In 1776 the Methodist movement and the new American Republic existed in uneasy tension. By 1829 the two seemed to share a common destiny, so closely did Methodists identify with the new Republic. By the opening salvos of the Civil War, Methodist churches of varying identities would claim the largest proportion of American churchgoers, the largest numbers of ministers, and the largest numbers of church structures of any American denomination. Regarding the religious culture of the new Republic, it may be said, as went Methodism so went the nation.
This great American church's origins could not have been more improbable. Methodism emerged from the reforming impulses of early Anglicanism, seized upon by the brothers John and Charles Wesley in their experience as Anglican missionaries to American Indians in Georgia. Methodism's emphases on missionary outreach, moral reform, and later episcopal structure all owed their ancestry to the Church of England. John Wesley, the movement's chief theologian, organizer, and advocate, conjoined a powerful focus on religious conversion with a "connection" (loose hierarchy) of unordained itinerant preachers to produce what he considered a return to the values of early or "primitive" Christianity. But Wesley's free will theology, emphasizing the experience of sanctification (also called spiritual perfection), was distinctly at odds with the largely Calvinist revivals in the American colonies, led by the Wesleys' former fellow Oxford comrade and competitor, George Whitefield.
Conditions for the introduction of Methodism improved in the 1760s, when Methodist adherents migrated to the middle colonies. Wesley was inspired to appoint two itinerants to a new "American circuit" in 1769, just before Whitefield's death. The Patriot movement was well under way, but the rising numbers of American-based itinerants remained nonpartisan or Loyalist in keeping with Wesleyan instructions. In Britain, contrary to his reformist tendencies, Wesley published strongly worded condemnations of the Patriot movement. Conversely, the Methodists' liberal strain appeared early in their path-breaking recruitment of African slaves and free people, also encouraged by Wesley's antislavery publications. Because few of the Patriots espoused emancipation of slaves, this ambition further removed many Methodists from the greater cause of the Revolution.
With American independence and intensification of the Revolutionary War, Wesley's itinerants scattered, some back to Britain, some into Britishoccupied territory, others dangerously into Whig neighborhoods. The future leader of the American movement, British-born Francis Asbury, took sanctuary in Delaware. Methodism's fate was left in the hands of novice preachers, mostly American recruits. Among their main concerns was appealing to followers without attracting the attention of Patriot authorities and state legislatures.
The Methodists' change in fortunes came with the end of the war and Wesley's decision to permit the American preachers to form their own connection. At the Christmas Conference (24 December 1784–2 January 1785), Asbury and Wesley's emissary, Thomas Coke, went one step farther, persuading the American itinerants to create the Methodist Episcopal Church (MEC), in part to keep pace with the Anglicans and the formation of the Protestant Episcopal Church. The Methodist order of the ministry was established, and Coke, already ordained as "superintendent" by Wesley, officiated over Asbury's ordination as his co-bishop, the apostolic title preferred by the Americans. (By contrast, the connection in Britain remained a part of the Church of England until Wesley's death in 1791.) In 1785 the first Methodist discipline condemned slaveholding as "contrary to the Golden Law of God…and the unalienable Rights of Mankind."
Initially centered in Philadelphia and New York City, the new church's informal headquarters swiftly moved to Baltimore at the northern tip of a rapidly rising Methodist population in Delaware, Maryland, and northern Virginia. The itinerants now recruited a wide array of Americans into their movement. A large percentage of Methodist followers before 1800 were women—as much as two-thirds of the early city congregations. Many of these women were young and unmarried, part of a new post-Revolutionary generation bound less by family ties than voluntary association. Many were slaves and former slaves. Others, especially in the Baltimore and urban areas, were wealthy patrons and confidantes of the traveling ministers. The movement provided unprecedented opportunities for women to lead public prayer groups and to support the itinerants. The correspondence between the preachers and their female adherents is replete with expressions of mutual admiration. Women's presence in the church continued strong after 1800. As she notes in Strangers and Pilgrims (1998), the scholar Catherine A. Brekus discovered as many as twenty-nine self-appointed female Methodist preachers, black and white, in the years before the Mexican-American War (1846–1848). Among them was African Methodist Jarena Lee, who published her spiritual memoir in 1836.
