One Family Under God: Love, Belonging, and Authority in Early Transatlantic Methodism

About two decades ago (with the 1993 publication of Gregory Schneider's The Way of the Cross Leads Home) American religious historians—who up until that point had been far more interested in New England Puritans— discovered that Methodists were interesting. It took the American guild somewhat longer—urged on in fact by Northern Irish historian David Hempton's 2005 Methodism: Empire of the Spirit—to discover that Methodists were also British. Hempton began a tradition of fine books which take the transatlantic nature of Methodism into account.This well-written, entertaining book is worthy of standing in that line, though its conclusions may be most relevant to the American context. Lawrence focuses on the idea of family, which she has rightly seized on as being central to early Methodist discourse. How does viewing one's religious movement as a family define the movement? How does it change the way one views one's own families? Through writings of Methodists in Britain and America—and of their critics, who often found their relational and emotional language highly suspect—Lawrence probes these questions. Surprisingly, she concludes that many aspects of the modern family, which no one would dream were rooted in Methodist experience, in fact draw on the way Methodists made themselves a family and made the family their own.Within the Methodist societies, ‘men and women related to one another within this rapidly growing transatlantic network of familial relations and … claimed authority over the personal decisions within their own lives and within the family as a whole’ (2). Methodist experience, especially the experience of befriending and sometimes marrying fellow Methodists, was central, Lawrence argues, to the change from viewing marriage as a result of economic needs and filial obedience to viewing marriage as a romantic love match.How did this happen? Classes, bands, and societies redefined family even as they redefined and encouraged discipleship: ‘One was not born into it; one had to earn it … Conversion made individuals members of a transnational and unearthly family, one in which members might not even meet in this world but were guaranteed to do so in the next’ (43). People often separated from their birth families and social ‘customs’ as a result of conversion. Conflict ensued from the resulting ‘class and gender transgressions’ (69). Women especially committed such ‘transgressions’, and Lawrence mentions three famous Methodist women who became transatlantic models of this journey: Catherine Livingston [ Garrett], Mary Bosanquet [Fletcher], and Hester Ann Roe [ Rogers].Lawrence also explicitly notes something I had intuitively known: that early Methodists used all the common family terms—fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters—to describe their relationships to each other in society, class, and band. Critics often zeroed in on the emotional intensity of these relationships. Methodists ‘employed sensual language to describe their most ecstatic, God-centred feelings and relationships…. The passion normally reserved for couples or family members was transferred to unrelated Methodists’ (130). Yet since Methodists also encouraged restrained and modest sexual mores, they had a constant need to ‘make a strict accounting of their sensations … to sift through what was divine and what was devilish’ (130). The encouragement of celibacy, especially for male itinerants, was a matter of economic necessity, but it also put them at ‘odds with the predominant cultural and parental pressures’ towards marriage and family life (157). When Methodists did marry, it was often a ‘tortuous and deliberative’ event with ‘romantic and religious destiny’ both at stake in ‘choosing the correct soul mate’ (185–6).Finally, Lawrence notes that Methodists in America also used the language of family and authority to explain their independence from their British family, first acknowledging themselves as Wesley's ‘sons in the gospel’, but later writing him out of the Discipline (at least as their ‘father’) (203). The attention to family also had interracial complexities in the American context.In the nineteenth century, Methodists became more respectable. In the US they became the de facto established Church and in Britain they operated in the shadow of one, but in both places among their mainline strand ‘the radicalism of [their] voluntary social organization faded, and these romantic, sentimental bonds found outlet in the more traditional sense of the Methodist household, a bounded nuclear unit’ (223). Given where Methodists had started out, this was a very ironic place to end up.In many ways, this book speaks particularly to the American religious experience, especially the evangelical experience. Methodists are not the only source of modern evangelical emphases on the nuclear family, on conversion as an intimate relationship with Jesus, or the ‘exaltation of the “soul mate” as a central consideration for marriage’ (2)—but Methodist language on these matters has turned out to be pervasive. Certainly my own experience within American holiness and evangelical subcultures have shown them operating with many of the subconscious presuppositions Lawrence outlines here.But this book can also adjust one's vision of Methodism itself. American Methodists in particular navigate a modern Church that operates like a large, bureaucratic company yet still defines itself in terms of family relationships. Recognizing that Methodism at heart treats its dysfunctions as family quarrels is perhaps the first step to repairing them.

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