The Methodists and Revolutionary America, 1760-1800: The Shaping of an Evangelical Culture, by Dee E. Andrews, Princeton University Press, 2000, 367 pp.; $59.50

The title of Dee Andrews's superb account of early American Methodism, The Methodists and Revolutionary America, 1760-1800, points to the central paradox of this religious history. The Methodists, reviled as Loyalists by the patriots in the mainstream of American evangelicalism in the 1760s and '70s, only tenuously established themselves in the midst of a Revolution they largely opposed. Yet in the wake of the British defeat, Methodism thrived in the early Republic, and by 1800 was poised to become in the largest denomination in the United States. Indeed, as Andrews puts it, nineteenth-century Methodism virtually became "America's church." How a tiny group of British missionaries navigated the rising tides of American nationalism and turned an unpromising beginning into a triumphal success is the story of her book.

There are many interrelated elements to her fascinating explanation. Andrews, like earlier historians, places great emphasis upon the flexibility and discipline of Methodism's unique organization. Methodism evolved from its origins as a movement within the Church of England. In enlisting itinerant and lay preachers free of the traditional duties and costs of parish priests, John Wesley drew from his experiences both as a missionary in the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel and as the leader of voluntary societies of clergy and laity in Britain.

Much of the tightly organized, top-down institutional structure of American Methodism was also owed to its English founder's indefatigable labors and dictatorial style. Beneath Wesley's overriding clerical authority were placed the leading American clergy, most notably Francis Asbury and Thomas Coke, who in turn oversaw a growing number of settled local ministers and a cadre of licensed lay itinerants commissioned to ride circuits in areas without regular clergy. Beneath these hierarchical layers emanated a more informal network of unlicensed male and female preachers and of grassroots lay meetings, called classes, often held within private homes.

This Methodist system of organization was at once highly centralized and capable of infinite expansion, for it provided direction and order to its participants while remaining unencumbered by the need instantly to build churches and to recruit highly trained, official clergymen. The formation of Methodism within the interstices of the Church of England gave rise to a new evangelical method, one that proved ideally suited to the denominational competition and expansion of unchurched territory in post-revolutionary America.

Andrews convincingly argues that early Methodism also possessed special appeal to Americans because of its deviation from aspects of mainstream culture. She lays special stress on Methodist household piety and the religious roles of devout women as running against the grain of traditional ecclesiastical and patriarchal structures both. (The brothers John and Charles Wesley, it should be noted, grew up under the religious tutelage of their fervently evangelical mother, Susanna.)

Traveling missionaries commonly used the lay households in which they were invited guests as their theater of operation. The heroic exertions of the passionate, intensely ascetic, and generally young male circuit riders added greatly to their charismatic appeal, especially to those women who devoted themselves to their care. Women often led the men of their families into the faith, at times becoming recognized religious virtuosos, class leaders, and lay preachers themselves. Subtly loosening the strictures of male domination, early Methodism stimulated the participation of women on various levels, sometimes in direct defiance of their husbands. Its household-based piety, moreover, fostered an intimacy among members of both sexes and encouraged the sense that Methodist societies were alternative families.

Andrews shows that the attraction of Methodism in the late eighteenth century was also due to its relative openness to various forms of popular piety. The repeated forays of the British Methodist George Whitefield into the American colonies from the 1730s through the 1760s were part of the larger American revivalist movement known as the Great Awakening, which was especially strong among Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Baptists. Revivalists of all these religious persuasions assumed newly emotional preaching styles, appeared before mass audiences, and stressed the primacy of heartfelt religious experience.

While Andrews rightly stresses the importance of its emotionalism, what was more distinctive to Methodism was the appeal of its doctrine and rituals. In its emphasis on conversion, Methodist theology had a simplicity and a populism that contrasted markedly with the Anglicanism and Calvinism which dominated early American religion. More important even than doctrine to the success of the movement, however, was the warmth and inclusiveness of its ritual practices, which were replete with sonorous hymn-singing, feasts, and spontaneous raptures of joy. Methodism also departed from other major American denominations by accepting the possibility of ecstatic possession by the Holy Spirit, relegated by cessationists to the apostolic era; from this stream the Holiness movement and Pentecostalism would flow.

On the surface, neither the success of Methodism's organizational structure nor the appeal of its popular piety had anything to do with the American Revolution. But Andrews amply demonstrates that American Methodism became steeled in the heat of the rebellion against Britain. Always viewed as sectarian and subversive in the eyes of the antirevivalist Anglican ecclesiastical hierarchy, now Methodism fell victim to a new and more widespread form of vilification. In 1775, upon the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, John Wesley emphatically proclaimed his loyalty to church and king. Regarded as traitors to the American cause, the small band of American Methodists gained new notoriety, and life under the patriots became increasingly dangerous. A few outspoken Methodist Loyalists were arrested, and others left or ceased their religious activities. In self-defense, those who continued to preach avoided political discourse and claimed neutrality.

