Performing the Self: Methodist, Secular, and Postsecular Productions

The anxiety that surrounds publicly performed belief, not least on the part of more secular observers, is a central motif of this masterful and fascinating volume. In finely textured literary-historical scholarship, informed by critical theory that is rich, but never jargon-laden or intrusive, Anderson regales us with the ways eighteenth-century Britons, in dramatic and poetic satire, in prints, in erotic novels, fretted and fascinated over Methodists whom they seemed almost obsessed in representing, especially in their public and, it was often charged, theatrical demonstrations of belief, namely conversion, effusive preaching, and passionate hymn-singing. According to Anderson, Methodist theology and spirituality worked “to place the contingent, open-ended idea of the modern self in dialogue with a mystical, intensely somatic moment of divine intervention” (5) and thus with a model of selfhood that Charles Taylor refers to, in A Secular Age, as “porous.” This meant that this contingent, modern self, which conceived of itself (again in Taylor’s words) as “buffered” and gravitated towards establishing its legitimacy in terms of self-contained knowing and modern epistemologies, was at the same time secondarily but crucially negotiating its standing vis-à-vis belief. As Anderson shows, effusive performances of faith made Methodism “a flashpoint for eighteenth-century conceptions of modernity because it captured the anxiety about whether a self could be” truly buffered, “autonomous and cognitively coherent,” and could express “the longing for intimate connection with the other in a world of cognitive isolation” (3) to which Methodism so powerfully spoke.

That longing is, in Anderson’s account, an undeniable yet subtle echo in the many eighteenth-century portrayals of Methodists, which revealed profound nervousness about the modern self—and Methodists were modern in many ways—not adding up to a whole, about experiences of truth all perhaps being tainted by performance and belief. The implications of Anderson’s larger argument are immense. Perhaps more than any recent volume in eighteenth-century studies, Imagining Methodism mounts a bold challenge to the secularization thesis, showing us how secularity is constructed and contingent, and advances only as the new categories of the secular and of secular selfhood are constantly negotiating their relationship with belief and with other forms of identity that retain marked benefits and desirability. Instead of a secularization that advances simply alongside modernity, we glimpse, in Imagining Methodism “the fraught process through which religion was made modern” (11), and the ways “the idea of modernity is intertwined with the articulation of what kinds of religious beliefs are too excessive or too uncritical for a modern self” (237). “Methodism served imaginatively,” Anderson tells us, “as a space of intimacy, desire, and even ecstasy for the modern British self even as, and indeed because, it served as a boundary for that self” (3).

To touch on just a few highlights of this gripping book: across six chapters, a savvy introduction, and helpful afterword, the man John Wesley comes across as more vivacious and surprising than I ever knew; we see a man hammering out his theology, editing literary texts, passionately helping women of every socioeconomic class, in both this world and the next, a man who was a voracious reader, a fan of the theater, a prolific editor and publisher, a vegetarian. Wesley’s fresh portrait is itself one of the great contributions of this volume. The substantial introduction, “Longing to Believe: Methodism and Modernity,” situates Anderson’s methodology and argument in the context of other critical histories of Methodism and, more broadly, religion in the period, and explains her key terms: secularity, modernity, and selfhood. It is followed by the delightful tutorial of chapter 1, “Historicizing Methodism,” which gets readers up-to-speed for the particular inquiries of the other chapters. The second chapter’s meditation on desire, transformation, and the Methodist body leads perfectly to the surprising and compelling third chapter, on Fanny Hill and its overlap with Methodist and anti-Methodist discourses of desire and [End Page 109...