the New Pantagruel

Methodism’s Move Across Centuries and Continents

by Mike Pino

Reviewed in this essay:

Methodism: Empire of the Spirit, by David Hempton. Yale University Press, 278pp. Yale University Press. $30.00.

ELEBRATED war hero and soon-to-be President Ulysses S. Grant once quipped that there were only three great parties in the United States: “the Republican, the Democratic, and the Methodist Church.” The claim seems valid once again, at least when one notices the dozens of newly released books and articles examining and reevaluating the Methodist church. That these publications coincide with the tercentenary of John Wesley’s birth should hardly be a surprise; that 2003 also saw Lincoln College, Oxford finally erecting a monument to John Wesley offers the cynic the opportunity to confound, yet again, university politics and religious influence with the smug quip that even the Victorian academics denied Wesley a memorial. Nevertheless, the representation of religious enthusiasm has undergone a sea change: current scholars are questioning that presumptively inevitable march toward secularism so celebrated in the Enlightened Academy, while simultaneously making efforts to recognize the individuals and the culture that sought after piety and personal salvation.

The recent scholarship on Methodism has yielded some noteworthy work. Alan Harding’s guidance through the thicket of doctrinal controversies and how these interpretations of doctrine were understood by a well-organized though short-lived Methodist branch in The Countess of Huntingdon’s Connexion (2005) and John Wigger’s impressive vista of post-Revolutionary America Methodism in Taking Heaven by Storm (2001) are two contributions in that category. Both of these scholars achieve success by combining careful work in the archives and records while engaging with the journals, diaries, and personal ephemera of adherents and contemporaries. The result each time is something of a scholarly aper�u, a sketch that captures the nuances of a lived religious experience and the often inexplicable shifts in alliances and interpretations. Other recent contributions include John Kent’s provocative and intemperate Wesley and the Wesleyans (2002), a book that has galvanized factions, whether in defense of his conception of “primary religion” or to criticize his revival of the old Marxist claim that Methodism prevented revolution in late eighteenth-century Britain. Renewed interest in the topic has also activated one of the preeminent historians on British Methodism to weigh in. We are fortunate to have David Hempton’s Methodism: Empire of the Spirit: it is obviously the result of much thoughtful research, analysis, teaching, and reflection done over the course of three decades.

At the outset, Hempton limits the scope of his book to be a “history of Methodism as an international movement… concentrating on eight important themes, each one designed to get beneath the hard surface of mere institutional expansion.” The thematic arrangement of his chapters allows Hempton to weave together selective episodes from assorted biographies and diaries, summarize distinctive aspects of the various understandings of the Methodist tradition, and combine recent scholarly work to his commentary. The result is a frequently dazzling movement from the narrative of particulars to the general axiom. Hempton sketches, for example, a few incidents illustrating the struggles of early nineteenth-century missionaries among Native Americans in order to make clear that “the language problem was particularly formidable, for the Methodists so much relied on preaching, teaching, and reading that the lack of linguistically qualified personnel and materials in native languages was a serious barrier to progress.” The disappointing returns and setbacks among the missions, Hempton effectively explains, led to a change in approach that would later be replicated in other parts of the world.

At other times, however, Hempton�s narrative can be uneven. For instance, in his third chapter on Methodist hymnody, sermon writing, and other publications, Hempton offers little in the way of direct considerations of Charles Wesley’s beautiful hymns and instead discusses of the arrangement and the table of contents of the Collection of Hymns (1780).

But ultimately, the most important contribution of this work is its even-handedness, especially when Hempton treats religious experience on its own terms. In a passage on the trial of Ephraim Kingsbury Avery, the Methodist minister accused of seducing and later murdering Sarah Cornell in Fall River, Massachusetts, Hempton teases out the irony that “those aspects of Methodism that many early-nineteenth-century Americans found most appealing, its religious egalitarianism and its capacity to inculcate personal and social discipline, were the very qualities found wanting by its Fall River opponents.” Instead of pursuing the salacious and dubious claims of sexual misconduct at camp meetings, Hempton centers his discussion on what was at stake, politically and spiritually. In the very act of considering the spiritual dimension of Methodism’s history, and, as he puts it, “refus[ing] to grant that the political, social, or gender element is the most fundamental,” he offers a social history that is sympathetic but not partisan, at once concise and graced with nuance.

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