Religion of the People

Methodism and Popular Religion 1750-1900

David Hempton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136131561
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Taking account of broader patterns of growth, the focus of this book is Methodism in the British Isles. Hempton discusses why Methodism, the most important religious movement in the English-speaking world in the 18th and 19th centuries, grew when and where it did and what was the nature of the Methodist experience for those who embraced it. He also explores the themes of law, politics and gender which lie at the heart of Methodist influence on individuals, communities and social structures.

Part I

Growth: Comparisons and Experiences

The two most important questions to be asked of Methodism are why did it grow when and where it did, and what was the nature of the Methodist experience for those who embraced it? As with the great hub airports of the modern airline industry all other questions stretch back to those two and cannot be answered without reference to them. The quest for answers is essential; the prospect of supplying them is intimidating.

The first two chapters represent two very different approaches to the first question. The first seeks to understand Methodist expansion within the widest possible geographical area (with the notable exception of Canada) in the North Atlantic world in the Age of Revolution. The second is an intensive local study of Methodism in the border counties of southern Ulster in the same period. Each approach has its strengths and weaknesses. The former inexorably leads the historian into other big questions about the relationship of Methodist expansion to other simultaneous social processes, including the rise of industrial capitalism, the growth of market economies, the rise of religious pluralism and the democratization of religion and politics. The answers are inevitably speculative, though the process of comparison from place to place imposes its own intellectual disciplines and throws up new frameworks of interpretation. Less ink would have been wasted by nationally bound historians of Methodism if they had paused to think how it was that Wesleyan Arminianism, itinerant preaching, lay leadership, class systems, love-feasts and hymn-singing came successfully to be exported to many different social contexts in different parts of the world in the period from 1750 to 1850.

Bigger canvasses naturally facilitate the treatment of bigger themes, but there is room also for the fine etchings of the miniaturist in the reconstruction of Methodist communities. Methodism did not simply blow across the North Atlantic world like some giant cloud propelled by other more powerful forces, it was rooted in the particularities of time and place. Its tender pieties and harsh disciplines were embraced by individuals and expressed in communities. Methodism needs to be earthed and the second chapter is an attempt to do just that. The advantages of a local study are that it is possible to reconstruct the economic and social setting of Methodism and relate it quite precisely to the growth and decline in membership. Southern Ulster was chosen because most Irish Methodists lived there and because Irish Methodism has not as yet been overlain with the same kind of cultural baggage as exists in England. It represented a rare opportunity to paint a picture almost from scratch.

In their different ways what these chapters show is that Methodism profited from the erosion of old structures and the weaknesses of the established denominations. Methodism thrived in expanding and pluralistic societies and found the going much tougher in places where old authorities or old conflicts retained their power throughout the revolutionary period. Methodism’s own expansionist mechanisms either operated in symbiosis (though not necessarily always in harmony) with wider economic and cultural patterns or clashed with them. The former, as in the USA, England and Wales, produced remarkable growth, while the latter, as in Ireland and France, could throw up periods of intense religious excitement, but could not convert them into durable religious cultures. On one level Methodist growth obeyed a tautology: growth and expansion created the minimum conditions of religious pluralism which in turn opened the way for further growth and expansion. Soil already steeped in Roman Catholicism or Presbyterianism was rarely as fertile for Methodism as that already cultivated by the Anglicans or that which had never properly been cultivated before.

Whatever the patterns that emerge it is good to be constantly reminded that Methodism was carried by people to people. It is sadly instructive to compare the many thousands of books devoted to Methodist theology, ministry and organization with the mere handful devoted to religious motivation, meaning and experience. Both in this section and in the others at least some effort has been made to restore this horrid imbalance.

