Shouting, Embracing, and Dancing with Ecstasy: The Growth of Methodism in Newfoundland, 1774–1874 (review)

In 1815, the Wesleyan Methodist Conference in Britain dispatched an increased contingent of clergy to Newfoundland and thereby rescued its population from the moral degradation visited upon it by a cruel environment and unrelenting isolation. At least that has been the dominant historiographical view of Newfoundland Methodism for much of the twentieth century. In Shouting, Embracing, and Dancing with Ecstasy, Calvin Hollett reimagines this history by arguing that popular revivalism, not the efforts of the Wesleyan hierarchy, led to the widespread adoption of Methodism by merchants, merchant clerks, captains of vessels, fishermen, and tradesmen across Newfoundland. Drawing on extensive published and unpublished sources to reach beyond the narratives written by (and featuring the efforts of) the clergy, Hollett sheds new light on the popular appeal of Methodist revivalism in six of Newfoundland’s bays: Conception, Trinity, Bonavista, Notre Dame, Placentia, and Fortune. What emerges is a picture of a vital religion of the people that opened a new way for Newfoundlanders to express their spirituality apart from the increasingly hierarchical frameworks offered by Church of England Tractarianism and an ultramontane Roman Catholic Church. In so doing, Hollett insightfully argues that Methodism furnished more than just a third option: it critically transformed the dynamic of Newfoundland’s broader culture from one of dualism to one of diversity.

While he is careful not to argue that the contribution of the Methodist hierarchy was irrelevant, Hollett concentrates the bulk of his attention on the efforts of laypersons as they travelled throughout Newfoundland to pursue the cod fishery in the south and the seal fishery in the north. By sharing spiritual passions with one another in schooners, on flakes, and in winter tilts, Methodist class leaders, exhorters, and other lay figures obliged to travel for their livelihoods effectively spread their faith far and wide without the direct help of the clergy. Hollett lays a similar emphasis on the importance of revivals growing out of vernacular prayer meetings when he argues that popular revivalism played a far more important role in Methodism’s successes than missionary-led services. Although he stresses that the study of religion should never be reduced to a mere adjunct of political history, Hollett draws special attention to the Conception Bay revival of 1829–32, the Grand Bank and Burin revival of 1848–49, and the Conception Bay revival of 1854–55 while hinting that all these events preceded and perhaps helped to precipitate key political reforms in Newfoundland’s history.

Although the spirit of revivalism eventually gave way to a quest for Methodist respectability in Newfoundland, as it did everywhere else during the nineteenth century, it is striking how long that spirit continued to persist in this particular context. By the time the first Conception Bay revival began in 1829, for example, Egerton Ryerson was already using the Christian Guardian to steer Upper Canadian Methodism into the political mainstream. Meanwhile, the ecstatic excesses of figures such as ‘Crazy’ Lorenzo Dow in the United States had long given way to a broader impulse, led in large part by Nathan Bangs, to achieve social respectability by professionalizing the clergy and raising educational standards across the church. Hollett’s book is thus an intriguing contribution not only to Newfoundland historiography but also to the historiography of Methodism more generally. Though it was not fundamentally different from Methodism elsewhere, Hollett deftly shows the way in which this particularly insular (if not isolated) environment affected the denomination’s development by depriving its clergy of the same degree of oversight they typically exercised elsewhere and consequently how it was able to retain for much longer its primitive character as a robust popular movement grounded in the experience of revival.