Methodist outreach to black members was the movement's most distinctive social characteristic. By 1800, 21 percent of America's 64,000 Methodists were black, slave and free. A small Methodist congregation in Wilmington (Delaware), the pioneering African Methodist Episcopal congregation under Richard Allen in Philadelphia, and the African Methodist Zion congregation in New York City asserted their independence as separate denominations in 1813, 1816, and 1821 respectively. All these groups placed special emphasis on the "African"—African American—identity of their members and sought full ordination of their ministers, refused to them by the MEC. By contrast, Baltimore's black Methodist presence, forming up to 35 percent of the city congregation in and around 1800, remained within the larger church. Although most of Baltimore's black worshipers likely met in their own chapel building, the Baltimore Methodist churches may be described as the first significant multiracial organizations in the United States.
The white men who came to the church in its first years were also socially diverse—laborers, artisans, professionals, middling merchants, and assorted industrial capitalists in the cities; slaves, farmers, and varying orders of gentry in the countryside. After the MEC was organized in 1784, urban and rural local elites alike began to form boards of trustees to sustain the building of hundreds of Methodist chapels across the states and into the territories.
Young, single men especially discovered the vocation of the traveling preacher in the church's formative years. Between 1769 and 1806, Jesse Lee, the first Methodist historian, calculated that 990 men comprised the first generation of licensed Methodist preachers. They were a sacrificial lot: committed to traveling a different, and often enormous, circuit every six months, as mandated by church discipline and dictated by the bishops. The early Methodist clergy's feats of itinerancy were legendary. Bishop Asbury traveled sixty times across the Appalachians and twenty-nine times to the Lower South, covering over a quarter of a million miles on the American continent before he died in 1816. He probably met more Americans face-to-face than any single figure in the early Republic. The itinerants' lives were often cut short by their labors, and their obligations ran the gamut from delivering sermons to delivering health care. In some areas, the preachers were seen as shamanlike figures, capable of magical acts of redemption and personal healing. But the older denominations often typecast the itinerants as uneducated upstarts, who, in the words of one Anglican minister, "set themselves up as teachers of those above them."
Other churches had reason to fear Methodist growth. By the 1790s Methodist circuits were being surveyed in especially large numbers in New York, New England, and the Upper South, and Methodist itinerants were moving quickly into new territories and states west of the Appalachians. In New England the MEC challenged the standing order of the Calvinist Congregational Church. In the South they eventually overtook the Anglicans and posed the first significant competition for the Baptists.
The later years of the Second Great Awakening (1800 through the 1830s) have also been called the Methodist Age by religious scholars, and with good reason. Although conservative Evangelicals were convinced that freethinker Thomas Jefferson's election as president marked a low point in American religious influence, many Methodists were encouraged by the Democratic Republicans' support of the separation of church and state. The Methodists' success in Jeffersonian America corroborated the liberal (Wesleyan) evangelical belief that religious freedom would serve newcomer churches well.
Membership in the MEC skyrocketed in the decades after 1800: from 64,000 in 1800 to 175,000 in 1810, 257,000 in 1820, and nearly 500,000 in 1830. The church's message was assisted by an eastern innovation, the camp meeting. These initially interdenominational revivals further popularized the Methodist style: preacher, hymnbook in hand, exhorting expectant listeners to receive the Holy Ghost and convert to primitive Christianity. The huge meeting in Cane Ridge, Kentucky, in 1801 marked the starting point of evangelical dominance in the West, but also the beginning of Methodism's massive influence on the style of worship of other American churches.
Less easily determined is Methodism's political character after 1800. In Great Britain, in response to the French Revolution, the royal government's crackdown on radicals—traveling preachers among them—compelled the Methodist leadership to steer a conservative course. The long association between the Methodist establishment and Victorian values began early in the century, although working-class Methodists also developed strong ties with the trade unionist movement in Britain's emerging industrial centers.
In the United States, historians disagree on the fundamental nature of Methodist political culture. The historian Christine Leigh Heyrman argues in Southern Cross (1997) that evangelical preachers across the South, hundreds of Methodists among them, succeeded in controlling the region's religious future only after they abandoned their early allegiance with women and African Americans and adopted the gender and racial norms of southern white men. Southern Methodism and Baptism consequently, and rapidly, veered away from early emphases on emotionality and the equality of all Christians to a masculine mastery that has come to define American evangelicalism. Heyrman's thesis is supported by the rapid movement of southern Methodists away from the church's original antislavery teachings. In 1804, the church no longer urged its southern members to abandon slaveholding. By the 1820s, black Methodists in the south were strongly discouraged from forming their own congregations.
