Nathan Bangs and the Methodist Episcopal Church: The Spread of Scriptural Holiness in Nineteenth-Century America

Nathan Bangs (1778–1862) was a towering figure in the Methodist Episcopal Church (MEC) in the generation after Francis Asbury. As a prolific and vigorous polemicist, Bangs defended evangelical Arminianism against New England Calvinists and upheld Methodist episcopacy against Anglicans and Presbyterians. As a publisher and organizer, Bangs transformed the debt-ridden Methodist Book Concern into a flourishing publishing house, adding intellectual depth to the Connexion's literature through the Methodist Magazine and Quarterly Review and creating a successful weekly newspaper, the Christian Advocate and Journal, with a readership of 120,000. He was chosen to promote the work of the MEC's Missionary Society; he served on numerous General Conference committees; he was briefly president of Wesleyan University, and was urged several times to accept nomination to the episcopate; and he chaired the Committee of Nine, which crafted a plan for separating the MEC's warring northern and southern sections as tensions over slavery ran high at the General Conference of 1844. Alongside these multifarious activities, Bangs was also a highly effective preacher, pastor, and presiding elder, instrumental in seasons of revival in New York and elsewhere, while his commitment to Wesleyan teaching on entire sanctification made him a sympathetic, if not uncritical, attender at Phoebe Palmer's Tuesday Meetings for the Promotion of Holiness in the latter years of his long life.Bangs was a controversial as well as an influential leader in the antebellum MEC. Here attention has focused partly on his attitudes toward slavery and separation, partly on his turn away from initial support for constitutional reform in the MEC, and partly on his appraisal of Asbury's legacy. Bangs held that there were two ‘blemishes’ on Asbury's record: his resistance to ministerial training and his failure to acknowledge the financial pressures, particularly on married itinerants, of meagre stipends and inadequate housing. Bangs worked to remedy these perceived deficiencies, promoting the Course of Study for preachers, and arguing for enhanced stipends and the provision of housing for ministers. For some contemporaries, and some later historians, this represented a move away from the primitive simplicity of early Methodism in a quest for respectability, status, and influence in the rapidly developing United States.In this well-researched and very readable biography Jared Maddox provides a chronological account of Nathan Bangs's long life and ministry, and also addresses the historiographical debate around respectability, engaging in particular with the work of Nathan Hatch and John Wigger. For Maddox, the MEC might have become more respectable, but this was not Bangs's aim: his overriding purpose was to promote the mission of Methodism in spreading scriptural holiness, and he sought to make the MEC as effective as possible in achieving that goal. Maddox makes his case, through a detailed study of Bangs's prodigious literary output—an appendix listing Bangs's articles runs to a dozen pages—and through a careful engagement with the history and historiography of American Methodism. Bangs's personal and family life do not feature very much in this biography—the focus is very much on Bangs's ministry and especially on his role in the wider life of the MEC—but this is a very welcome analysis of an important and representative figure in a crucial period of Methodist history.

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