Methodism, Mormonism, and the Atlantic World

Christopher Jones

Cross-posted at the Juvenile Instructor.

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I recently opined on the benefits of situating the rise of Mormonism within the larger historical context of the (late) early modern Atlantic world. I would like now to briefly outline one example of what such an approach might look like. When I wrote my MA thesis on the subject of Methodist influence on early Mormonism, I was mostly interested in exploring the specific ways Methodist converts to Mormonism left their mark on early Latter-day Saint religiosity and paid little attention to the ways in which Methodism and Mormonism related to one another on a broader scale of Christian, American, or Atlantic history. In light of my more recent reading and research, however, I find it difficult to separate those two questions.

In chapter three of my thesis, I explored the ways in which Mormon converts from Methodist backgrounds understood their prior affiliation with Methodism as expressed in public sermons, tracts, and especially in private (and occasionally published) spiritual narratives. I found that contrary to sweeping assessments that Mormonism’s doctrine of “restoration made it abundantly clear that God had sanctioned one true church and that all others were false,” and that this identity left “no room for abstractions, ambiguities, or shades of gray” in the way Mormons understood Protestant traditions [1], Mormon converts from Methodism more often than not understood their conversion to Mormonism not as a wholesale rejection of Wesleyan religion, but rather as a final step in their search for truth. These converts explained that it was their former experience as Methodists that led them to accept the Mormon gospel. Methodism was thus insufficient or incomplete, not altogether incorrect, and Mormons recalled enjoying certain spiritual gifts, learning essential “truths,” and experiencing true Christian conversion during their time as adherents to Methodist teachings and churches. Joseph Smith, therefore, purportedly declared to the Methodist itinerant Peter Cartwright that “he believed that among all the Churches in the world the Methodist was the nearest right, and that, as far as they went, they were right,” and that “if the Methodists would only advance a step or two further, they would take the world. We Latter-day Saints are Methodists, as far as they have gone, only we have advanced further, and if you would come in and go with us, we could sweep not only the Methodist Church, but all others, and you would be looked up to as one of the Lord’s greatest prophets.” [2]

Related to Smith’s assertion that Methodists had “stopped short” of claiming the entire Christian gospel was the suggestion made by other converts that Methodists not only stopped short but even took a backward step by forsaking some of John Wesley’s teachings. Of course such a claim was not new or novel, and in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, many disgruntled Methodists leveled similar charges against leaders of the Methodist Episcopal Church in America and the Wesleyan Methodist Church in Great Britain, leading to a splintering of the movement over issues of church governance, mode and manner of worship, social issues, and theological emphases. Perhaps not surprisingly, it was from these several splinter groups that so many of Mormonism’s early converts and leaders came. And it was those same individuals who repeated anew the charges that mainline Methodists in the 1830s and 1840s had forsaken pure Wesleyanism. Brigham Young, who aligned himself with the Reformed Methodist Church prior to his conversion, thus had little kind to say about the Methodists of his day but held John Wesley in high regard, remarking on one occasion that he considered Wesley to be “as good [of a person] as ever walked on this earth, according to his knowledge,” and expressed his belief that “had the Priesthood been conferred upon [Wesley], he would have built up the kingdom of God in his day as it is now being built up. He would have introduced the ordinances, powers, grades, and quorums of the Priesthood.” [3] William Appleby (and Parley Pratt), meanwhile, praised Wesley’s take on spiritual gifts, and John Taylor, who led a small Methodist sect in Canada before converting to Mormonism, once accused Methodist preachers he encountered in the British Isles of forsaking their Wesleyan heritage, charging that “surely Messrs. John Wesley, John Nelson, Fletcher, and Bramwell, who were ornaments of the Methodist society, would have been ashamed to have been found in the situation in which Messrs. Heys and Livesey have placed themselves in.” [4]

I’ll leave it to others more interested in the accuracy of such charges to debate their relative merits. But it does seem clear to me that in looking at the historical trajectory of Methodism and Mormonism, one can point to ways in which Methodists did move away from key points of Wesley’s teachings and ways in which Mormonism can appropriately be seen as “restoring” some of those points. But what does all of this have to do with the Atlantic world?

Well, one of the most notable ways in which Francis Asbury, whom Wesley appointed as co-superintendent of Methodist efforts in America and who initiated the process leading to the establishment of a separate Methodist church in America (the Methodist Episcopal Church, founded in 1784), moved away from Wesley’s legacy was in his approach to missionary work. While both were proponents of aggressive and far-reaching missionary efforts, they envisioned those efforts in very different geographical terms. As Ian Straker recently noted, whereas “[John] Wesley defined the world as his parish,” and initiated a number of foreign Methodist missions, the “British born Asbury defined his world more narrowly,” limiting the missionary endeavors of his Methodist Episcopal Church largely to the North American continent (and ultimately to the United States alone). [5] While British Wesleyan missionaries continued to operate on both sides of the Atlantic (especially in Canada and the Caribbean), American Methodists aggressively spread throughout U.S. territory. In the early 19th century, Methodists became fierce advocates of American exceptionalism and in some crucial sense (my apologies to Mormonism), the MEC became the quintessential American church of the era, growing to become the largest Protestant denomination on the eve of the Civil War.

While it could be argued that Mormonism built on this pattern both in assembling an upstart and wide-reaching missionary force and in sacralizing the American landscape (and the underlying ideals of the United States), Mormonism also departed sharply from the example of Asbury and the American Methodists by restoring an emphasis on transatlantic (and indeed, worldwide) proselytization. Instead of restricting his church to the United States, Joseph Smith (like John Wesley and others before him) initiated a movement that operated in a truly Atlantic world, prompting the spread of ideas and of people back and forth across the ocean.

Interestingly, other dissident Methodists, like Lorenzo Dow and William Hammett, insisted on moving beyond the borders of the United States and across the Atlantic in their preaching careers. And other inheritors of the Wesleyan legacy, including the Holiness and (later) Pentecostal movements (whom David Hempton appropriately labeled Methodism’s “religious offspring”) also emphasized worldwide missionary programs, leading to their modern day success in Latin America and Africa, where they compete with (who else but) Mormons for converts.

