Introduction and Response to Special Issue

Much has been written about the lives, characters, and theology of John and Charles Wesley, men who helped to shape the ethical compass of the modern age. This issue of Wesley and Methodist Studies addresses the relation of the Wesleyan legacy to race and empire. The sciences have refuted what many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophers were so intent to prove: race, the ideology associated with phenotypical difference, has no inherent biological meaning. In this sense, the Wesley brothers were well ahead of their times. As researchers have demonstrated, John and Charles Wesley overwhelmingly rejected racism and enslavement as immoral—injustices to the human spirit. Indeed, Wesleyan scholarship generally regards the totality of their writings and activism as a refutation of Enlightenment constructs of human ‘whiteness’ and ‘blackness’. This includes what Frantz Fanon would later call the ‘epidermalization of inferiority’, or the perception of persons of African or Asian descent as ontologically subhuman based on racial classification.1 The Wesleyan theological legacy rejects supremacist religion that undergirds such beliefs as well as structural racism and imperialist exploitation.However, much like a multiheaded hydra, the systemic manifestation of racist ideologies has proven resilient since the eighteenth-century ministries of John and Charles Wesley. In various forms, race and empire are thriving, their tentacles wild and tortuous, chameleon-like in adaptability. Thus, the time has come for re-examination of the Wesleyan legacy regarding these issues using the subtleties of a contemporary lens. Calls for reflection upon nuanced aspects of the Wesleyan theological tradition are highly relevant at this moment. In today’s climate, when lingering issues of race and empire impact multiple aspects of secular and religious life, what does Wesleyan thought say to us?Some of the articles in this collection focus on traditional understandings of the Wesleyan tradition regarding imperialism and African agency. These authors explore ways African Methodists incorporated the Wesleyan tradition within their beliefs and identities. These articles demonstrate that various individuals of African descent were empowered by their understandings and propagation of Wesleyan doctrine while navigating British imperialism, racism, and practice of enslavement. Dennis Dickerson, in ‘Building a Diasporic Family’, argues that late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Black Methodist women repudiated Protestant supremacist religion cloaked as civilizing missions. The Women’s Parent Mite Missionary Society, an evangelical organization of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, exemplified the Wesleyan tradition by transcending racial, ethnic, social, economic, and political hierarchies in building Christian communities devoted to societal transformation. This missionary impulse among African Methodists served as resistance to structural racism within mainstream religious institutions that used racializing and paternalistic expressions and methods to evangelize so-called ‘heathen’ and ‘uncivilized’ communities in Africa and the Caribbean. African Methodist resistance entailed stressing familial and communal bonds—the oneness and equality of the human family, exclusive of racial hierarchies or divisions.‘Conversion as an Act of Reclamation: John and Charles Wesley’s Interaction with Two West African Enslaved Men’, by Sègbégnon Mathieu Gnonhossou and Kelly Diehl Yates, challenges scholarship that claims the eighteenth-century historic figures Ancona Robin Robin John and Little Ephraim Robin John, slave traders who had been sold into bondage, returned to their former way of life after acquiring freedom. The authors of this exciting article analyse various primary sources, including handwritten letters (discovered by the authors in the Methodist Archives and Research Centre at the John Rylands Research Institute and Library, University of Manchester) addressed to Charles Wesley by the Robin Johns. Gnonhossou and Yates centre their argument around the notion of thoroughness stressed in Wesleyan conversion theology, in which the believer is completely transformed to live a sanctified life. Deliverance from sin includes the cessation of immoral and unjust practices. The Robin Johns, who were baptized by Charles Wesley, joined Methodist societies in Bristol, England and served in West African Methodist churches once they returned home to what is now Nigeria. The men would have been deeply apprised of the Wesleyan abolitionist stance as part of sanctifying grace. Gnonhossou and Yates also demonstrate that circumstantial documentation suggests that rather than returning to slave trading, the men adopted other economic ventures in West Africa. Two other men of African descent are explored in Colin Haydon’s ‘Son of a Former Slave, Born into Enslavement: Samuel Barber (1783–1828) and Edward Fraser (1798–1872), Two Mixed-Race Methodist Evangelists’. This article examines the lives of mixed-race men who lived and flourished as Methodist preachers in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British imperial world. Samuel Barber, the son of a formerly enslaved African, became a dynamic Primitive Methodist local preacher in England. Edward Fraser, born into enslavement in the British Caribbean, became an influential Wesleyan Methodist preacher and missionary. Despite enduring the challenges of racism and enslavement, both men demonstrated resilience and courage while proclaiming the gospel through the evangelical Methodist tradition.A second set of articles subject the notion of John Wesley as public theologian to contemporary analyses, focusing specifically on Wesley’s expressed dedication to anti-imperialism and abolitionism. ‘John Wesley and the East India Company’, by Clive Murray Norris, evaluates Wesley’s apparent failure to condemn the notorious East India Company, known for its abusive colonialist practices, despite public critiques of institutions that exploited foreign lands and peoples. Norris finds that as early as the 1750s, Wesley was aware of corruption in the company. Yet, he chose to broker ethical appeals to shareholders privately. When these entreaties failed, Wesley began publishing prophetic diatribes against the company in the Arminian Magazine and other sources.Natalya A. Cherry offers further examination of the juxtaposition between Wesleyan theology and ethics in ‘Was Eighteenth-Century Arminian Anti-Slavery Also Racist?’ In contrast to the dominant scholarly narrative, which maintains that Wesleyan thought exclusively champions racial equity, Cherry makes a significant breakthrough. She argues that despite critiquing the harmful effects of empire, John Wesley continued to utilize European racializing frameworks—that is, linguistic and ideological constructs of imperialism—in his writings, particularly in the famous tract, Thoughts upon Slavery. To explain her perspective, Cherry helpfully distinguishes between ‘racist pro-slavery’ and ‘racist anti-slavery’—that is, racist ideology regardless of moral posture. The pervasiveness of this racializing paradigm is even evident in the writings of some eighteenth- and nineteenth-century African Americans, who may have also utilized common racist expressions while fighting against structural racism, an important recognition evident in Dickerson’s article. Thus, Cherry’s analysis complexifies the understanding of Wesley’s purported anti-racism and anti-imperialism by highlighting the tendency of linguistic tropes to surreptitiously propagate racialized concepts.David Field delves even further into the racial contradictions of John Wesley’s writings. ‘Imaging the “Exotic Other”: John Wesley and the People of Africa’, shows that despite the use of positive images of West Africans gleaned from various sources in Thoughts upon Slavery, Wesley utilized negative stereotypes of Africans in other writings. Specifically, Wesley uses racist and stereotypical images to describe the Khoikhoi, indigenous populations of South Africa, while discussing original sin and human depravity. Field rightly critiques Wesley’s inconsistent rhetorical imaging of Africans to advance specific theological agendas as harmful and problematic.The provocative and interesting articles in this edition of Wesley and Methodist Studies include traditional perspectives as well as the deconstruction of established narratives in Wesleyan history, theology, and missiology. The twenty-first century is a time of tremendous change and realignment among various institutions that claim the renowned Wesleyan and Methodist heritage—bodies that, in the words of John Wesley, seek to ‘reform the nation, and in particular the Church, to spread scriptural holiness over the land’. These exceptional articles aim to broaden perceptions of race and empire in the church and world, offering insights that may assist in developing effective tools to transcend racial divisiveness.

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