The third chapter, therefore, represents an attempt to penetrate to the heart of popular religious (not only Methodist) cultures in the British Isles in the modern period. Oral evidence (and, later, participant observation), literary evidence and the decoding of religious rituals and rites of passage all show how unsatisfactory are the crude divisions into which statistically based studies have consigned their subjects. The religious census of 1851 still casts a great shadow over the writing of nineteenth-century religious history. Only slowly have we begun to shake off the statistical and utilitarian inquisitions of the Victorian bourgeoisie to move on to the questions which could neither be addressed nor answered by such methods. Numbers and the way in which they line up are far from unimportant, but they can no more get to the essence of religious belief and practice than Samuel Butler’s bees were able to extract pollen from flowered wallpaper.

1

‘Motives, Methods and Margins’: A Comparative Study of Methodist Expansion in the North Atlantic World, c. 1770–1850

Whether one was stimulated or angered by his work, there is no denying the fact that the regrettable death last year of Edward Thompson has robbed us of one of the most widely read and admired interpreters of popular religion in its cultural setting during the Industrial Revolution. A man of razor-sharp intellect and passionate convictions, Thompson was not only one of Britain’s greatest ever social historians, but also has had a remarkable influence over Methodist historiography, especially in the United States, since the publication of his great work The Making of the English Working Class in 1963.¹ In a sense, however, his is a name that will not be regarded with particular fondness by those interested in the history of Methodism as a popular religious movement. The ringing phrase ‘psychic masturbation’ along with his other attempts to get at the heart of Methodist experience through a psycho-sexual treatment of hymns and images created an immense stir at the time and has never been forgotten or indeed forgiven by those who felt that a great religious tradition had been immolated on the altar of the sexual faddism of the 1960s.²

But Thompson was no mere dedicated follower of fashion. In the midst of the controversy surrounding his interpretation of Methodism it is easy to forget that Thompson wrote as he did as a result of asking penetrating questions which seem genuinely to have perplexed him and which still need to be addressed. With a sharp eye for the way the historiography was shifting, he stated that

too much writing on Methodism commences with the assumption that we all know what Methodism was, and gets on with discussing its growth rates or its organisational structures. But we cannot deduce the quality of the Methodist experience from this kind of evidence.³

It was his attempt to penetrate to the heart of Methodist experience – as opposed to its structures, organization and theology – that stimulated Thompson to address a number of subsidiary but linked questions. Why did working people, for example, accept ‘this passionate Lutheranism’ and not the more politically literate and rational faith of the English dissenting tradition which Thompson considered a more appropriate vehicle for working-class interests in the age of the French Revolution? How should one begin to interpret recorded Methodist experiences when they were so often couched in the most high-flown supernaturalistic language about Satan and his demons and described in the most surreal of images?⁴ How can one explain a religion allegedly founded on the principles of a loving sacrifice which nevertheless ‘feared love’s effective expression, either as sexual love or in any social form which might irritate relations with Authority’? How can the remorseless mechanics of societary discipline be squared with the remarkable outbursts of folk revivalism which seemed to operate on the rawest edge of emotional extremism? How could Methodism simultaneously act as the religion of the industrial bourgeoisie and wide sections of the proletariat given that both Weber and Tawney had confined themselves to explaining why puritanical forms of religion had appealed almost exclusively to the middling sort with economic aspirations?

In answering these questions and in facing up to the many apparent paradoxes of Methodist experience, Thompson imposed several analytical frameworks; I say imposed, because, as is the way with many of the most influential histories of Methodism on both sides of the Atlantic, his conceptual apparatus and sheer power of historical imagination were generally more impressive than his detailed evidence. For convenience he split Methodist history into three epochs: the era of the Wesleyan pastorate, the war years and ‘the sober years of ascending respectability and social status’.⁵ It was the middle period, Methodism’s great age of rapid expansion, that interested him most. In this period he sought to explain Methodist experience in terms of the psychic disturbances occasioned by war, food shortages and revolutionary political and social changes, which he synthesized in the memorable phrase ‘the chiliasm of despair’. He meant by that not so much that Methodism was a kind of millenarian sect – like those which came to the fore during the English Civil Wars and Interregnum – but that social and political anomie produced the kind of psychological climate within which a religion like Methodism could flourish.