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[1] Richard T. Hughes, “Soaring with the Gods: Early Mormons and the Eclipse of Religious Pluralism,” in Mormons and Mormonism: An Introduction to an American World Religion, ed. Eric A. Eliason (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 27-28, 40.

[2] Peter Cartwright, Autobiography of Peter Cartwright, with an introduction by Charles L. Wallis (Nashville: Abingdon Press reprint, 1984), 225-226.

[3] Brigham Young, “Nature of Man—Happiness—Influence of God’s Spirit Upon Mankind, etc.,” July 3, 1859, in Journal of Discourses 7:5.

[4] John Taylor, An Answer to Some False Statements and Misrepresentations made by the Rev. Robert Heys, Wesleyan Minister, in an Address to His Society in Douglas and its Vicinity, on the Subject of Mormonism (Douglas: Penrice and Wallace, 1840), 9.

[5] Ian Straker, “Comments on Selected Themes [in John H. Wigger’s American Saint: Francis Asbury and the Methodists],”Methodist History 48:4 (July 2010), 221.

Glenn Beck, Methodism, and "Black Founders"

by Christopher Jones

Glenn Beck initially drew my interest because of his Mormonism—I sensed in Beck’s conspiratorial approach to politics something reminiscent of an earlier generation of Mormon public figures. The pervading fear of socialist subversion, combined with the particularly Mormon interpretations and understandings of human agency, the methods and aims of satanic opposition, and the divinely-inspired nature of America’s Founding documents, were reminders both that the influence of Cleon Skousen and Ezra Taft Benson’s religio-political views still loomed large among a certain segment of the Mormon population and that in them lay a narrative that had the power to appeal to not only conservative Mormons but other embittered Americans as well, suspicious of the government and intent on rescuing the nation from secularism and immorality (and make no mistake, perceived secularism and immorality are as central to Beck’s movement as is some vague libertarian notion of fiscal responsibility). These topics have been discussed, analyzed, and reanalyzed at least a hundred times over by now (though some commentators rehash them anew and claim such discoveries for their own, all while butchering the identities of key people and ideas in Mormon history), and to be honest, I’ve grown weary of thinking about Beck, his Mormonism, and his agenda in general. In fact, I’d sworn off posting anything more on Beck here or at the Juvenile Instructor.

But one of Beck’s more recent forays into early American history has forced me to reconsider. It touched a nerve not because of Beck’s subtle invocation of Mormon themes, but rather because they addressed the subject of my current research—early American Methodism. Sandwiched in between Beck’s recent assertion that race relations in America were (with the exception of some unidentified “racists”) fairly harmonious before the years immediately preceding the Civil War and that provisions for Revolutionary War soldiers and veterans operated on a sort of colorblind basis is an intriguing discussion of what Beck oddly refers to as “the first real megachurch … a white and black megachurch.” The "megachurch" in question (which goes unidentified) is St. George's Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia and the central figure is Richard Allen, eventual founder of the AME Church.

“Richard Allen,” Beck explains, “was a preacher at a white church—a megachurch. … And Richard Allen, this megapreacher, he tried to segregate.” Beck’s go-to guy for all matter historical, David Barton, chimes in, noting that “In the 1790s [Allen] proposed having a black denomination. And both whites and blacks said, ‘we don’t want that. We want the integrated stuff. We don’t want separate denominations.’ There was finally an overt act of racism in one church that kind of gave him the impetus to go ahead and start a black denomination. But for years, neither blacks nor whites wanted a separate denomination ‘cause they worshipped together in those churches, in Philadelphia and elsewhere.”

Rather than focusing on each of the several problematic points raised (the insightful scholarship of Albert Raboteau, Dee Andrews, and Richard Newman is recommended for those interested), I’d like to ruminate on the meanings and implications of two particular points.

First, I was struck by Beck and Barton omitting entirely any mention of Methodism. Richard Allen is simply “a black preacher” and St. George’s is simply a generic “megachurch.” Considering that Methodist theology and worship were so central to Allen’s identity as a Christian (and as a black man), and that his "black denomination" remained within Methodist Episcopal tradition, this seems as especially odd omission. This not only simplifies and distorts the history of St. George’s (and Methodism more generally) by ignoring the complex dynamics of early American religion, but also serves as a useful means of locating this supposed bastion of interracial harmony within the tradition so many of Beck’s listeners and viewers claim as there own today—conservative evangelical Christianity. This rhetorical maneuver, then, allows these conservatives to co-opt the legacy of interracial evangelicalism in early America (in much the same way that Beck has co-opted the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement of the twentieth century).

Second, this conversation between Beck and Barton took place during a recurring segment of Beck’s show called “Founder’s Friday.” This particular episode was devoted to “Black Heroes in American History,” and was part of Beck’s stated effort to “spend more time learning about our black founders, and restoring this part of history” (a worthwhile effort, no doubt—at least theoretically). I was immediately reminded of Richard Newman’s biography of Richard Allen, Freedom’s Prophet, in which Newman sought to place Allen squarely within the tradition of America’s Founding Fathers. Echoing others, Newman reinforced the notion that Allen was a black founder, but moved beyond previous assessment by declaring that Allen was deserving of such a title not only because he founded black institutions but also because he “was essentially the forerunner of modern civil rights activists” and because “his belief in nonviolent but confrontational reform offered lessons for virtually every black leader who followed in his wake” (p. 4). As Alan Taylor summarized in his review of the book, “Allen was a Founder for all Americans. He emphasized a prophetic vision of America as a multi-racial democracy of equal rights and equal opportunity. His egalitarian vision was far more daring than anything considered by the more famous white Founders.”

In Beck’s vision of “black founders,” however, Richard Allen in cast as a foil to the interracial harmony he earlier enjoyed as a “mega-preacher” to “2,000 whites” by promoting “segregation.” Tellingly, then, what Beck sees as antithetical to his imagined ideal of American society, Newman see as admirable and daring. The implication of Beck’s narrative—that this “black preacher” and the black church he pioneered, are mere distractions to the real story of this Christian nation—serves as an interesting contrast to those who “seek a sense of authenticity” in black institutions and raises important questions about the place of the black church in the conservative white mind today.