American Methodism weathered the storm in large part by strengthening its internal organization while under external attack, drawing less upon the scarce and suspect British itinerants and more from young, American-born lay preachers. In the midst of the Revolution their leader opposed, these determinedly apolitical and energetic young Methodists led a series of successful revivals. The number of Americans in Methodist societies doubled between 1778 and 1783, growing to almost 12,000 by the end of the war.

A second indirect benefit of the American Revolution was the collapse of the Church of England. Despite the damage that the reputation of Methodism suffered from an association with Loyalism, its status as a missionary society that was institutionally separate from the British government spared it the worst wounds inflicted upon the English church. The vacuum created by ecclesiastical disestablishment in the southern and middle colonies gave Methodism, originally the offspring of the Church of England, more room to grow.

In the wake of the Revolution the Methodists detached themselves from their British past still further, taking creative measures to assert their American identity. In 1783, the aged John Wesley finally lost patience with the Church of England for refusing to allow him to ordain ministers, and he declared the creation of an autonomous Methodist church. By this time the Americans, having achieved de facto independence during the war under the leadership of Asbury and Coke, were poised to follow suit by instituting a separate American Methodist church.

Dee Andrews's slice of Methodist history, ending in 1800, is only able to anticipate the phenomenal growth of the denomination that occurred later on. Much of the period she covers appears atypical when compared to the main features of the movement in the nineteenth century. Despite the innovation of the circuit rider system, Methodism had yet to achieve its renown as the religion of the frontier. Although the Wesleys in the 1730s first ventured to Georgia, a new colony on the fringes of settlement, the movement only picked up steam in America in the 1760s and '70s when it concentrated its efforts upon the more settled and urban colonies of the middle Atlantic.

Andrews persuasively argues that the unusual religious and ethnic diversity of this region, combined with the absence or weakness of established state churches, made the middle colonies particularly fertile ground for Methodism compared to colonies to the north or the south. This phase of its history was crucial, for it was only after the infusion of lay Methodist immigrants, many of them Irish, who settled in Baltimore and New York and recruited new followers, that the English Methodist bishopric committed a significant number of itinerants to America. Only later, after the institutional structure of the movement had been shaped, would the Methodist center of gravity shift from the mid-Atlantic to the south and the west.

The creation of the African Methodist Church in the 1790s illustrates the distinctiveness and importance of this early Methodist history as well. In the 1770s Methodist preachers began to criticize black slavery as ungodly, soon demanding that Methodist slaveholders manumit their slaves. Compelled by the force of this message, free blacks and slaves in the middle colonies comprised 20 percent of the Methodist membership by 1790. The population of free blacks in the mid-Atlantic cities rose rapidly toward the end of the century as a consequence of northern abolition and the upward migration of free blacks from the South. Black ministers like Richard Allen of Philadelphia rose to prominence among African American Methodists, who as their numbers increased had become segregated.

Racial frictions arose in the 1790s because white Methodist leaders refused to ordain black ministers. In Philadelphia, New York, Baltimore, and Wilmington, black Methodists formed their own separate Methodist chapels, achieving a measure of autonomy, if not equality, within the movement. This racially ambivalent pattern of partial inclusion and segregation would persist within Methodism into the nineteenth century.

In her description of blacks, women, and lower-class workers in the movement, Dee Andrews judiciously steers between portraying the Methodists as liberal or conservative, democratic or authoritarian. Throughout her fine study she instead focuses on the astonishing variety of figures and groups who found a home in Methodism. Her story is laced with illustrative biographical vignettes of individual travails and triumphs, as well as studded with a wealth of statistics that document the growth and demographic breakdown of the denomination.

What comes across most strongly from Andrews's prodigious research are the organizational talents of the Methodist leaders and the extraordinary devotion of the rank-and-file. The book appropriately ends with the Great Revival of 1800 and the election of Thomas Jefferson, events that together marked the beginning of Methodism's expansion into the new American west and the next, and greatest, chapter in American Methodist history. Without the knowledge of the eighteenth- century history so well provided in Dee Andrews's book, however, one would be at a loss to understand how Methodism so vigorously seized the opportunities that lay ahead.

Ruth H. Bloch is professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought, 1756-1800 (Cambridge Univ. Press).

NOTE: For your convenience, the following book, which was mentioned above, is available for purchase:

• The Methodists and Revolutionary America, by Dee E. Andrews

Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine.
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