Methodism: Empire of the Spirit (review)

How can one account for the rise of Methodism from unpromising origins in the England of the 1730s to a major international religious movement by 1880? This is the rather bold question—not quite so "disarmingly simple" as the author suggests (2)—that David Hempton undertakes to answer in just over two hundred pages. His effort is just as bold in that he proposes to discover "the essence of Methodism" (86; variants on 152 and 203) in his narrative—not the most obvious historical aim these days, especially in an era of microhistory. To do so in rather modest length, Hempton constructs chapters around parallel or competing concepts and uses case studies and, within them, snapshots instead of detailed analysis to illustrate his emerging themes. Thirty pages of notes testify to his comprehensive range of resources. The result is tantalizing and provocative. His sweeping claims and characterizations—in particular, that "Methodism was the most important Protestant religious development since the Reformation" (2)—will be discussed and debated for some time to come.

Hempton attends very carefully to the transnational character of Methodism, calling it international or global in places, but what he focuses on is mostly a North Atlantic story, with Latin America, Jamaica, Korea, India, and China, for example, receiving only limited attention. This would certainly have changed had he included the twentieth century more comprehensively in his purview. In keeping with his judgments regarding Methodism's essence, his format is social, rather than institutional or theological, history. In contrast to an earlier generation of historians who viewed the movement as socially regressive or anti-modern, Hempton contends that Methodism was notably modern in the senses of being egalitarian in its populism, mobile in the energy of its migrations, and focused on religious experience. William Taylor, missionary first to California and then to four other continents in the latter half of the nineteenth century, was not the only one for whom "Methodist experience trumped theological erudition" (172). Methodism appealed particularly to cultural outsiders, especially women but also racial minorities; in its spirit of voluntarism, both in its organizational patterns and in its focus on the religious life through the pursuit of entire sanctification, Methodism was vigorously anti-establishment and anti-elitist.

Victorianists will no doubt gravitate to the second half of the book, where tensions, conflicts, and even repudiations of the original Methodist impulse make the history as well as the essence increasingly complex. They would, however, risk missing the chief characteristics of "the spiritual empire" that Hempton emphasizes in his effort to explain how Methodism grew so rapidly in its first century. The "energetic activism" of John Wesley's ambition to spread scriptural holiness throughout the land was carried on by his mainly lay followers; in Hempton's concise phrasing, "outdoor and itinerant preaching, societary association, and connectionalism were the means; individual assurance, communal discipline, and national regeneration were the ends" (14). But Hempton quickly adds that the actual development of the movement was anything but neat and tidy, and the first four chapters illustrate this in complex ways. The movement took advantage of cultural change, found a niche initially within Anglicanism with emphasis on cottage meetings and lay preaching, and fought against Calvinism. Wesley held enlightenment and enthusiasm in creative tension: on the former, he was a Lockean empiricist, a defender of religious toleration, and a firm believer in self-improvement; on the latter, he encouraged his followers in their acceptance of God's providential interventions in the world but also tested claims to special revelation on the evidence of transformed lives. This simple but subtle message was transmitted largely by hymnody, sermons, and small and large regular associational meetings. Because Methodists transgressed a number of social boundaries, they were often subject to mob attack, riots, and scurrilous charges in print. In the first half of the nineteenth century, issues of governance and conflicts over class in Britain and slavery in the United States produced secession and schism on both...