"Thieves break through and steal" at the Methodist Archives

Paul may indeed be right that "Methodists just aren't that cool," but historical documents stolen from their archives still apparently fetch a hefty sum on the black market. Just ask William John Scott, Drew University freshman and (former) employee at the school's United Methodist Archives and History Center, who was arrested last week on charges of stealing several valuable documents from the archives (including 21 of the 23 Wesley letters the school owns, and "roughly 11 other important and historical documents, ... including letters from five United States presidents"). Scott is currently being held on $50,000 bond and could face up to 10 years in prison.

From the report in the New York Times:

The university became suspicious, according to an account provided by prosecutors, after an antiques dealer in England alerted officials in its library that he had been approached by someone offering to sell him original letters from the Wesleys. Ten of the letters arrived on March 3, via FedEx, according to the complaint, with two suffering some damage in transit.

Prosecutors said the unprofessional way the valuable documents were shipped did not sit well with the dealer, who then consulted Drew officials, given their expertise and collection of Wesleyana.

After a quick search of its archives, the university estimated that 21 to 23 of its Wesley letters appeared to be missing and contacted the F.B.I. The missing lot included a valuable letter, worth more than $5,000, from John Wesley to a friend and supporter, George Merryweather, dated Dec. 20, 1766. ...

University officials had not been aware that the presidential letters were missing until the search of the dorm room. But they were optimistic on Monday that they would ultimately recover any lost items. “For Methodists, these are treasures and so we’re hoping to get them back,” said Christopher Anderson, the Methodist librarian at Drew.

Methodists, Elizabeth Warren, the Financial Crisis, and Free Market Fundamentalism

Ask Elizabeth Warren, scourge of Wall Street bankers, how they treat consumers, and she will shake her head with indignation. She will talk about morality, about fairness, about what she calls their “let them eat cake” attitude toward taxpayers. If she is riled enough, she might even spit out the Warren version of an expletive.

“Dang gummit, somebody has got to stand up on behalf of middle-class families!” she exclaimed in a recent interview in her office here.

Yes, it’s true, I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about Methodists lately. Sure, I farmed out John Wigger’s new biography of Francis Asbury out to a couple of our blog contributors, and recently I was surveying a manuscript of a journal article which discussed the red-baiting spewed at some Methodist Church leaders in the 1950s (one of whom responded with admirable humor and restraint, I thought). But Methodists seem so, umm . . , nineteenth century somehow -- that was the Methodist century, after all. Even my several weeks at the Methodist archives at Drew University were spent in the service of a larger project that had less to do with Methodism per se than religion and civil rights more generally. Methodists just aren't that cool.

All this struck me today while reading about one of my contemporary heroes -- Elizabeth Warren, a Methodist Sunday school teacher, professor of law at Harvard Law School, congressional overseer for the TARP program, and the best-known advocate for the proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency (opposed unanimously by Senate Republicans -- thanks, guys, plus Olympia Snowe and what’s-her-name from Maine, for your heartwarming diplay of bipartisan spirit on a major national issue). The Senator from my home state, Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, is apparently too busy fulminating about denying Viagra to sex offenders to worry about a consumer financial watchdog agency. I mean, why spend time worrying about the national housing crash, predatory lenders, pay-day loan scams, and the entire structure of too-big-to-fail “insurance” companies (yeah I’m talking about you, AIG) when there is the slightest possibility that some dude somewhere might snooker his physician into getting him some Viagra. And of course the other congressional wingnuts have been preoccupied egging on the very same Tea Party protesters who hurled racial and homophobic insults at John Lewis and Barney Frank, and are now targeting Rep. Betsy Markey in my current home state of Colorado -- check Sarah Palin's Facebook page, and you'll see that I mean the term "targeting" quite literally. There's a bullseye on you, Betsy, that will make you regret voting for a very modest, limited expansion of health care to some uninsured people.

Apropos of that, I believe it is Warren that I first heard point out that medical costs were the number one cause of bankruptcy in America -- reasonably common knowledge now, not so much a few years ago when I saw her explain that.

A brief description of Professor Warren:

She is an Oklahoma native, a janitor’s daughter, a bankruptcy expert at Harvard Law School and a former Sunday School teacher who cites John Wesley — the co-founder of Methodism and a public health crusader — as an inspiration.

I’ve heard Ms. Warren on the radio, and seen her on television a number of times, and she seems equally at ease on both Jon Stewart and on Dave Ramsey -- the latter being the current reigning guru of radio financial advice. (Confusingly, Ramsey mixes sound financial advice and common-sense platitudes about staying out of debt with near-daily nonsensical screeds against Social Security and in favor of the kinds of market fundamentalism which have, in part, created the legions of people calling into his shows seeking emergency financial advice). Warren seems equally able to piss off the right-wingnuts and Timothy Geithner at the same time, an unusual quality right now.

In her pitch for a consumer financial protection agency, she speaks forthrightly to Congress, fear of failure be damned:

If that happens, Ms. Warren will still have her own platform, starting with her nearly constant stream of television appearances. Hosts and cameramen love her: she has the friendly face of a teacher, the pedigree of a top law professor, the moral force of a preacher and the plain-spoken twang of an Oklahoman.

Historically, Methodists have been pretty resistant to fundamentalism, and perhaps that helps explain why Warren, an old-fashioned and principled conservative in many ways, has emerged as the strongest proponent of consumer protections against free market fundamentalism.

I Hate Methodism; and G. K. Chesterton vs. H. L. Mencken: Battle of the Monogrammed Dudes. Surprising or Otherwise Interesting Primary Sources, Pt IV

Randall Stephens

I’ve been doing some nonfiction pleasure reading that overlaps with my work. (I try to avoid that sort of thing whenever possible, because it could nerd me out beyond all measure.) I like Herbert Asbury’s punch-punch, bludgeon, stab-stab prose. (Asbury sat at the feet of H. L. Mencken, like so many other talented, and even untalented, writers of his era.) So Asbury’s 1926 memoir about growing up in the stodgy Methodist town of Farmington, Missouri (Farmington, Misery for him) drew my eye when I saw it on a bookstore shelf some months back. As an added bonus Roy Blount, Jr. writes the insightful foreword to the 2003 edition of Up From Methodism: A Memoir of a Man Gone to the Devil. (I got it new from Half Price Books for $3.98! Half Price Books, please send the check to my office for that blurb.)