Similarly, in the North other studies show that the book agent Nathan Bangs eagerly encouraged Methodists to pursue gentility, while he transformed the Methodist publishing house into a thriving capitalist enterprise with publications like the Methodist Magazine and Quarterly Review. Methodist women, the Magazine's avid readers, were urged to devote their missionary energies to their families, and Methodist women increasingly complied. Pew rents became customary in many Methodist churches. In 1820, New York Methodists objected to replacing the downtown meetinghouse with a neoclassical edifice as a departure from "the primitive simplicity of Methodism." Gothic-style Methodist structures would help define the American Victorian landscape.
Taking the opposing view, in The Democratization of American Christianity (1989) the scholar Nathan O. Hatch portrays Methodism as one of the great democratic mass movements in United States history, notable for its unorthodox preaching, indifference to established ecclesiastical authorities, and all-embracing religious populism. Evangelical preachers were passionate insurgents, Hatch argues, determined to reinstate primitive Christianity in America and strikingly unconcerned with respectability. Black Methodist preachers were likewise proud of their lack of sophistication. Typically American, the Methodist clergy also made the most of a burgeoning capitalist economy to advertise their spiritual wares and whereabouts.
Certainly, the scale of Methodist expansion—federal in structure, multiracial in composition, propelled by troops of charismatic and energetic itinerants into every region of the country—prompts irresistible comparisons to the democratic Republic: experimental, expansive, young, and vibrant. As the historian Richard Carwardine has shown, in Transatlantic Revivalism (1978), the competitive political culture of the Republic also drew many Methodist men away from their espousals of nonpartisanship into enthusiastic participation in electoral politics. Methodists were pro-Federalist in Delaware and pro-Jeffersonian in Ohio. Methodists soon appeared in the ranks of state legislators, judges, and even governors. By the 1820s the Methodist ministerial calling attracted westerners like Peter Cartwright who identified with the American revolutionaries, American political virility, and American expansion. The historian Mark A. Noll, in America's God (2002), describes Methodism's spiritual practice, evangelical mobilization, and sheer size as providing the bonds for national cohesion, linking together religion and republicanism in fundamentally new ways.
Whether interpreted as conservative or democratic, political or more strictly spiritual, John Wesley's missionary movement was a thoroughly Americanized institution by the beginning of President Andrew Jackson's first administration in 1829. As such, Methodists were divided by the same issues, particularly the conflict over slavery, that divided the country. In 1844 the MEC split into two halves, northern and southern, a breach that would not heal for more than a hundred years.
Methodism's unorthodox influence remained strong nonetheless. While Frederick Douglass condemned the hypocrisy of southern Methodist slaveholders, he was a Baltimore Methodist when he made his escape to the North in the late 1830s. Women remained strong advocates of Wesley's teachings and took leading roles in the formation of Methodist offshoot denominations, among them the Primitive Methodist and Methodist Protestant churches. The Methodist preachers' rejection of Calvinist predetermination and embracing of free will theology and sanctification fundamentally altered the aim and tone of American Christianity. For the Republic, the legacy of the Methodist age was deep-seated, multilayered, and long-lived.
See also African Americans: African American Religion; Baptists; Bible; Camp Followers; Catholicism and Catholics; Denominationalism; Presbyterians; Professions: Clergy; Religion: Overview;Religion: The Founders and Religion; Religious Publishing; Revivals and Revivalism.
Andrews, Dee E. The Methodists and Revolutionary America, 1760–1800: The Shaping of an Evangelical Culture. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000.
Brekus, Catherine A. Strangers and Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America, 1740–1845. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.
Carwardine, Richard. Transatlantic Revivalism: Popular Evangelicalism in Britain and America, 1790–1865. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978.
Hatch, Nathan O. The Democratization of American Christianity. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989.
Heyrman, Christine Leigh. Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt. New York: Knopf, 1997.
Lyerly, Cynthia Lynn. Methodism and the Southern Mind, 1770–1810. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Mathews, Donald G. Religion in the Old South. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1977.
Nash, Gary B. Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia's Black Community, 1720–1840. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988.
Noll, Mark A. America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Richey, Russell E. Early American Methodism. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1991.
Schneider, A. Gregory. The Way of the Cross Leads Home: The Domestication of American Methodism. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1993.
Wigger, John H. Taking Heaven by Storm: Methodism and the Rise of Popular Christianity in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Dee E. Andrews