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

3. The Best of Bonds: Joining the Methodist Family

Chapter  The Best of Bonds: Joining the Methodist Family When Susannah Designe wrote to Charles Wesley in , she proclaimed, ‘‘I find greater ties Both of Love and Duty to your Brother and you than my natural parents after the flesh.’’1 While not all Methodists would state this exchange of families in such bald terms, all evangelicals joined a new family when they converted. Methodist laity typically described their relationships to their religious brothers, sisters, mothers, and fathers as the ‘‘best of bonds.’’2 These bonds were employed in various stages of their lives, through conversion, commitment to a religious life, courtship, marriage , childbirth, and death. These family ties bound Methodist structure, promoting a religious association that went deeper than common worship space and practice. On the interpersonal level, these bonds allowed individuals to construct a new sense of family, one that included many more chosen family members than blood relations. During the eighteenth century, various economic, social, and cultural forces confirmed the primacy of the nuclear family, alongside the rise of romantic, love-based marriages.3 At the same time, English and American evangelicals moved in a seemingly opposite direction toward an expansive familial association. By formulating religious bonds that often challenged or competed with the ‘‘natural’’ family, they expanded eighteenth-century families to include chosen, unrelated family members from within the religious ranks. In this family, they replicated the titles, emotions, and supports of the nuclear family structure. Broader secular and religious networks of association contributed to new familial practices and embedded individuals and nuclear families within larger sets of connections. The friendships, kinship bonds, and inti- Best of Bonds  macies that eighteenth-century people forged with one another expanded upon the nuclear family. These broader connections tended to submerge, or, as Naomi Tadmor puts it, ‘‘blur’’ the nuclear family.4 Furthermore, the developing concepts of romantic love, placed within the context of the Methodist family, took on a more complex hue, shaded by ideas of divine love and the fraternal love between members of the religious family. The family as the basic unit of English society was extremely important through the early modern period. As Michael MacDonald and Terrence Murphy write, ‘‘The family was the atom of English society, and sentiment was the force that bound its particles together.’’5 MacDonald and Murphy emphasize that ‘‘[a] person without a family was in a sense not a person; one’s status and role in the community followed from one’s role in the family.’’6 The central importance of the nuclear family to early modern English society underlines the radical nature of the formation of the Methodist family as an alternative family. It also helps us understand why the Methodist family constituted itself along the lines of the nuclear family, with all the same titles and roles. At the same time that Methodists emphasized the central roles of the early modern nuclear family, they de-emphasized the core nucleus of the married couple. Through the promotion of celibacy and the focus on fraternal bonds, the early Methodist family diminished this key component of the nuclear family. The Bonds of the Nuclear Family The nuclear family, the normative household of a couple and their offspring , has been in existence since the early modern period. At the same time, that nuclear family was not identical to the one we see in contemporary England and America. There were numerous mutable factors, including the permeability of households, the emotional relationships between family members, and proximity of friends and kin, which have influenced the meaning of ‘‘family’’ quite profoundly from the sixteenth century into the modern period. When historians have focused on the quality of intimacy and emotional arrangements of the family, they have seen a significant difference between modern and premodern families.7 In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, qualitative markers emerged in the modern family: the ideas of emotional closeness, the focus on children within the family, and the idealization of a strictly private realm for the nuclear family. In describing  Chapter  what is particular to the Victorian sense of family that dominates family culture in the nineteenth century, historians have often focused on the emotional intimacy that ideally existed between parents and children. As well, the nineteenth century witnessed the emergence of a private domestic sphere that allowed the nuclear family to segregate itself from society.8 Part of defining this strict division was to separate...