Our Hearts were Strangely Lukewarm: The American Methodist Church and the Struggle with White Supremacy

Scholars who decry racism in American society and condemn the collusion of white Wesleyan adherents in maintaining sinful systems of Black subordination premise their narratives around the Methodist Episcopal Church as the normative expression of Methodism in America. This formulation is unnecessarily narrow and wrongly characterizes as derivative other historic Wesleyan denominations of equal longevity and ecclesial standing. American Methodism is not synonymous with white Methodism, but merely includes this large but hardly representative Wesleyan body in what became the United States. Hence, prior to any discussion of institutional racism within Methodism, there must be a stipulation that the Methodist Episcopal Church, later the United Methodist Church, while significant, was not the most important voice on how Wesleyan theology reckoned with subaltern constituents victimized by slavery, segregation, and other forms of anti-Black oppression.While Richard Allen led in the establishment of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, he attended the founding ‘Christmas’ Conference that formally organized America’s Wesleyan ecclesia. As an itinerant preacher who travelled in the Middle Atlantic, Allen belonged to the first generation of American Methodists and was as much a founding father of Methodism in America as any other Methodist who embraced the Wesleyan cause after its entry to America in 1766. A different vision for Methodism emerged in 1787 in the same fluid era as the 1784 ‘Christmas’ Conference. While the factual record of Our Hearts were Strangely Lukewarm is correct, the conceptual framework that shapes it requires refinement. The white-dominated Methodist Episcopal Church retreated from racial inclusivity, while the concurrent emergence of African Methodism, believing that Christianity barred no one from the altar, remained faithful to the Wesleyan vision of the still-living John Wesley.Though the author rightly identified the locus of anti-Black racism in the Methodist Episcopal Church, he scarcely recognizes that the African Methodist Episcopal Church, launched in 1787, and the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, whose roots lay in 1796, represented a visible and palpable witness for a competing vision for Methodism. The language of schism or breakaway is misleading because African Methodism and what is actually a white-dominated American Methodism represented different contemporaneous versions of Wesleyan theological interpretations. Though the author acknowledges the existence of African Methodism, he does not view them as peer movements that promulgated a compelling and competing testimony about an authentic Wesleyan identity.The steady abandonment of the Methodist Episcopal Church from staunch anti-slavery positions divided the denomination before the 1844 split that yielded the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. Within the North, white Methodists differed in the degree of zeal they expressed for abolitionism and whether gradual emancipation, the repatriation of Blacks to Africa, or a restricted civic status were the best solutions in reckoning with the African American population. Notwithstanding a separation from a pro-slavery southern branch, the attitudes of northern white Methodists about Blacks did not mean that they were advocates of Black equality. Additionally, the author contrasts the separatist policies of both the Methodist Episcopal Church and the Methodist Episcopal Church, South in how they engaged with freed people after the Civil War with the African Methodist denominations and their emphasis on autonomy and assertiveness both in the ecclesial and civic spheres. Though sundry white Methodists supported African American equality, their sincere stands proved insufficient in thwarting the 1939 reunion of the majority white Methodist ecclesia at the price of a formal racial segregation of Black members in a Central Jurisdiction.The civil rights era, however, pushed the Methodist Church beginning at the 1964 General Conference to dismantle separatist structures and to desegregate the denomination. Some in the clergy in the South resisted racially recalcitrant parishioners who opposed Black civil rights. Salient strides through the Commission on Religion and Race, Black Methodists for Church Renewal, strategic cross-racial pastoral appointments, and the elevation of Black bishops and district superintendents addressed the denomination’s imperfect racial past.The version of Methodism developed in the Methodist Episcopal Church and the successor bodies that led to the United Methodist Church mirrored the variegated views about African Americans espoused within the larger American society. The author, across several eras, identified ministers and members, both white and Black, and male and female, who sought to subvert the racial status quo in both church and society. Nonetheless, he missed a major opportunity in not delving deeper into the Black ecclesia that flourished within the majority white Methodist body. Whether it was the nonviolent theorist, James M. Lawson Jr, mentioned in sundry areas of the book; Gloster B. Current, the influential NAACP leader; Charles Albert Tindley, the mega church builder and prolific hymnologist; or I. De Quincey Newman, a civil rights titan in South Carolina, these apostles of Wesleyan social holiness from the racially proscribed precincts in white Methodism understood the insurgent elements of Wesleyan theology better than their Caucasian counterparts. They with their colleagues in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, African Methodist Episcopal Church Zion Church, and Christian Methodist Episcopal denominations moulded an African American Methodism that reflected the subversive ‘practical divinity’ that John Wesley espoused.

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