One Family Under God: Love, Belonging, and Authority in Early Transatlantic Methodism

2. Loosening the Bonds of Family and Society

Chapter  Loosening the Bonds of Family and Society In the eighteenth century, the ideal Methodist convert was a young individual , someone who used her youthful energy to further evangelical growth. In Dee Andrews’s meticulous survey of membership records in the Middle Atlantic region of America, she discovered a ‘‘prototype’’ for Methodist laity in the late eighteenth century: a woman who was sixteen to twentyfour years old, unmarried, and still living at home or making her living as a servant.1 Reaching young men was also necessary for sustaining evangelical growth; the grueling pace and sacrifice of the preachers’ circuit was seen as a young man’s job. The prototypical circuit preacher Freeborn Garrettson joined the preaching ranks at the age of twenty-four, covering much of the Middle Atlantic and upper South, traveling over , miles from  to .2 As young as many converts were, they had to consider their ties to their blood families when they joined the evangelical family. Alienation from one’s birth family was often a necessary preliminary step toward becoming a Methodist, especially from the late s to the second decade of the nineteenth century. In their letters and journals, young Methodists regularly recorded the scorn and disapprobation of their families. Evangelical literature and fellowship helped these young converts through the pangs of separation from their previous lives, families, and friends. At the same time, anti-Methodist literature stoked the idea that there were two competing cultures in a young convert’s life, one belonging to their natal family and tradition and the other to the strange ways of the Methodists. Early converts heard gossip and read pamphlets that characterized evangelicals as low class, deranged, self-serving, and false. As the first generations of evangelicals joined this group, they encountered social and familial opposition based on these negative characterizations of Methodism . Most Methodists did not become orphans in the literal sense, but Loosening the Bonds  many experienced profound distancing from their natural families as they joined a larger family of believers. The erosion of familial bonds was both a stereotypical anti-Methodist critique and an accurate description of reality. In multiple pamphlets and journals, Methodists were charged with being antifamily, leading young, impressionable minds away from their normal dispositions.3 In reality, Methodism did provide an impetus for separation from one’s given family, and evangelical narratives illustrate the details of this separation. In these narratives, Methodists described their new religious ideas as a source of conflict in their families, and they further described real and symbolic ruptures between evangelicals and society as a whole. New converts changed their ways by dressing differently, associating with different people, and generally holding different values, many of which transgressed gender and class norms. Methodists encouraged one another to take up the cross, to suffer in seriousness against the obstacles of family and friends. In , American preacher Stith Mead encouraged young converts to avoid their old irreligious friends, writing that a truly religious convert would not take pleasure in Company profane Who wishes to Adulterate and alter her name . . . Declaring she never her God will offend To be the Companion of a wicked friend.4 Dissent into Madness One signal that others saw Methodists as a distinct and disturbing family was the regularity of association between madness and Methodism in the eighteenth century. This was not simply a fictional caricature, because some Methodists described themselves as truly consumed by the psychological trials of conversion. The first step in conversion was conviction of sin, which made some evangelicals merely melancholy. In others, awareness of their sinfulness caused them to act in ways that would seem insane—crying, trembling, groaning, talking to God, and displaying severe emotional swings. After attending a Methodist sermon, the young English convert Mary Maddern was awakened to her sinfulness, and she became convinced that she would go to hell. When Maddern discovered Methodism, she was a teenager. Soon after she attended her first meetings, her parents forbid her to go to any more, arguing that the Wesley brothers ‘‘had drove Many  Chapter  to dispare through [their pernicious] Doctrine.’’5 She seemed to confirm these rumors, when she left the Methodist meeting, ‘‘crying out what shall I do to be saved.’’ She felt worse, not better, after successive sermons, and experienced several months of deepening depression. She went through several more months of feeling alternately at peace and in despair, which continued until she joined...