love-based marriages.9 I argue that we should revisit and reassess religious families to understand their effect on the formation of the modern family. I measure their impact on family history along three interrelated trajectories: (1) religious families were quite elastic in their ideas of membership, since unrelated evangelicals became “brothers,” “sisters,” “mothers,” and “fathers”; (2) this flexibility of familial association strengthened the emotional bonds of family by emphasizing the intimacy of this chosen family; and (3) evangelicals accelerated the turn toward romantic marriage through their exaltation of the “soul mate” as a central consideration for marriage.
While it is easy to associate religious notions of family with conservative, backward-looking principles, religious groups have also prompted radical reconsiderations of family formation, gender roles, and marriage. This is particularly true of dissenting religious groups, which critics have frequently characterized as sexually deviant.10 Early Quakers excited suspicion for the ways that they allowed women to preach in public, and critics accused Quakers of sexual flagrancy behind closed doors. Similarly, antipopery movements in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England, France, and America fostered the idea that Catholics were sexually aberrant; images circulated of publicly prudish priests and nuns who were secretly lascivious. The Moravians, who were Methodists’ contemporaries, shared similarly pietistic, ecstatic language with Methodists. Moravian communities also challenged the normative patriarchal family through their separation of the sexes in worship and life. Polygamous Mormons in the nineteenth century faced violent public opposition to their marital practices. A common component of these religious dissenters’ challenge to the larger society was their countervailing notions of gender and sexuality.
The preponderance of anti-Methodist literature written in the eighteenth century demonstrates how disturbing and provocative this group was to outsiders. During the eighteenth century, critics contributed to a deluge of material written against Methodists, and publishers turned out more than six hundred anti-Methodist pamphlets.11 Common themes in this literature were the interdependent ideas of evangelicalism’s power and women’s susceptibility to that power. The writings characterized itinerant preachers as poor, uneducated, irrational, self-interested, rapacious, seductive, and dangerous.12
The opposition to this group illustrates the ways in which early Methodists were a revolutionary community. While we are now more likely to associate modern Methodism with middle-class morality, conservative denominationalism, and temperance, Methodism is historically rooted in dissent. In the eighteenth century, Methodists dissented from the Church of England to form their own religious and social culture. In opposition to the dominant social and political beliefs of broader secular society, early Methodists championed antislavery, women’s religious participation, and leadership from a variety of social classes.
Methodist Family
“Family” as a term does not have a static meaning throughout history. The sociological conditions of family have always been contextual, and the cultural and emotional meanings of family changed rapidly during this period in history. There were also variations among families, due to location, race, class, and ethnicity, which make it difficult to speak of “the family.” The geographic scope of Methodists ranged across a variety of settings from London to the newly industrialized areas of North England, and from the American South and Middle Atlantic to the Northeast. Methodists came from elite families and very poor families. Methodists drew from primarily English ideas of family, but the American Methodist family encompassed African Americans as well, especially in the South and Middle Atlantic.
The eighteenth century marks an important, but also a somewhat illdefined, period in family history. In 1976, Nancy Cott marveled that “the eighteenth century is the most mysterious of times in the history of American families.”13 In 2003, Ruth Bloch reiterated the call for further definition of eighteenth-century family culture. “The transition from seventeenth to eighteenth century ideas about sex and marriage was far from smooth … and remarkably little has been done by historians to give an account of the change.”14 Evangelicalism was the predominant emergent moral and religious movement of this era, and it brought a new sensibility to the domestic and social ideas of family in this “mysterious” eighteenth century.
In this study, I analyze the Methodist discourse of family with a concern for both the language and roles of the Methodist family. In using the concept of “family” as a broad association of unrelated people, I depart from family histories based in demographic surveys, a field that has been well established since the late 1960s.15 In going outside the definition of “family” as a unit of the household, I seek to understand how evangelicals used the terms of family as a broader measure of association.
At the outset, this book asks the reader to think of family in two ways: family as metaphor for a profound sense of association for people with few blood ties; and family in the more traditional sense of legally defined families. Just as the alternate metaphorical meaning of family is distinct from the traditional blood family, the religious family is also distinct from the more concrete sense of community. In this current virtual age, a nonphysical community seems very familiar and probable. In the eighteenth century, community was largely a local identification, with a bounded set of peoples and territory. The eighteenth-century evangelical family certainly had a sense of its own membership, but its people were scattered throughout the Atlantic world. Its members were drawn from multiple denominations, races, and nationalities. This was the essence of the evangelical mission, to expand the work of God in every direction. Thus, evangelicals necessarily saw the scope of their mission spreading beyond the boundaries of community.
The Methodist family pulled people out of their identification with local communities into an expansive sense of identity within the larger world of godly people. Furthermore, the Methodist sense of family went beyond the shared elements implied by a community to emotional, personal ties that one finds in affectionate blood families. Family also implied the sense of eternal bonds for Methodists, who saw their commitments to each other and God as eternal ones that would exist beyond the world of the living. As an interesting point of contrast, eighteenth-century Moravians had both a community and a religious family. For Moravians, founding local communities was just as important to their mission as expanding the sites of those communities and reaching various different kinds of people throughout the Atlantic world.16
Methodists evoked the ideas of family by widespread use of terms such as “fellowship,” “our people,” “our society,” and “the connection” when referring to the broader group of Methodists. While eighteenth-century people generally used the term “connection” to refer to extended kinship, the Methodist “connection” meant the whole group, or Methodist associations in different geographical areas.17 When Methodists employed broader associative terms like “our people,” it was a way of talking about their sense of being a distinct family, their shared sense of religious experience, and their linked fates in the world beyond. The concept of “family” underlies all of these terms and encompasses their shared sense of intimacy, obligation, and cohesion.
In researching the accounts and letters written by early Methodists, I came across a consistent use of family terms to describe various kinds of evangelical relationships. The use of the family as metaphor is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere in studies of Methodism. Almost every work references the titles of “brother” and “sister,” but very few examine the context and meaning of those titles.18 At the same time, there has been little attention paid to the exact nature of early Methodist approaches to individual family formation and sexual activity. In 1984, religious historian David Hempton wrote, “The influence of Methodism on family life is also underresearched. On one level, families could be useful in recruitment, as converted parents or children shared their faith within the household.… On another level, however, the austerity of Methodist religion could be recognized by their dress, hairstyles and physical detachment from the world of revelry, sports and dancing.”19 Hempton’s call to study Methodism’s