Farmington was no Manhattan. It was no Baltimore, either. In fact, it made Jefferson City, MO, look like the place to be. Columbia, seat of learning, by that logic, was Paris. Asbury—yes, bearer of that famous Methodist name and lineage—skewers the townsfolk with nary a sense of guilt. Locals are slack-jawed faith monkeys, mountebanks, dunderheads, joyless shrews, and worse. No moonshine swilling thrillbillies in pious Farmington. This hamlet was, in Iggy Pop’s words, “No fun to hang around.” Here’s a prime example of Asbury’s barbed prose (note the awesomely spare American style):

Under no circumstance could we play the fiddle in our house on Sunday, because of all music, that which came from the fiddle was the most sinful. It was the Devil's instrument. No fiddling on Sunday had been a cardinal rule of my father's family since Colonial days in Virginia, and later in Mississippi, and in North Carolina my grandmother had compelled her Negro slaves to put up their musical instruments from Saturday night to Monday morning. Eventually I took lessons from the music teacher in Farmington and learned to call the fiddle a violin, and as I grew older I played when I pleased, although not very successfully. But so long as the instrument remained a fiddle it was played in our house on Sunday on only one occasion. And then the performance was a neighborhood scandal, and only the fact that the instrument had been played by a Preacher saved us from getting into trouble with God and His representatives in Farmington.

Something else I recently came across—also written in the Jazz Age, though basically jazzless—was G. K. Chesterton’s shot across the pond. The rotund, witty defender of the faith and champion of the faithful took aim at H. L. Mencken. Mencken had gone a bit too far in his campaign to exorcise religious mania from the land. And, Chesterton wrote, religion could not be reduced to its most grotesque and wild manifestations. Just because America was thick with sawdust trail preachers spitting out idiotic sermons, it did not follow that all Christianity was as insipid or idiotic as the most simple-minded faith healer or snake juggler. Chesteron also set his sights on the Mercury editor’s high esteem of science. “The popular science, that rages in the American Press,” Chesterton mused, “is simply a dance of lunacy more ghastly than a dance of death.” Mencken is a kind of irreligious maniac. Crazed on the subject of irreligion. Sounds amazingly like current science vs. religion debates, doesn’t it?

G. K. Chesterton, “Mencken and the American Mercury,” Illustrated London News, June 23, 1928.

I have already noted that, if there is such a thing as religious mania, there is also such a thing as irreligious mania. Just recently, perhaps, it has been the commoner of the two. But a very interesting study of the matter comes from a country in which we may say, without injustice, that both are fairly common. I had occasion to remark recently, in this place, that an American paper had accused me of being an anti-American writer; and I commented on the curious irony that the American paper was itself an anti-American paper. Anyhow, most of the writers on it were at least more anti-American than I am. But, though I may be permitted thus to parry a purely personal charge, and a highly preposterous one, I should not like anyone to suppose that I do not both enjoy and value the magazine in question. I am quite well aware that Me. Mencken, the editor of the American Mercury, is really doing his duty as an American citizen in being an anti-American critic. I myself have been regarded often enough as an Anti-English critic, when I regarded myself as a patriot. In short, there are immense internal evils for Mr. Mencken to attack, and he is perfectly right to attack them. All is well so long as the good citizen abuses his own city. The trouble begins when the foreigner abuses it—or, almost as often, when the foreigner admires it.

But the particular point about the two types of madmen arises thus. It is very natural that Mr. Mencken should be mostly occupied with trying to restrain religious mania. To what extravagant lengths that sort of devotional demagogy can go in the Western democracy, it is necessary to study his notes to realise. The methods of Billy Sunday arc somewhat notorious; but compared with some of the religious ranters quoted in the magazine, one could almost mistake Billy Sunday for a rather shy and refined gentleman of the Oxford Movement. When theological problems are presented in the form of "Is God a Papa or a Father?" we all feel that the title is enough to tell us all we want to know about the sermon. When another Evangelist says that the American Radio Commission consists of five, but the one that broadcasted the Psalms only of three, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. we are, like Queen Victoria, not amused. When he observes cheerily, "We don't know what soap company broadcast in David's day, or what newspapers had a tic-up with the radio, but you are still tuning in on David's programme" ... we feel we have no strong desire to tune in on his programme. But, anyhow, the chief efforts of the American Mercury have to be directed towards this howling wilderness of sectarian sensationalism. It can hardly turn its attention to many other matters while so much of the dialectic on the other side is the multitudinous chattering of Monkeyville. The editor must face the fact: he must recognise the religious atmosphere of a Sabbath as wild as a Witches' Sabbath; he must sit tight and try to survive Sunday, or at any rate Billy Sunday. He must be grimly patient and wait till the Holy Rollers roll by.

But even here there is any amount of evidence of a quite opposite peril or potential madness. Men may be on what side they like in a controversy between Religion and Science. When both are sane, there is not the slightest difficulty about being on the side of both. But when both are insane, it is certain that Science is more insane than Religion. The popular science, that rages in the American Press and local government, is simply a dance of lunacy more ghastly than a dance of death. And an exceedingly valuable and important protest against it can be found in the same number of the Mercury from which I have picked the examples of theological hysteria. The protest is all the better because it is not the sort of protest that I should write, or that any person of my beliefs would write. The critic is writing entirely in the interests of Science, and is perfectly indifferent to the interests of Religion. He is probably quite as much of a materialist as the mad materialist; only he is not mad. And he enters a virile and telling protest against that science, which is his only religion, being dragged through the mire as a degrading superstition. He insists that most of the psycho-analysis of madness is simply mad psycho-analysis. It is a science conducted by lunatics for lunatics. Nor are there even learned and concentrated lunatics, like those who sometimes harden their hobbies into lunacies in the shadow of libraries. They seem for the most part, both in England and America, to be exceedingly cheap and superficial lunatics, who stick any random notions in their heads, as the others were supposed to stick straws in their hair. They are generally concerned with proving that people are irresponsible; and they certainly succeed in proving that some people are.

