A Church’s Broken Heart: Mason-Dixon Methodism

Russell Richey, the William R. Cannon Distinguished Professor of Church History Emeritus at Candler School of Theology, and arguably today’s best-known chronicler of American Methodism, has written yet another seminal monograph on the history of the Wesleyan movement in the United States. This particular volume, however, contains an unexpected twist because the specific topic of the book—the various perspectives regarding race displayed by mid-nineteenth-century white Methodists in Southern and Northern borderlands—reflects similar tensions regarding Black-white relations that Richey experienced personally as a native Southerner and as a Methodist churchman who has lived in both the South and the North.All historiographical interpretations derive, to some degree, from a scholar’s personal background, often unacknowledged. But in A Church’s Broken Heart, Richey self-consciously and prominently includes a number of vignettes from his own biography, including an entire concluding chapter entitled ‘A Long Personal Postscript’ that details aspects of his upbringing and subsequent life story. Rather than detracting from the scholarly import of the book, Richey’s self-disclosure adds poignancy and contemporary relevance to the historical account, helping the reader to make connections between social justice struggles of the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries. Indeed, this volume is a rare specimen of a book that proves to be significant both for religious historians and for non-academic church folk interested in the ups and downs of denominational life.But first let us consider the noteworthiness of A Church’s Broken Heart for scholars interested in the history of Methodism. The story of racial relations in American Methodism, as told by Richey (and others), is a deeply troubling account. At the formation of the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1789, American Methodists carefully followed John Wesley’s instructions by insisting on an integrated church and clear pronouncements against slavery. But almost immediately, white American Methodists prevaricated, and found large and small ways to compromise with the cultural racism that surrounded them. Richey narrates the story of this complicity by using examples of Methodism in two Midwestern states that bordered one another—the slave state of Kentucky and the (nominally) free state of Ohio. The Ohio River divided the two states and therefore provided the border between South and North.In the eastern United States, where there is no river that visibly demarcated North from South, a surveyed geographical line—known as the Mason-Dixon Line—divided the free state of Pennsylvania from the slave state Maryland and thus served as the de facto border between the sections. Because the Mason-Dixon Line technically did not refer to the Ohio-Kentucky border, I initially found the subtitle of the book (Mason-Dixon Methodism) to be confusing, since the content of the book deals with Ohio and Kentucky and not with Methodism in Pennsylvania and Maryland. (It is true, though, that the term ‘Mason-Dixon’ eventually became the common designation for the entire border between North and South.) In addition to the comparison of race relations among Ohio and Kentucky Methodists, a comparison of those relations among Pennsylvania and Maryland Methodists would, in fact, be an engaging research focus, given that American Methodism began and had its earliest growth in that eastern border region. Richey has often commented that the extension of American Methodism is best understood as an expansion that stretched from the Delmarva Peninsula through Baltimore and then westward to the Ohio Valley. Perhaps Professor Richey could enlarge his fascinating study in a subsequent volume by including the older, eastern border states?Why concentrate on Kentucky and Ohio? Richey states that the focus on these two states ‘invites attention to the Midwest as an arena in which Methodism dramatized its racial struggles, setbacks, strategies, compromises, divisions, and traumas’ (xxi). As a result of Richey’s scholarly attention on this region, he concludes that ‘a racist worldview, which guided or shaped signal nineteenth-century achievements by Kentucky and Ohio [white] Methodists, in most sectors of their lives, constitutes the first and overriding motif in this book’ (xii).The author develops his thesis by narrating how race relations took expression in three dimensions of Methodist praxis: its connectional structures, its formational processes, and its outreach—three ‘rubrics’ that interpret Methodism in the nineteenth century and, Richey argues, also interpret it more recently. Together, these three rubrics represent Methodism’s way of being church, its lived ecclesiology.One of the strengths of the book is that it highlights several nineteenth-century figures, such as James B. Finley, who have not received the attention they are due. The author also ‘draws upon and liberally displays the denomination’s nineteenth-century publications’ (xvi). Indeed, a number of nineteenth-century documents are included in the appendix that are not readily available elsewhere. The inclusion of these lengthy reproduced published materials is an enormous gift for historians. The book, Richey states, ‘rests on the official documents of the two churches, Methodist Episcopal Church and Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and of their respective conferences’ (xxiv).Richey’s use of primary sources produced by the two largest Methodist churches in the United States provides a rich in-house interpretation of white Methodism during the antebellum era. The documents of the Kentucky Conference, for instance, demonstrate how its ‘sense of its mission . . . is best captured as it talked to itself’ (34). It would be intriguing, as well, to know how African American Methodist and Holiness denominations, which are briefly mentioned (119–21), viewed race relations during the same period. What were Black Methodists doing and thinking in this era? And what about Wesleyan Methodists, the split-away group of Holiness abolitionists whose Miami Conference in the 1840s and 1850s covered Ohio and included both white and Black members, sometimes in integrated congregations?One of the central conclusions of the book is alluded to several times. Richey determines that, within Mason-Dixon white Methodism, ‘Black lives didn’t matter in Ohio; mattered for field hands and house servants in Kentucky; but prospered for whites in both states’ (x). Southern whites, he states, ‘made efforts to be pastoral across carefully delineated racial lines; Northerners, by contrast, showed indifference to their black members’ (177). This interpretation of the data is very interesting: the allegation of Northern (Methodist Episcopal) indifference to Black lives certainly seems true. One wonders, though, if it is accurate to say that Black lives ‘mattered’ for white Methodists in the South. Southern whites may have made efforts to be pastoral to Blacks, but to what end? My own suspicion is that such a charitable evaluation of antebellum Southern white attitudes is too generous.In moving on from the scholarly contribution of A Church’s Broken Heart to its contribution for everyday Methodists, I would like to focus on the book’s use of a ‘personal tone and references’ (xi). Indeed, in this book Richey employs more than just a subjective tone; the author also tries ‘to reflect personally on sectional and racial differences that have shaped my life, and I judge that of my/our church(es) and nation.’ Why does he focus on his own experiences and why does he offer a judgment on the church? In reflecting on this personalized approach to writing, the author—as an accomplished historian—wonders out loud whether he is ‘perhaps violating scholarly standards’ (xiii). I would say that if Richey is violating such standards, then more power to him, for the questions he raises in A Church’s Broken Heart remain pertinent for Methodists of all backgrounds.Richey uses his own story and his verdict regarding Methodism’s failures to provide contemporary readers with a way forward regarding justice advocacy. He is writing ‘in the shadow of American racial discord’ (ix), which is still with us. He is also writing to a denominational tradition in which racist structures, such as the ongoing use of jurisdictions in the United Methodist Church, continue to be perpetuated. Given these present-day realities, one of the purposes of the book, he hopes, is to ‘guide the church and its people to a vibrant, inclusive, pluralistic, biblically grounded lived theology, and to corporate life shaped accordingly’ (xxxi). By spotlighting the struggles and tensions of American Methodist racial relations, Richey intends to assist current Christian endeavours to build a more just society. Both for researchers and church people, then, A Church’s Broken Heart is an essential text for readers today.

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