Supplement to Endnotes

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Early Methodists have been portrayed by some historians as outsiders, braving the buffets of capitalism’s earliest winds.[1]

Yet, however humble its beginnings, American Methodism increasingly accommodated itself to well-heeled gentlemen; and it did so while instilling in its congregants values of self-reliance and hard work, offering a path towards uplift and respectability. The gospel of self-generated conversion, industry and self-improvement attracted masses of Americans searching for a path toward respectability.

    By mid-century many Methodists began hearkening back to the purer days of plain church houses and members dressed in homespun and patches, both proud of and embarrassed by their humble beginnings. Yet, more and more believers relished their hard-won respectability and wealth -- what would have once been seen as the devil’s kiss of death. Affluence and respectability may have been dangerous; yet it demonstrated a Christian’s tireless labor. If a disciple hid the natural fruits of collective work and self-improvement, he or she would be hiding God’s promised blessings for the worthy.[2]

    First softening theology, then softening seats and fine drapery, made the old Puritan religion something that few could anymore hear or feel.

    Because they were called to be fishers of men, Methodists found ways to outfish other Christian denominations. They had to attract and retain members from a nation of men and women who sought refinement and respectability. Starting in the 1820s, Episcopalians began luring aspiring congregants who were dazzled by the gothic architecture and splendor of worship. Other churches followed along. Congregationalists, though, denounced how Episcopalians (like the dreaded Catholics) had pushed preaching of the word to the corners of worship, bringing ornate altars and elaborate ritual to the center. Such Popish churches, they warned, were designed to manipulate the mind with glinting gold instead of bringing gospel preaching to the soul. But even Congregationalists placed the pulpit at the center of worship only to crowd it with velvet, cushioned seats, belfries, organs, carpeted steps, tassels, silver and so on. With the refinement of churches, preachers’ education and manners had to complement the grandeur. First in larger cities, then in frontier towns and villages, churches scrambled to keep up with one another. For much of mid-century Christianity, good taste was a sign of true conversion.[3]

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[1]  See: Christine Leigh Heyrman, Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); John H. Wigger, Taking Heaven by Storm: Methodism and the Rise of Popular Christianity in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). Charles Sellers locates class tensions in antebellum America in the religious battles between market-oriented congregations and subsistence-oriented, fiercely egalitarian denominations like Baptists and Methodists. The latter he paints as “antinomian,” resistant to refined believers (“arminians”) who had come to believe in the power of humans to regenerate themselves and the world around them. But it was moderate, arminianized preachers like Charles Grandison Finney who began winning over traditionalists into a new, progress-oriented culture that celebrated the individual’s power to progress materially and spiritually. Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).

 

[2] One might mistake this as proof that the culture of ambition finally wooed the disciples of Wesley away from their humble origins. But this garbles reality. Many early Methodists were Jefferson’s plodding yeomen who denounced commercial intrigue and privilege while laboring relentlessly on farms, or in shops, in the hope of improving their condition, or getting ahead. Their sanctified work provided the intricate fibers in the vast web of trade and exchange that transformed everyday life in antebellum America. In other words, the market revolution of the first half of the nineteenth century, and the simultaneous explosion of Methodism seem to have been more than coincidental. If white American Methodists were lured away from their humble beginnings, they were chasing their own tails toward materialism. The culture of ambition and prosperity did not eventually overcome resistant believers; instead, it was their gospel of work and the zeal for education that helped set the forces in motion. As much as some Methodists lamented that the worldly market had got its hooks into the faithful, it was the early faithful who prepared the way for the American faith of trade and business.

    Though Methodists may have originally been drawn to Jefferson’s party which celebrated yeomen over merchants, and later to Jackson’s -- it did not mean they shared the suspicions of wealth and market forces of their fellow party members. In fact, their commitment to these parties had more to do with Methodists’ longer struggle with more established denominations (like Congregationalists and Presbyterians) who had sought to legislate morality and shape culture by regulating the free market of the Holy Spirit. By the 1830s and 40s though, with the worrisome rise of alcoholism, prostitution, Jackson’s own spotty record of morality, the influx of German and Irish papists, and the ways in which even old-line Calvinists began softening up their teachings on depravity and predestination, Methodists found themselves increasingly comfortable within a broad Christian alliance within the Whig Party. The Whigs, and later the Republicans attracted those who shared an economic vision of cultivating material progress by using legislation and policies to shape and control the market. Though many Methodists worried about succumbing to the God of mammon, their own long held commitments to individual choice, self-improvement and competing in the religious free market, brought significant portions of them into a cozy embrace with Whigs and later Lincoln’s party.

    See: Richard Carwardine, “‘Antinomians’ and ‘Arminians’: Methodists and the Market Revolution” in The Market Revolution in America: Social, Political, and Religious Expressions, 1800-1880, edited by Melvyn Stokes and Stephen Conway (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996), p. 282-307; John H. Wigger, Taking Heaven by Storm: Methodism and the Rise of Popular Christianity in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Curtis D. Johnson, “Islands of Holiness: Rural Religion in Cortland County, New York, 1790-1860” PhD diss., (University of Minnesota, 1985),esp. pp. 82-85.

[3]  Richard Bushman, The Refinement of America, pp. 313-349.

 

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