Pragmatic Saint

Editor's Note: Below is the first of two reviews/assessments I hope to post of John Wigger's new biography of Francis Asbury. The first comes from our new contributor Christopher Jones, who is studying Methodism and other subjects at William and Mary.

“The Pragmatic Saint”

Review of John Wigger, American Saint: Francis Asbury and the Methodists (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).

by Christopher Jones

“Why do we have no modern critical biography of Francis Asbury, one of the most revered and influential figures in the early republic?” (Nathan Hatch, 1989)[i]

It took twenty years, but someone has finally answered Nathan Hatch’s call for a scholarly biography of Francis Asbury. John Wigger, who studied under Hatch at Notre Dame, has published American Saint: Francis Asbury and the Methodists, a highly readable and lively portrait of the Methodist bishop who shepherded the movement through its early growing pains in America to set it on a course to become the largest Protestant denomination in antebellum America. Contradicting decades-old assessments that “no biographer should try to make [Asbury] lovable, for this he would never allow himself to be,”[ii] Wigger concludes that the exact opposite was the case: “Asbury loved and was loved, despite his flaws” (p. 416).

Wigger’s biography does much more than simply satisfy a decades-old call for a critical biography of Asbury and refute simplistic and outdated characterizations of the man, though. It challenges common assumptions about religious leadership in American history. As Wigger noted in a recent interview, one of his goals in writing this book was to “raise questions for readers about the meaning of religious leadership in America.” Attributing scholarly neglect of Asbury to the fact that he doesn’t neatly fit any of the “three camps” in which “key figures in American religious history are generally lumped” (“charismatic communicators,” “intellectuals,” and “domineering autocrats”), Wigger contends that Asbury’s life forces us to nuance such categorization and look to alternate models of religious leadership. Never known as an eloquent speaker or innovative theologian and having left behind only a scant collection of published writings, Asbury is usually characterized as a rigid autocrat singularly committed to maintaining his hierarchical control by virtue of his status as the head of the Methodist episcopacy in the United States. Such a description, according to Wigger, ignores Asbury’s deeply-rooted piety, his ability to interact and communicate with individuals in intimate settings, his sensitivity to shifts in the surrounding culture (and his related ability to react and adapt), and his organizational genius. Asbury, Wigger maintains, led by example in supervising the force of itinerant missionaries he organized and led. He steered clear of politics (basically hiding out for two solid years during the height of the Revolutionary War), lived a life of relative poverty (never owning a home or plot of land, thus shunning the things of this world), never married (in an effort to more single-mindedly serve the Church), and traveled relentlessly to both preach and maintain personal contact with those he was given charge over (so as to be able to more effectively appoint preachers to locales better suited to different personalities and backgrounds).

According to Wigger, “Asbury had a better feel for the tension between faith and culture than most of the religious leaders around him” (p. 417). He consistently navigated this tension by exhibiting a pragmatic approach to nearly all tensions within Methodism in an effort to allow the church to grow. He was committed to Arminian theology but never was as strident in his critiques of Calvinism as other Methodists (including Wesley) were. “Theological exactitude didn’t concern him as much as it did Wesley, Wigger suggests. Instead, Asbury read widely in theological and devotional writings in an effort to adequately assess “the intellectual currents of the day, so that he could guide the movement to engage them” (p. 107). He never experienced the miraculous and visionary episodes that other Methodist converts did, but forthrightly refused to automatically reject such experience as heretical or dangerous, and encouraged intimate communal gatherings (class meetings and love feasts) and later adopted camp meetings in an effort to nurture immediate and emotional religious experience. God, Asbury maintained, could manifest Himself differently to different people. While such pragmatism often allowed Methodism to prosper and grow, it sometimes had more negative consequences. Such was the case in Asbury’s shifting commitment to abolition and antislavery. Initially an advocate of requiring all Methodists to emancipate their slaves and no longer participate in the practice, Asbury later decided to allow individual conferences within the movement to decide for themselves whether local clergy and laity could own slaves and remain in good standing with the MEC. Practical commitment to institutional growth trumped ideological devotion to morality.

While Wigger’s biography thus provides a lively and provocative portrait of a complex religious leader, it also succeeds in revealing a detailed and intimate account of early American Methodism. Methodist dissenters and schismatics are granted a greater role in the story of American Methodism than in other accounts of the movement (including Wigger’s own earlier treatment, Taking Heaven by Storm), and several short but illuminating biographies of lesser-known leaders with the MEC are embedded within the larger narrative. In following Asbury’s daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly travels, relationships, and interactions, readers catch a glimpse of the growing pains associated with Methodism’s rise to prominence. Instead of simply noting that Methodism grew immensely during the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries, Wigger traces the ups and downs of that process, illustrating in the process that Methodist growth was never a guarantee, constantly being threatened by discontent dissenters, rival religious groups, and regional, theological, and ideological disputes within the MEC itself. Asbury’s singular commitment to seeing Methodism prosper in its American setting thus produced mixed results. But that commitment, combined with the dedication and piety of Asbury, qualifies him for the title of “American Saint” granted him by Wigger.

I was disappointed in Wigger’s occasional failure to engage relevant literature on certain topics. In his otherwise excellent treatment of Asbury’s complicated relationship with Richard Allen and other black Methodist preachers, for example, he fails to cite or engage Richard Newman’s insightful biography of Allen entirely (reviewed at RiAH last year). But such omissions do little to detract from the value of this perceptive and thoughtful offering from Wigger.

Throughout the book, Wigger’s admiration for Asbury shines through (he notes with apparent satisfaction in one footnote that upon completing his manuscript he “was surprised to find how closely Asbury resembled the leaders described” in a recent book on what makes modern businesses and leaders successful (p. 425, n. 17)). Perhaps previous biographers of Asbury refused to recognize as a lovable figure because they themselves felt no affection for the man. Such is not the case with Wigger. One senses in reading American Saint that Wigger sincerely enjoyed the extensive research and writing that went into this biography because he not only respects but genuinely admires Francis Asbury. Others will likely feel the same after reading the book. This is an important contribution to American religious history, and readers will discover a much more detailed and rich account of Asbury and early Methodism than what I’ve been able to cover here.

