American Saint: Francis Asbury and the Methodists (review)

At long last, Francis Asbury, the most significant figure in the development and spread of Methodism in North America, has the biography he deserves. Methodism began as a reform movement within the Church of England, led by Anglican clerics John and Charles Wesley, and was transplanted to Britain's American colonies in about 1760 by Robert Strawbridge, an Irish convert from Roman Catholicism and volunteer lay preacher. In 1771, when Francis Asbury landed in Philadelphia as the fifth official Wesleyan missionary to the continent, the Methodists could count fewer than one thousand converts, most of whom lived in the mid-Atlantic region, from New York to Virginia. By 1850, Methodism was the largest institution in the United States other than the federal government; nearly one in thirty Americans was a Methodist. Today, a declining denominational Methodism claims nearly eight million members in the United States, but it is the theological ancestor of the fastest-growing religious movement in the world, Pentecostalism.

Francis Asbury rode the bucking bronco that was early American Methodism, giving it structure, discipline, and leadership through the American Revolution, when he was the only one of Wesley's British preachers to remain on the western shores of the Atlantic; and, through the tumultuous Second Great Awakening, when the wild emotionalism of camp meetings led thousands of converts into the fold, and nascent church quarrels about slavery began to torment the faithful. He led by force of will and exemplary piety. In addition to his service to the Christian cause, Asbury provided manna for later historians. His journal (annotated and published in 1958) is one of the most significant primary sources on U.S. history in the early national period. Through the course of his endless itinerancy, Asbury rode more than 130,000 miles on horseback through the length and breadth of the United States. He crossed the Appalachian Mountains sixty times, set foot in the transallegheny territory that would later become West Virginia at least fifty times, and left thoughtful commentary on its early settlers; West Virginia's present 613 Methodist churches and 523 Methodist pastors are the products of his ministry in the mountains.

John Wigger traces Asbury's childhood in England's West Midlands during the Industrial Revolution, the enormous impact of his extremely pious yet deeply depressed mother and ne'er-do-well father, to his role as "transitional figure in the development of American religion, promoting the separation of religious leadership from wealth and formal education," as it had been in the Church of England of his boyhood and his first few years in America. "The system of religious economy that Asbury and the Methodists were largely responsible for creating – churches unaided and not coerced by government intervention, operating outside the control of social elites" remains with us today (13). Under Asbury's leadership, the Methodists were among the first and most effective religious bodies to exploit the Jeffersonian principles of separation of church and state. Though his education was modest and his management style somewhat autocratic, Asbury redefined religious leadership for a young nation.

At least thirteen biographies of Asbury have been published since 1852. John Wigger's volume is the first one that fully meets the requirements of academic scholarship, yet its graceful prose will make it accessible to a wide audience. Wigger, professor of history at the University of Missouri-Columbia and one of the country's leading scholars of Christianity in the United States, is a native West Virginian and alumnus of West Virginia University. His earlier work, Taking Heaven by Storm: Methodism and the Rise of Popular Christianity in America (1998), is already a classic in the field. American Saint is a worthy companion volume.