environments. So it is with Methodism. Much has been written about the movement from an internalist point of view, stressing quite properly the infrastructure of a religious movement built for growth, but Methodist growth did not take place in isolation from other important trends in the new world order of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. How were they linked? How did the symbiosis work in practice, not just in theory?

I set out on this discussion with not a little trepidation, because previous attempts have not worn very well. Forty years ago it was fashionable to regard Methodism as expressly a counter-enlightenment and counter-revolutionary movement that helped enslave its members to a new economic order based on factory production and raw capitalism. Much of this interpretation has withered with the Marxist and Weberian ideology that sustained it, but there are still books coming off the presses arguing that Methodism's primary appeal was to a predominantly superstitious popular culture that had been abandoned by more cultivated and rational religious institutions. The implication of all this is that Methodism was essentially a socially regressive movement, either at odds with good modernizing forces or an agent of bad modernizing forces. Those who resisted that interpretation, out of good intentions, often replaced it with an unconvincingly urbane kind of Methodism shorn of its raw populism and contributing to a new world order based on liberalism, ecumenism, and freedom of choice. Thus, neither critics nor defenders seemed able to capture the essence of a religious movement with the capacity to grow with explosive energy from very unpromising origins.

Unpromising may be an understatement. Protestant churches, suffering from external threat and internal decay, were at a low ebb in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in Europe. Under pressure from the cumulative weight of the Counter-Reformation and from vigorous policies of confessional assimilation, Protestant morale was sagging. In the England of Wesley's early manhood there were litanies of woe about the general wickedness of the age, the progress of rationalism and deism, the decline of Church courts, the existence of new proto-industrial populations wild and free from religion, the political corruption of Robert Walpole's brand of whiggery, and, whether imagined or real, the general malaise of the Church of England. European Protestantism seemed to be entering a religious ice age in which old species were more likely to disappear than new ones arise. Yet beneath the surface, vigorous new forms of life were already taking shape. Just at the point when old religious establishments began to creak, new forms of Protestant Christianity, according to W. R. Ward, "exhibited astonishing new vigour by going over wholesale to unconfessional, international, societary means of action, in which the laity paid for and often ran great machines which had no place in the traditional church orders."

One of Protestantism's great post-Reformation deficiencies, therefore, its lack of religious orders, was partly redeemed by the international mobility of pious Protestants from central Europe. The catalysts were the Moravians. An unlikely combination of Moravian and Anglican enthusiasm for mission on the frontier of Britain's new American empire soon opened up a more benign religious version of the infamous triangular trade of slavery and cotton that fueled the economics of empire. This particular religious triangle was between continental Europe, especially Halle and Hernnhut, Britain, especially London and Oxford, and Georgia, especially Savannah. Some of this was facilitated by the existence of the Hanoverian court in London, some of it was generated by the activities of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, but most of it was sustained by the remarkable speed and volume of religious communications (both of literature and personnel) in the early eighteenth century. As the expansion of Europe into the New World gathered pace in the eighteenth century, the spoils would go to those who were prepared to be mobile, and who had a powerful religious message to trade.

The message was refined in the Fetter Lane Society in London, a religious pollen factory that performed the same role for Methodism as Azusa Street did later for Pentecostalism. Fetter Lane, strategically situated in the capital city of trade and empire, was a meeting point for German visitors to London, Calvinist evangelicals, Welsh revivalists, French Prophets, London's artisan pietists, and English High Church-men like the Wesleys. Not all was sweetness and light, however. The Fetter Lane Society was repeatedly rocked by doctrinal, ecclesiological, and semi-political disagreements. Wesley was...