at times.
Yet, American and British Methodists purposefully sought this suspension of the rational mind. If the believer truly felt the weight of his or her sinfulness, evangelical melancholy was a convincing sign of a convert’s conviction. Benjamin Abbott, who was a farmer in New Jersey, became part of a Methodist revival in 1772. He wrote that traveling home one day he was suddenly struck with the idea that “as I was one of the reprobates and there was no mercy for me, I had better hang myself and know the worst of it.” He denied himself all earthly pleasures, shunned his wife, avoided food, and had visions of the devil; he generally looked and felt awful. When he was born again after several days of being at the bottom, physically and mentally, it was a great relief to his family and friends as well as himself.7 This spiritual journey into darkness, visions, anxiety, and depression was part of a common stage in conversions. This period of conviction required the believer to wallow in his or her state of inherent sinfulness. For many, this meant reliving past sins as well as becoming acutely, painfully aware of the ways in which those sins were increasing daily. In fact, many Methodists never felt entirely free of this stage, since there were usually multiple backslidings in any Methodist’s life.
Parents’ worries were justified, according to anti-Methodist pamphlets that circulated in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In 1809, Leigh Hunt proclaimed that liberal British society agreed that evangelical conversion was the first step toward the madhouse: “The Arminian and Evangelical Magazines are full of the dying comforts of their disciples, but why do they not give us a candid account of those who die in wretchedness of mind? Why do they not give us a list of the Methodist lunatics throughout the hospitals of England? If they wish to terrify sinners, it is strange they should conceal that most alarming fact in their church-history. I returned a short time since from a large manufacturing town in the North, where I had an opportunity of inspecting the godly a little more closely than in the mazy multitude of London.… Those who were more seriously affected became either melancholy or mad.”8 Parents had reason to fear for their children’s mental health, anti-Methodists maintained, if they became unmoored from their traditional religion and blood families to join with these dangerous fanatics. This widespread belief in Methodist-induced madness was so persistently circulated that Wesley felt it necessary to defensively claim the rationality of Methodists in the inaugural issue of the Arminian Magazine in 1778.9 This magazine was published in London originally, and then in Philadelphia as well, beginning in the 1780s. The association between ardent religiosity and insanity was already fully developed in eighteenth-century Anglo-American society, drawing upon a deep well of associative images from the Puritan ascendancy and the explosion in enthusiastic dissenting religions of the seventeenth-century interregnum period.10
In the late seventeenth century, medical authorities declared “religious melancholy” a category of mental illness, alongside the more serious category of “religious madness” with its symptoms of delusions and hallucinations. Eighteenth-century physicians took the visions and dreams of evangelicals as proofs of insanity, committing people under the diagnosis of “Methodically mad.”11 Whereas early seventeenth-century dissenters risked being labeled as heretics and being legally persecuted, in the eighteenth century, dissenters risked being treated as mental patients. Anglican elites promoted this anti-Methodist view of mental health, in order to discredit evangelical religions.12 This was not mere propaganda, because evidently doctors and parents took this association to heart. In the American South, some parents and spouses called for doctors when they saw the distressing effects of conviction on their loved ones.13 English Methodists were disproportionately committed to insane asylums in the eighteenth century, counting for as much as 25 percent of Bedlam’s inmates.14
While some concerned relatives deterred budding evangelicals with commitment to asylums and painful treatments, other parents expected the children to cure themselves, seeing religious melancholy as a self-inflicted state. Two young English converts faced similar responses from their parents in the face of their evangelical madness. Mary Bosanquet’s parents told her to “rouse [her] Self out of that Low state.”15 Likewise, Hester Roe’s mother described her daughter’s madness as a prison of her own making. In some cases, parents and others used madness more as a metaphor than as a real diagnosis of young Methodists.
This supposed separation from sanity actually described a separation from families and their religious, social, and cultural traditions. The symptoms of the sickness, the insane grief and obsession of conversion, were also symptoms of disengagement from the moderate ways of a convert’s familial faith. It had to be madness that forced sons and daughters to reject their upbringing and to prefer the company of Methodists to their birth families.
Dissent from Family and Society
Methodism was a religion of dissent during the eighteenth century, and this alone made it seem frightening to many people who were devoted to the Church of England. Despite the fact that John Wesley repeatedly avowed his allegiance to the Church of England and stated a desire to only supplement, not supplant, traditional worship, Methodism had all the markings of a dangerous sect. Its followers adopted a strange new language, one that had specific codes of discourse for addressing each other, for describing their leadership, and for shaping their emotions and religious fervor. At a profound level, Methodism seemed to provide young people with the tools to reject society and all of its customs. One of the persistent themes of anti-Methodist literature and everyday gossip in the eighteenth century was that Methodists simply did not know how to enjoy themselves. In their stringent adherence to austere moral and social codes, evangelicals rejected the commonplace joys of mainstream culture, according to their critics.
As diversions and entertainments increased in number, in theaters, novels, gambling houses, coffeehouses, and public houses, Methodists asked their members to abstain from these sorts of enjoyments. Methodists repudiated the normative social activities for young adults: dancing, gossiping, going to theater, dressing up, or being concerned with “trifling” things. Sometimes, in the accounts of young men, these behaviors included more serious sins, such as sexual indiscretions. For Virginian Stith Mead, who was twenty-two years old when he converted to Methodism in 1789, his religiosity flew in the face of his family’s beliefs and practices. He had enjoyed dancing, fencing, card playing, and fine clothes prior to his conversion, but denounced them afterward. To his family members, these were innocent pursuits, sanctioned by society and culture. Yet Methodists, alongside Baptists, had specific rules about how members should behave, and these rules dictated strict ideas about moral behavior. Evangelical rules for behavior often involved a denial of gender-specific roles of masculine sociability, feminine socialization, or engagement in the fashionable world.16 In 1738, John Wesley first set down the guidelines for Methodists in his Rules of the Band-Societies, and he went on to revise and republish these rules regularly during his lifetime; these rules became more commonly known as the Discipline.17
Alongside gender prescriptions, these rules also emphasized a plain way of life, wherein Methodists renounced much of the trappings of fashionable, excessive living and thereby any privileges of their class. As a broad directive, Methodists were enjoined to live as simply as possible and to help those in need. The Methodist Discipline emphasized the directive that its members practice frugality, spend their money only on necessities, and give the rest to charity. Wesley emphasized in various writings that holding money was not a problem, as long as it was not misspent. Followers were expected to give excess income to charity for the support of less fortunate Methodist members.18 Upper- and middle-class Methodists, like Stith Mead, Mary Bosanquet, and Hester Roe, emphasized the differences from their familial culture, by dressing more plainly, working harder, and avoiding social occasions.
By adopting the specific codes found in the Methodist Discipline, Methodists seemed to abruptly discard the values and activities of their birth families. Evangelicals countered the traditions with which they were raised, and they sent waves of disapprobation toward their unconverted parents, siblings, and friends. An anti-Methodist pamphlet charged: “It is