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[i] Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 220.

[ii] L.C. Rudolph, Francis Asbury (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1966), 220.

Dissertations on Dudeness, the Historical Profession, and Francis Asbury

Paul Harvey

Just following up on some of previously posted-about topics.

First, "Dissertations on His Dudeness," NY Times, December 30, has more on religion/philosophy, cult movies, and The Big Lebowski, which we had posted about here previously.

Secondly, over at Immanent Frame is more on "Religion and the Historical Profession," including several scholars weighing in on an uptick of interest in religion in the historical profession, as discussed in a recent AHA study and reported on by Inside Higher Ed; we blogged about it previously here (with links to all of the above). From the perspective of a Europeanist, Jonathan Sheehan of UC Berkeley points out that many of the great studies of the Reformation (to cite one of many examples) occurred during the alleged low period for study of religion a generation ago. He continues:

So what seems most interesting about these findings is not that we are attending to religion with renewed zeal. Rather, it is the eagerness of historians (myself included) to hitch ourselves to the religion train, to declare ourselves historians of religion, rather than historians who happen to study religious events, people, or phenomena.

Sheehan then goes on to reflect further on some of the dangers of according religion a field of autonomy that is often not so readily granted to other phenomenon: Whether it is 9/11 or modern evangelical politics, world circumstances lure us into believing in belief. They lure us into believing that, beyond the social, political, and cultural, there is a certain something, an area of faith, that stands apart. But of course, this is exactly what religions have always said about themselves. If historians don’t want do the work of religion, then I think we have to reserve judgment on the thesis of religious autonomy.

David Hollinger, the renowned intellectual historian at UC Berkeley, reflects on the necessary and healthy disconnection among some between religious faith and religion as a field of study. He writes:

Religion is too important to be left in the hands of people who believe in it. Finally, historians are coming to grips with this simple truth. Why this has happened and with what effects may differ from period to period, continent to continent, and religion to religion.

Here, I will comment on this transformation as visible in the field I know the best, 20th century United States history.The careful and sustained study of Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism in this particular field has been carried out primarily by scholars who profess some version of the faith they study. This has produced some wonderful work, and I am not suggesting that belief is a barrier to successful scholarship. But this religious demography of scholarship does narrow the inventory of perspectives brought to the field, and once in place it is self-reinforcing: it can create the impression that religious history belongs mostly to the religious, and that historians of a more secular orientation will compromise their secularity by getting involved at all. The current increase of interest in religion on the part of scholars in this field follows in large part from the breaking of the connection between belief and the object of study. Just as we have lots of studies of Nazis by people who have no sympathy for Nazism—to use an extreme example to make the point—so, too, can we have studies of Presbyterians by people who have no commitment to Presbyterianism and may indeed find its influence on American life to be more pernicious than not.

Finally, more one someone who most certainly didn't think that Methodism was "more pernicious than not" -- Francis Asbury, subject of a recent biography by John Wigger, which

we'll have further and more extensive discussions about up sometime in the next few months; we previously blogged about the book here. Wigger is interviewed about his huge new biography here and also here. Here's a little excerpt from the 2nd:

One of the things I hope this book does is raise questions for readers about the meaning of religious leadership in America. To some extent, we’ve misunderstood religious leadership. We’ve tended to focus on individuals who were great communicators, great preachers. But, if you look at the country’s largest religious movements—Methodists, Baptists, Roman Catholics—most Americans today can’t name a single figure who put these religious movements together in this country. Most Americans today don’t know who Francis Asbury is. I wanted to go back and find out what was it about Asbury that allowed him to do this with Methodism. The first thing I found was that he was never a great preacher.

Finally, I would just add that our contributor John Fea has more about all this (including a good short summary of the Immanent Frame contributions) on his own blog, so check that out too.

New Book on John Wesley and Methodism

Randall Stephens

Cambridge University Press has a marvelous series called the Cambridge Companions to Religion. Of particular interest to readers of this blog will be: Dana Evan Kaplan, ed., The Cambridge Companion to American Judaism (2005); Stephen J. Stein, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Edwards (2006); and John Coffey and Paul C. H. Lim, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism (2008).

The Cambridge Companion to John Wesley (2009), edited by Randy L. Maddox and Jason E. Vickers, is the latest installment in the series. Wesley, of course, has had an enormous influence on American Christianity. His religion of the heart "strangely warmed" continues to exercise evangelicals, members of mainstream churches, and modern-day social gospellers. Wesley once tellingly wrote: “I am not afraid that the people called Methodists should ever cease to exist either in Europe or America. But I am afraid lest they should only exist as a dead sect, having the form of religion without the power. And this undoubtedly will be the case unless they hold fast both the doctrine, spirit, and discipline with which they first set out.” Over one hundred years later, Holiness folk and Pentecostals said, "amen and amen!"

CUP summarizes Wesley's impact and describes the The Cambridge Companion to John Wesley as follows: "A leading figure in the Evangelical Revival in eighteenth-century England, John Wesley (1703–1791) is the founding father of Methodism and, by extension, of the holiness and Pentecostal movements. This Cambridge Companion offers a general, comprehensive introduction to Wesley’s life and work, and to his theological and ecclesiastical legacy. Written from various disciplinary perspectives, including history, literature, theology, and religious studies, this volume will be an invaluable aid to scholars and students, including those encountering the work and thought of Wesley for the first time."

Contents

Introduction Randy L. Maddox and Jason E. Vickers; Part I. Wesley's Context: 1. The long eighteenth century Jeremy Gregory; Part II. Wesley's Life: 2. Wesley's life and ministry Kenneth J. Collins; 3. Wesley in context David N. Hempton; Part III. Wesley's Work: 4. Wesley as revivalist / renewal leader Charles I. Wallace; 5. Wesley as preacher William J. Abraham; 6. Wesley as biblical interpreter Robert W. Wall; 7. Wesley as diarist and correspondent Ted A. Campbell; 8. Wesley as editor and publisher Isabel Rivers; 9. Wesley's engagement with the natural sciences Randy L. Maddox; 10. Wesley as adviser on health and healing Deborah Madden; 11. Wesley's theological emphases Jason E. Vickers; 12. Wesley's emphases on ethics Rebekah L. Miles; 13. Wesley's emphases on worship and the means of grace Karen B. Westerfield Tucker; Part IV. Wesley's Legacy: 14. Spread of Wesleyan Methodism Kenneth Cracknell; 15. The Holiness/Pentecostal/charismatic extension of the Wesleyan tradition Randall J. Stephens; 16. The African-American wing of the Wesleyan tradition Dennis C. Dickerson; 17. Current debates over Wesley's legacy among his progeny Sarah H. Lancaster.

