After a long season as historical understudies to the New England mind in the explanation of American religious history, Methodists began coming into their own in American religious historiography about two decades ago. Since American Methodism was rooted in British beginnings, more recent histories—spearheaded by David Hempton's Methodism: Empire of the Spirit (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006)—frequently take the transatlantic nature of the movement into account. This book probes diaries, letters, and published writings of Methodists in Britain and America, as well as the writings of the movement's critics, to explore something still under discussion in our own day: the influence of religion on definitions of family, and of family on definitions of religion.
Anna Lawrence, noting the fluid nature of the Methodist movement as a society rather than a formal denomination, explores “how men and women related to one another within this rapidly growing transatlantic network of familial relations and how they claimed authority over the personal decisions within their own lives and within the family as a whole” (2). Particularly, she wants to attend to how “the roles of religious families and the significance of religious literature” (2) helped move society from an older model of marriage focused on economic needs and filial obedience to ideas of marriage as a romantic love match. The individualism and flexibility with which religious families were chosen and forged by previously unrelated people, the intimacy of these newly chosen relationships, and the “exaltation of the ‘soul mate’ as a central consideration for marriage” (2) all played central roles in defining the modern family.
Lawrence begins by narrating how the structures of belonging that Methodists created—classes, bands, and societies—redefined family: “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). Conversion focused on separating from natal families to choose the Methodist one, usually in the face of opposition; it often “entailed class and gender transgressions, alongside repudiating one's birth family and customs” (69).
This new family had in it fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters, and Lawrence looks closely at how and why Methodists used each of these terms to claim each other as family members within the movement's unique structures. Particularly—in a move often mocked by anti-Methodist writers—Methodists “employed sensual language to describe their most ecstatic, God-centered feelings and relationships . . . . The passion normally reserved for couples or family members was transferred to unrelated Methodists” (130).
Yet the movement also encouraged “reserved” sexual practices, creating for Methodists a tension and a constant need to “make a strict accounting of their sensations . . . to sift through what was divine and what was devilish” (130). Celibacy was strongly urged among many early Methodists, and Lawrence sees in this not only necessity (itinerants were not paid enough to support families) but a willingness to “put themselves at odds with the predominant cultural and parental pressures” toward marriage and patriarchal family life (157). Yet some early Methodists did marry. She probes the “tortuous and deliberative” spiritual path they took toward marriage, with much at stake in both “romantic and religious destiny” in “choosing the correct soul mate” (185–186). Finally, she uses language of family and authority to explain how American Methodism became independent from its British family, and how Methodists negotiated the changing landscape of race within the early American movement (a road also traveled by another excellent new book, Charity Carney's Ministers and Masters: Methodism, Manhood, and Honor in the Old South [Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011]). The closing pages gesture toward Methodists' nineteenth-century emborgeoisment and the ways in which “the radicalism of its 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).
Methodists may have become the new American historiographical darlings, but this detailed, wittily written, and thoughtful book stands out among many recent entries. It is impossible to look at either Methodism or the modern family in the same way after reading Lawrence. While modern evangelical gender roles by no means derive solely from Methodist sources, she makes an excellent case that Methodist language about these matters pervaded American culture and permanently changed the ways in which many religious people defined social bonds as well as the meaning of conversion. (It could even be argued that the search for a “soul mate” spawned an entire generation of Christian dating and relationship books, a genre well critiqued recently by Margaret Kim Peterson and Dwight Peterson's Are You Waiting for “The One”? [Downers Grove, Ill.: IVP Books, 2011], which attempts to uninscribe many expectations that the trends Lawrence illuminates here inscribed on Christian marriage in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries).
Scholars of family history will find that Lawrence's religious focus sheds new light on the creation of the modern nuclear family, ironically deriving from a movement that felt itself to be profoundly countercultural. Scholars of Methodism will gain much from viewing the movement as consisting, even in its modern bureaucratic form, of relationships defined above all in familial terms. And Lawrence's insights still resonate as well with the lived experience of many who remain within conservative holiness and evangelical families, churches, and organizations.
