[Methodist preachers] denounce, but the whole world itself, abstractedly considered, with all its enjoyments and attachments, from dancing, song-singing, and spectacle, to the happy frolic of youth.”19 As this writer describes, evangelicals’ antisocial behavior looked like a rejection of humanity altogether. In the accounts of young Methodists, they commonly voiced the need to dissociate from their peers, either because of their friends’ explicit anti-Methodist sentiments or their irreligious activities.20
In the 1790s, Stith Mead often separated himself from his family in order to conduct prayers in secret, and this was a point of derision for his family members. He did not always pray alone, though, and made repeated efforts to convert the rest of his family. He was successful with one brother, Samuel, but the rest remained unconvinced. His uncle Nicholas Mead announced that “he would have no more praying,” after Nicholas’s wife started to respond to Stith’s efforts. Despite his labors, the Mead family continued their enjoyable social practices, and as one sister remarked, she “did not see the necessity of giving up all the pleasures of the world.”21 Later, Stith Mead wrote a series of letters to his father aimed at awakening his father and siblings. His brother Samuel, who had been on the path of conversion, had recently died, and Stith Mead was afraid that his father had led him spiritually astray before his death. Stith wrote his father a scathing letter: “Father, the Indulgeance of Fidling and Dancing, has ever been your beseting Sin, and I fear will be your final and Eternal Ruin; do you Continue to Send your Children to the dancing Schools or Indulge them to attend the balls? If so you are training them up for the DEVIL to make them an heir of Hell-fire.”22 Mead declared he was not afraid of the threat of disinheritance, weakening this incentive for filial obedience. Yet, even while telling his father he would burn in hell, Stith Mead signed his letters “Your dutiful Son in Jesus Christ.”23 Mead’s father continued to resist his call for conversion, but he did leave his son a sizable inheritance.24
Narratives of Separation
The personal sense of psychological transformation shared by Methodist converts appears in their autobiographical narratives. The conversion narrative was the central genre in the rise of evangelical print culture. The spread of Methodism relied on its models, which were transmitted through conversion narratives. These narratives exemplified the ways in which conversion changed individual lives and showed the extent to which entering the Methodist family was transformative, socially and culturally.
The importance of autobiographies and biographies to evangelical culture cannot be overemphasized. Building on the Puritan tradition of commonplace books, daybooks, and spiritual memoirs, eighteenth-century English and American evangelicals actively promoted the accounting and recounting of one’s spiritual life.25 Privately, many Methodists recorded their daily experiences in journals and diaries that were later published or used for biographical sketches. Private reflection was the cornerstone of evangelical experience, and Methodists were ceaselessly contributing to narrative production as a group. These autobiographies became exemplars, which individual evangelicals would apply to their own lives.26 Converts treated published and epistolary religious narratives much like personal advice from a family member. They wrote about these spiritual paragons in their letters and journals, and they condemned themselves for not living up to their examples. These autobiographies bound the culture together, across many miles, to produce translatable models of behavior and modes of religiosity that bound the transatlantic family.
As models of experience, evangelical narratives were particularly helpful in leading converts through the periods of transition, from their unawakened self to their converted self. Often these autobiographies were clearly organized around the (re)production of religious experience, framing the key moments of one’s life in terms of religious awakenings and transgressions. As the genre of conversion narratives developed through the eighteenth century, certainly the replication of language and emotional accounts became evident; by the middle of the nineteenth century, these narratives were obviously mimetic.27 Yet, while the genre was still in its infancy in the eighteenth century, conversion narratives tended to include autobiographical detail that made the accounts highly individualized. These life stories were recounted in numerous journals and daybooks and through individual conversion narratives, which were written originally in letters and then published in pamphlets and magazines. Charles Wesley, in particular, was a great solicitor of conversion narratives. Laywomen responded volubly to his requests, and many noted the particular time and care it took them to write this sort of account, some demonstrating a painful lack of familiarity with writing altogether. Through these apertures, one can see the common patterns of language and custom in early Methodism and the emergence of a new sort of family.28
Methodist conversion narratives followed similar stages in describing converts’ steps toward the Methodist family and away from their birth families. In these narratives, women and men went through the initial religious pangs of alienation from their old ways as they felt the conviction of their sins. In the next stage, they individuated, by separating from their old friends and family and more securely forming their own sense of spiritual expression. In the final stage, they rejoined a family, which was their evangelical family. These stages of alienation and individuation were similar to anthropological notions of separation, liminality, and reintegration.29 Conversion narratives were central components in the formation of modern religious identity. As the eighteenth century witnessed an unprecedented expansion of mobility that loosened individuals from the traditional strictures in many ways, the conversion narrative was a way to reconstitute their sense of self and their new identities as religious converts. Religious historian Bruce Hindmarsh asserts, “Religious experience became, therefore, far more voluntary and self-conscious, and far less a matter of custom or givenness, as women and men were presented with alternatives. In this context the turn to spiritual autobiography played a crucial role by allowing believers to negotiate an identity that could no longer be merely assumed.”30
In the primary stage of alienation, Methodists valorized the image of the lone saint struggling through multiple obstacles to realize his or her religious life. There is a strong theme in early Methodist literature that associates patient, Christ-like suffering with increasing godliness. Many early Methodist narratives feature the figures of the stalwart individual and the precocious child saint. The journals of Methodist women in particular reveal the difficulties that many early converts faced when attempting to join this group. Methodist women, more so than their male counterparts, tended to focus on this departure from their birth families. Their accounts make clear that the spiritual calling of Methodism tended to be individualized, which not only alienated relatives, but also transgressed the gender codes of eighteenth-century England and America. Women’s entry into Methodism was a phenomenon of particular concern to English and Anglo-American society.31
Some women framed their journey toward Methodism as a continuation of their moral upbringing, but more often the call to religiosity was ignited by an impulse from within. This heightened the individuality of spiritualism within the account and made each woman the central actor in her own conversion. Men were expected to take distinct paths for themselves in young adulthood, but women had to justify this individuation. In the surviving literature of conversion narratives, Methodist women were more likely to root their spiritual lives within their childhoods than their male counterparts were. In these portraits, women describe themselves as following their own, particular callings of religiosity, which often pitted their wills against their parents’. As young women, they described this disobedience as always balanced by their desires to be dutiful daughters. Yet, Methodists, who felt that their callings had divine origins, could justify even the most flagrant filial disobedience.
Separation from one’s parents was not a requirement for becoming a Methodist, but this was a persistent theme in autobiographical accounts of childhood. In some cases, the convert phrased this separation as a necessary weighing and shifting of priorities, the inevitable realization that the divine authority had superseded earthly ones. Hester Roe, for example, framed her conflicts with her mother as instances in which God permitted and encouraged her to disagree with her
