Taking Heaven by Storm: Methodism and the Rise of Popular Christianity in America by John H. Wigger, Oxford Univ. Press; 269 pp., $55
The rise of Methodism to become the largest religious denomination in America on the eve of the Civil War was truly remarkable. Its relative neglect by historians is equally remarkable. While Methodist historians of Methodism have done valuable work in preserving archives, writing the internal history of the movement, and interpreting it for outsiders, the secular academy has been on the whole uninterested in the subject. Historians of the stature of E. P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm, who did so much to breathe fresh life into Methodist studies in Britain, have no very obvious American counterparts.
This apparent lack of interest in the history of Methodism was described as “a puzzle” by Nathan Hatch in 1994, even though his own book on The Democratization of American Christianity and subsequent books by Richard Carwardine, Charles Sellers, Russell Richey, and others have helped considerably to reduce the number of missing pieces. John Wigger’s excellent book, based on his doctoral dissertation at Notre Dame, is another important attempt to explain not only why Methodism grew so fast in post-Revolutionary America but also, by implication at least, why its early history has been so lamentably neglected.
The conceptual framework of Wigger’s well-researched book will not be altogether unfamiliar to those who have read Hatch’s work. Methodism is portrayed as the beneficiary of a religious free market and as a movement able to exploit the rise of new geographical and cultural peripheries as America expanded both its settled territory and its internal markets. It appealed largely to the middling sort (a contention now disputed in recent studies of British Methodism) whose social aspirations were nurtured by methodistical disciplines, but it also attracted large numbers of African Americans and women.
Early Methodist growth was largely a southern phenomenon, but then it spread north into New York and New England, and west into new territories. Methodists were men and women who chose their own spiritual and economic destinies and forged their own communities as against the perceived passivity of Calvinists and established churches.
If Wigger’s conceptual framework is largely inherited, his detailed accounts of the itinerant preachers and of the Methodist connection in action are splendidly worked out. The Methodist itinerants, the worker bees of the new movement, were mostly from artisan or farming backgrounds and were propelled into sacrificial service by dramatic religious conversions. Most of the early itinerants were unmarried, underpaid, and fired with enthusiasm. They formed a “band of brothers” dependent on hospitality for survival and fiercely egalitarian in the sharing out of resources and hardships. Their egalitarianism, geographic mobility, and willingness to compete for converts perfectly matched the prevailing economic and social conditions of early nineteenth-century America. Over time, however, increasing numbers married and located as the early vigor of the circuit system gradually gave way to a more settled and better salaried ministry.
The itinerant preachers were the lubricating oil in the Methodist connectional system, which drew resources from the center to the periphery and institutionalized cooperation without crippling individual initiative. For all its virtues of flexibility and sociability, however, connectionalism also had a way of transmitting conflict. Tensions between bishops and preachers, localities and centers, and rulers and ruled were ubiquitous in early Methodism both in Britain and America, and Methodism proved to be one of the most fissiparous of the modern Christian traditions. But division, at least in the short term, did not result in decline as newly organized churches added fresh Methodist varieties to the remarkable pluralism of modern American religion.
Wigger is at his best in exploring those features of early Methodism that helped facilitate its growth: the opportunities it afforded for social bonding through classes, love feasts, and camp meetings; its boiling hot enthusiasm and self-validating supernaturalism; its appeal to African Americans and “mothers in Israel”; its tender pieties and sober disciplines; its sense of individual responsibility and corporate support; and its relentless emphasis on self-improvement.
There were, of course, darker sides to the movement. After initially welcoming African Americans and women, Methodism marginalized them. Its early leaders spoke out against slavery, but subsequent generations collaborated in injustice. The movement’s early emphasis on diligence in prayer and constancy in business gradually gave way to an uncritical and sometimes sanctimonious pursuit of wealth and social status.
Indeed, it is the main argument of Wigger’s book that not only did Methodism shape American culture more powerfully than has yet been recognized but also that American culture has shaped Methodism, often in unpleasant ways. So close was the symbiotic relationship between Methodist and American values that historians have found it impossible to disentangle them.
One of the strengths of Taking Heaven by Storm is the author’s willingness to take Methodist enthusiasm seriously without collapsing it into social dislocation or psychological distress. He deals sympathetically with conversion narratives and with the occasionally bizarre supernaturalism of the Methodist faithful. He rightly states that early American Methodism cannot be reduced to enthusiasm, but cannot be understood without it. Still, the reader is left with nagging questions about the religious appeal of Methodism to its adherents and about the nature of Methodist spirituality. The nagging is reinforced by statements like “in both England and America, Methodist theology and doctrine added impetus to the movement’s social and cultural appeal.” Is that the correct sequence?
A more detailed exploration of the power of the Methodist message (its roots in a distinctive theology and its application in the lives of its hearers) would have added yet more dimensions to the author’s analysis. The Methodist itinerant preachers, so brilliantly brought to life in this study, did not self-consciously apprehend that they were engaged in a mission that perfectly suited their democratic and market-driven times. They set out on their mission because they thought their lives had been transformed by a powerful message of universal grace, and they could not wait to tell anyone else who would spare the time to listen. The message-its reception, transmission and application-is worthy of further study, not in dusty theological tomes as if it were a piece of forensic evidence, but as a powerful voluntary request, freely offered and freely received.
David Hempton is professor of church history at Boston University. He is author of The Religion of the People: Methodism and Popular Religion (Routledge).
