As Wesley’s dream of African conversion was finally starting to be realized in America by the 1760s, it was remarkably different from the missionary ideals espoused by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. The SPG envisioned formal catechisms as the basis for inculcating faith among non-Christians, but African Americans did not respond to this formal teaching, nor had the Anglican Church been terribly effective at convincing slaveholders to allow them access to slaves.120 While John and Charles Wesley initially saw African Americans as part of a wider and perhaps overly optimistic missionary evangelical project in the latter part of the 1730s, by the 1760s and 1770s, African American Methodists were central to the American Methodist connection.
Conclusions
The transcendence, sociability, and mobility of the Methodist organization were powerful ideas for African Americans. Slave and free African Americans could appreciate the transformative elements of conversion and transcendence of the physical world. The sociability of the Methodist family was a powerful element of association among African Americans and between white and black converts. The mobility of the itinerant preachers, particularly in the beginning of Methodist expansion in America, was central to its success at reaching populations that were not served by established churches. This was especially true for reaching slaves.
While the Wesley brothers did not see their time in America as an overwhelming success, it was clearly an important period for the birth of Methodism. From the 1730s and 1740s, when the Wesleys experimented with their missionary ideals, the transatlantic arena and its mobile populations were central to their formulations of Methodist practice. The early period of Methodism demonstrates its absorbent and ecumenical qualities. Methodists took in the social practices of religious meetings and experimented freely with various forms, keeping the bands and classes as central components in effective religious fellowship and as official forums for membership and discipline.
Early Methodists’ social orientation formulated a tenet that was central to this group’s success: while it drew the boundaries and discipline for belonging, it was also open to new members. It emphasized the certainty and benefits of belonging to this group, through having a ticket for class meetings and defining rules for living. They identified each other through these literal and material practices and by calling each other by family names. While their familial nature mattered, it was not a natal sense of belonging. One was not born into it; one had to earn it through commitment to true conversion and salvation. In many ways this is a profoundly eighteenth-century ideal, underlined by the universal promise of salvation. In the same way that true evangelical conversion pulled individuals out of their familial ties, conversion pulled individuals out of their bodily constraints and physical locations. Conversion made individuals members of a transnational and unearthly family, one in which members might not even meet in this world but were guaranteed to do so in the next.
Chapter 2
Loosening the Bonds of Family and Society
In the eighteenth century, the ideal Methodist convert was a young individual, someone who used her youthful energy to further evangelical growth. In Dee Andrews’s meticulous survey of membership records in the Middle Atlantic region of America, she discovered a “prototype” for Methodist laity in the late eighteenth century: a woman who was sixteen to twentyfour years old, unmarried, and still living at home or making her living as a servant.1 Reaching young men was also necessary for sustaining evangelical growth; the grueling pace and sacrifice of the preachers’ circuit was seen as a young man’s job. The prototypical circuit preacher Freeborn Garrettson joined the preaching ranks at the age of twenty-four, covering much of the Middle Atlantic and upper South, traveling over 100,000 miles from 1776 to 1793.2 As young as many converts were, they had to consider their ties to their blood families when they joined the evangelical family.
Alienation from one’s birth family was often a necessary preliminary step toward becoming a Methodist, especially from the late 1730s to the second decade of the nineteenth century. In their letters and journals, young Methodists regularly recorded the scorn and disapprobation of their families. Evangelical literature and fellowship helped these young converts through the pangs of separation from their previous lives, families, and friends. At the same time, anti-Methodist literature stoked the idea that there were two competing cultures in a young convert’s life, one belonging to their natal family and tradition and the other to the strange ways of the Methodists. Early converts heard gossip and read pamphlets that characterized evangelicals as low class, deranged, self-serving, and false. As the first generations of evangelicals joined this group, they encountered social and familial opposition based on these negative characterizations of Methodism. Most Methodists did not become orphans in the literal sense, but many experienced profound distancing from their natural families as they joined a larger family of believers.
The erosion of familial bonds was both a stereotypical anti-Methodist critique and an accurate description of reality. In multiple pamphlets and journals, Methodists were charged with being antifamily, leading young, impressionable minds away from their normal dispositions.3 In reality, Methodism did provide an impetus for separation from one’s given family, and evangelical narratives illustrate the details of this separation. In these narratives, Methodists described their new religious ideas as a source of conflict in their families, and they further described real and symbolic ruptures between evangelicals and society as a whole. New converts changed their ways by dressing differently, associating with different people, and generally holding different values, many of which transgressed gender and class norms. Methodists encouraged one another to take up the cross, to suffer in seriousness against the obstacles of family and friends. In 1792, American preacher Stith Mead encouraged young converts to avoid their old irreligious friends, writing that a truly religious convert would
not take pleasure in Company profane
Who wishes to Adulterate and alter her name …
Declaring she never her God will offend
To be the Companion of a wicked friend.4
Dissent into Madness
One signal that others saw Methodists as a distinct and disturbing family was the regularity of association between madness and Methodism in the eighteenth century. This was not simply a fictional caricature, because some Methodists described themselves as truly consumed by the psychological trials of conversion. The first step in conversion was conviction of sin, which made some evangelicals merely melancholy. In others, awareness of their sinfulness caused them to act in ways that would seem insane—crying, trembling, groaning, talking to God, and displaying severe emotional swings. After attending a Methodist sermon, the young English convert Mary Maddern was awakened to her sinfulness, and she became convinced that she would go to hell. When Maddern discovered Methodism, she was a teenager. Soon after she attended her first meetings, her parents forbid her to go to any more, arguing that the Wesley brothers “had drove Many to dispare through [their pernicious] Doctrine.”5 She seemed to confirm these rumors, when she left the Methodist meeting, “crying out what shall I do to be saved.” She felt worse, not better, after successive sermons, and experienced several months of deepening depression. She went through several more months of feeling alternately at peace and in despair, which continued until she joined a band and felt some spiritual stability after a few months with that group.6 Her inconsistency and her attraction to a society that seemed to make her lose her senses alienated her parents and friends. The behaviors of evangelical children made their parents fear for their children’s sanity, as parents saw firsthand the sort of depression that many Methodists described as the beginning stages of their conversion. This made Methodists seem dangerous and further produced an insider/outsider mentality that separated the believer from friends and family by a chasm of language, belief,