His second broad conceptual framework had to do with Methodism as an inculcator of work discipline and structured leisure at a time when industrial capitalism was eroding the traditional patterns of labour and popular amusement. ‘The argument is thus complete’, he wrote, ‘the factory system demands a transformation of human nature, the “working paroxysms” of the artisan or the outworker must be methodized until the man is adapted to the discipline of the machine.’⁶ It is here that he quotes with approval D. H. Lawrence’s words in The Rainbow that the miners ‘believe they must alter themselves to fit the pits and the place, rather than alter the pits and the place to fit themselves. It is easier.’⁷ This then, as far as Thompson was concerned, was the essence of Methodism’s impact on the workers in the early Industrial Revolution.

His third main conceptual framework was based on his view of Methodist theology, and, in particular, its doctrine of grace. Grace, according to Thompson, was maintained primarily through service to the church, cultivation of the soul by means of conversion, penitence and study, and the creation of methodical discipline in every aspect of life. Passion and the workings of the heart were thus to be confined to the religious spheres of dramatic conversions and service to the church and not to the secular world. In this way ‘the box-like, blackening chapels stood in the industrial districts like great traps for the human psyche’.⁸ It was in this psychological disorder that Thompson located the sexual repression and womb imagery of the Methodist hymns. Why then did working people in such large numbers put up with it? The explanation he offered was a combination of indoctrination through Sunday schools and a desperate search for community in a fragmenting social order. Indeed, anything worthy of admiration in Methodism, and in Thompson’s scheme there is very little, was owing to the ability of the English working classes to import some of their traditional compassion and common sense into the ‘religious terrorism’ of the Methodist experience.⁹

This is not the time or the place to engage in a point-by-point rebuttal of some of Thompson’s arguments. The purpose of describing them at some length is to highlight one of the most imaginative and conceptually fertile attempts to get to the heart of the Methodist experience by answering the basic questions: what is it and why did it grow where and when it did? In answering these questions Thompson put more stress on the motives of the faithful, the methods of transmission and the various margins which Methodism exploited than any of his predecessors. What restricted him was not so much the inappropriateness of the questions he asked as his own ideological convictions that since religious belief is essentially irrational then religion must always be explained in terms of displacement and repression. In short, his Methodism could not be allowed to display agreeable characteristics because no religion of any kind can by definition produce good fruit. Another weakness in Thompson’s approach to Methodism, which surfaced also in his influential study of crowd behaviour in eighteenth-century England, was his assumption that the essence of the Methodist experience was more or less the same from person to person and from place to place. As with English crowd behaviour, he assumes a ‘unanimity of conceptualization’ among Methodists which fails to do justice to the important variables of age, gender, location and level of commitment.¹⁰ In particular, his attempt to link Methodist experience to the dynamics of industrial capitalism fails to explain why both the Wesleyan and Primitive connexions often made their most spectacular gains in primarily rural or village communities.¹¹ It would nevertheless be a misjudgement to ignore Thompson’s shrewd questions simply because the answers he supplied were unsatisfactory.

What I wish to do, therefore, is to look more closely at motives, methods and margins in attempting to explain the quite remarkable expansion of Methodism in different parts of the world in the period 1770–1850. I shall begin with some of the implications of Professor Ward’s work on the European origins of the great awakening, before saying something about Methodist growth in Britain and the United States. I then want to compare those stories with a different and less successful pattern of Methodist growth in Ireland and France in the same period. What accounts for the difference and how can a comparative treatment help to answer some of the questions posed by Thompson in a purely English context? I shall then offer some concluding reflections on the three words that frame my rather contrived alliterative title.

The roots of the great religious revivals of the eighteenth century – from eastern and central Europe to the middle colonies of America – are to be found, according to Professor Ward, in the resistance of confessional minorities to the real or perceived threat of assimilation by powerful states and established churches.¹² He locates the seeds of future revival in the eighteenth-century Protestant frame of mind which was a compound of low morale, fear of confessional conflict, es...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface
• Part I: Growth: comparisons and experiences
• Part II: People: power and piety
• Part III: Themes: law, politics and gender
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index