American Saint

Paul Harvey

The boomlet in religious biography continues -- Joseph Smith, Aimee McPherson, George Whitefield, Dorothy Day, Walter Rauschenbusch, Henry Ward Beecher, W. E. B. DuBois, Catherine Tekakwitha, Richard Allen, Billy Graham -- all have received recent excellent scholarly biographical treatment from leading historians in the field.

Add to that list Francis Asbury, founder of Methodism in America, and the subject of John Wigger's new biography American Saint: Francis Asbury and the Methodists (Oxford, 2009). Down the road a bit we'll have a couple of folks put up their reflections on this text on the blog, but for now, just wanted to let everyone know of the book and also a session on the book at the upcoming AAR meeting in Montreal. Here's information on the session, for those interested:
__________________________________________________________

Wesleyan Studies Group

Theme: Discussion of John H. Wigger, American Saint: Francis Asbury and the Methodists (Oxford University Press, 2009)

Tuesday - 9:00 am-11:30 am (Nov. 10)

Douglas M. Strong, Seattle Pacific University, Presiding

Theme: Discussion of John H. Wigger, American Saint: Francis Asbury and the Methodists (Oxford University Press, 2009)

Francis Asbury is one of the most important religious leaders in American history. He was largely responsible for creating the American Methodist church, the largest church in nineteenth century America and the foundation of much of the Holiness and Pentecostal movements. This session features a panel discussion of John Wigger's new biography of Asbury, American Saint: Francis Asbury and the Methodists (Oxford University Press, 2009). Wigger's work considers previously unexamined and underappreciated aspects of Asbury's personality and style of leadership, showing how and why his tireless activity led to the church’s expansion into every state and territory. Growth brought financial prosperity and social respectability, ultimately undermining the church’s culture of discipline, which in the end seemed a bitter irony to Asbury. Under his leadership, Methodism exerted a powerful influence on American culture, but was itself transformed in the process, a pattern repeated again and again in American religious history.

Panelists:

Russell E. Richey, Emory University
Ian B. Straker, Howard University
Jane Donovan, West Virginia University
Richard P. Heitzenrater, Duke University

Responding:
John Wigger, University of Missouri

Know Your Archives, Part V: Methodist Heaven

Continuing our series on our archival experiences, I'm pleased to guest post the following from Christopher Jones, who blogs at Juvenile Instructor and is a graduate student at William and Mary. I, too, researched at the United Methodist Archives, for 2 weeks in 1999; they arranged some very nice housing there in a nearby apartment building, and Drew is close enough to New York City for some fun side trips as well!

By Christopher Jones

In the summer of 2008, I spent a week at the United Methodist Archives and History Center, located on the idyllic campus of Drew University in Madison, New Jersey. Perhaps providentially for a poor graduate student researching Methodism, the archives are located just down the road from my in-laws in Summit, NJ, which saved me the cost of having to find a place to stay, but I’ve heard from others that the Xavier Center invites individuals doing research at Drew to stay there for relatively cheap (about $40/night). I ate each day at the student center at Drew, which had a pretty good selection of decent (but not great) food for a reasonable price (John Turner’s not lying about the quality of the lunch at the LDS cafeteria).

The reading room is small, but quiet, and the collections at the UMAHC are rich. The Francis Asbury collection and Garrettson family collection (including Catherine Garrettson’s fascinating dream journal), along with a host of diaries penned by itinerant preachers in antebellum America received most of my attention, but there is a large collection of documents dealing with 20^th century themes and issues that are waiting to be mined by interested researchers (and which were utilized by Morris Davis for his important book on The Methodist Unification). They have an especially rich collection of source material (both personal papers and institutional records) dealing with missionary efforts in India and China during the early 1900s, for those interested in international issues. And what they don’t have in document form, they have on microfilm. Plus, they had a mourner’s bench from an early 19^th century camp meeting on display in the atrium outside the reading room, which for a religious history geek like myself, was an added bonus.

What made the trip to NJ especially worthwhile and valuable, though, was the staff. Chris Anderson leads a team of Methodist librarians that went above and beyond in ensuring my short stay was productive. In addition to having requested materials on hand awaiting my arrival each morning, the staff also suggested other sources that might be helpful to my research on Methodism and Mormonism (and they were right). When I left, Chris Anderson offered to send photocopies of any sources I may have forgotten to check out while there (an offer I luckily didn’t have to take him up on). For a young student making his first research trip outside of his local archives, it was a wonderful experience.

American Denominational History

Paul Harvey

Is there anything more dreaded, or derided, in American religious studies than "denominational history." At one time, probably not, since such studies tended to the antiquarian or the hagiographical. In recent years that has changed; and while it still does not count as "hip," it is simply a fact that denominations remain the major institutional expression of American Christianity, at least, and arguably of other religious expressions as well.

American Denominational History: Perspectives on the Past, Prospects for the Future, edited by Keith Harper (University of Alabama Press, 2008), is a new essay collection that surveys the field and projects possibilities for study in the future. It should be of particular help to graduate students and others seeking contemporary scholarly overviews and historiographical syntheses. Here's the table of contents:

Introduction, by Keith Harper

Catholic Distinctiveness and the Challenge of American Denominationalism by Amy Koehlinger

New Directions on the Congregational Way by Margaret Bendroth

Presbyterians in America: Denominational History and the Quest for Identity by Sean Michael Lucas (you can read this essay here)

From the Margin to the Middle to Somewhere In Between: An Overview of American Baptist Historiography by Keith Harper

"Everything Arose Just as the Occasion Offered": Defining Methodist Identity through the History of Methodist Polity by Jennifer L. Woodruff Tait

Black Protestantism: A Historiographical Appraisal by Paul Harvey

Mormon Historiography by David J. Whittaker

Interpreting American Pentecostal Origins: Retrospect and Prospect by Randall J. Stephens

"We're All Evangelicals Now": The Existential and Backward Historiography of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism by Barry Hankins

Seeing Visions, Hearing Things, and Having Fits

John G. Turner

Thanks for the proclaimed respite, Paul. It will do us all good.

My first week in graduate school, one of my professors assigned The Social History of Truth by Steven Shapin. I spent an entire weekend carefully reading it, underlining furiously, and taking copious notes. By the time my seminar met, I realized I knew absolutely nothing about the book beyond its title. Its entire content had mysteriously eluded me.

It can be tough to visit foreign historiographical territory, even within the field of American religious history. I've been trying to get up to speed on religion in the antebellum United States to provide me with some context in my grapple with Mormonism. Therefore, I'm reading some new books and reviewing some I too loosely perused in graduate school. I found I absorbed Nathan Hatch's Democratization much more than Jon Buter's Awash in a Sea of Faith, for instance, so I've reread Butler. I love his characterization of the antebellum "spiritual hothouse."

Having mostly concentrated on evangelicalism, I find myself challenged by Catherine Albanese's insistence on the "role of metaphysics as a major player in the evolution of the national religiosity." (A Republic of Mind and Spirit) Moreover, although I've encountered histories of the occult in Butler and in various works on Mormonism, I'm staggered at Albanese's detailed and complex accounts of hermeticism, alchemy, and other forms of the occult in the United States. Unlike Butler, she doesn't think magic and the occult became relegated to the "folk" by the end of the eighteenth century. I also found her sections on Spiritualism and Theosophy very illuminating.

In seeking to further understanding these and related topics, I've turned to Ann Taves's Fits, Trances, & Visions, which traces religious and scientific accounts of involuntary movements from the awakenings of the 1740s through William James. As much a contribution to Religious Studies as history, Taves highlights the role of Methodism in American society in ways new to me, such as John Wesley's relatively open stance toward the supernatural, the development of "shouting Methodism," and the beginning healing revivals at the end of the nineteenth century. I found myself taking away insights about everything ranging from Jonathan Edwards to Joseph Smith to clairvoyant somnambules. [If there isn't a recent scholarly biography of Ellen G. White (the adventist prophetess), it needs to be written!]

I'm also very impressed with Leigh Schmidt's Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion and the American Enlightenment. Intrigued by Joseph Smith pronouncing Brigham Young's glossolalia "the pure Adamic language," I learned from Schmidt that disciples of Swedenborg, among others, sought the pure tongue of angels in nineteenth-century America.

Unfortunately, my encounter with Albanese, Taves, and Schmidt -- all very erudite monographs -- leaves me feeling slightly akin to my reading of The Social History of Truth. Although I now have some sense of Swedenborg, Spiritualism, and Theosophy, I've realized not only how influential some of these "alternative" (i.e., not strictly Protestant) movements were but also how difficult they are to understand (at least for me). Perhaps I should have stuck with what Albanese terms the "evangelical thesis." I hadn't been planning on spending time on spiritualism in my American Religious History class this spring but now feel it's essential, so I'm going to have to spend more time digesting these topics. [I'm going to read Larry Moore's book on spiritualism, which I have hitherto neglected -- his Religious Outsiders is one of my all-time favorites, not least for his chapter on Mormonism]. Any suggestions for further reading on these subjects?

Of Mormons and Methodists

BY RANDALL STEPHENS

I’m hunkered down in the house today with Beatrice, my border collie. As the snow falls and the winds howl outside, I’ve had some time to check up on email and look at a few items on-line. A couple of things I came across may be of special interest to Religion in American History blog readers

A provocative article, “Making Mormon History,” by Mark Oppenheimer appeared in the Ideas section of the Sunday, December 9, issue of the Boston Globe.

Given the media coverage and chattering class buzz, Oppenheimer writes, it would appear that the LDS has entered a period of openness or transparency concerning its history and identity. Yet…

the relationship of the Latter-day Saints hierarchy with scholars and journalists has frequently been antagonistic: The church has excommunicated historians whose writings were deemed to portray Mormon history in a negative light, and to this day church archivists closely guard many documents, keeping some entirely secret, to scholars and everyone else. One church leader gave a famous speech in which he cautioned against unvarnished truth if it imperiled people’s faith.

Sounds like the hook for a research paper or an article. What can or can’t a person say about his/her tradition’s history? That would be an interesting question to pose to Pentecostal, Holiness, Baptist, or Church of Christ denominational historians who work “in-house.” Other observations in Oppenheimer’s piece concerning the “excessive” record-keeping of Mormons and the opportunities and challenges of Mormon history are equally interesting.

For professional historians and religious history enthusiasts (I’m sure there are at least three nonacademics in the latter category scattered across the US), there is a wonderful new research tool on another religious movement that exploded out of the 19th century. The revamped website of the Center for Studies in the Wesleyan Tradition at Duke Divinity School will be welcomed by both bow tie-wearing Methodist archivists and religious studies grad students sporting trendy glasses.

Professor of Theology and Wesleyan Studies Randy Maddox describes some of the additions:

[The site provides] online access to a complete and reliable collection of the verse of both John and Charles Wesley. Production of the collection is still in process, but it already contains—in time for the 300th anniversary of his birth—a complete set of the verse of Charles Wesley that was published during his lifetime. A complete set of the verse that remained in manuscript at Charles’s death is planned to be added by 2009. There is also a parallel collection of all of the volumes of hymns and religious poetry that John Wesley edited and published during his lifetime, which is currently over half complete.

As our first offering of scholarly access to important early Methodist sources, we are posting a transcript of a manuscript diary by Wesley’s book steward (Thomas Butts) in Bristol from October 1752–54, which offers some intriguing insights into Methodist debates of the time.

You will also find bibliographies of recent dissertations in Wesley Studies, a description of our Summer Wesley Seminar, which is designed to allow folk like you to spend a month in Durham working with our resources. If this sounds inviting, considering applying.

We at the Center hope that you find this website helpful and welcome your suggestions for future development.