Entangled: A History of American Methodism, Politics, and Sexuality by Ashley Boogan Dreff (review)

If you have followed the turmoil that has rocked Mainline Protestants in the United States over the last few decades, then you have observed that questions of human sexuality have been at the forefront. Such debates have caused fractures within the Mainline denominations, and the United Methodist Church is now poised for its own division over debates regarding the inclusion (or exclusion) of LGBTQ persons in membership, the clergy, and the episcopacy. From outside, this appears as a recent flashpoint. But those Methodists who have weathered the storms of doctrinal and ethical questions for nearly half a century find this looming rupture to be part of a long arc of Methodist history.

Ashley Dreff has provided a history that considers the internal politics of Methodism to reveal the workings of various camps responding to a host of questions about human sexuality. An implicit thesis is that the contention of the 2016 General Conference and of the special session of the General Conference in 2019 to address LGBTQ rights is a manifestation of nearly a century's worth of infighting about the normative definitions of sexuality. At the foreground of Dreff's narrative are accounts of how the so-called political caucus groups have worked within Methodism to rally troops and to lobby for legislative maneuvers within Methodism's polity. Her thesis is that for the first half of the twentieth century, Methodists accepted controversial practices such as birth control and abortion and advocated for a mature understanding of sexual self-expression so long as that expression and the actual techniques of pregnancy planning served the heterosexual nuclear family. The book provides a captivating, if somewhat parochial, illumination of the ways Methodists organize and mobilize for certain causes.

Dreff traces the themes of sexuality, morality, and politics throughout five chapters mostly structured in chronological and thematic ways. That is, the first chapter explores the Methodist embrace of birth control from the late nineteenth century through its full legalization in the 1960s. Chapter 2 covers Methodists' ideal of the heterosexual nuclear family, the church's opposition to premarital sex, and its casual acceptance of divorce. The second chapter looks most narrowly at the 1950s and 1960s, while the third chapter is primarily thematic, focusing on the new morality and sex education of the 1960s. This chapter serves as a crucial hub of analysis that explains how Methodists on various sides of the issues of sexuality began to leverage resources to advocate for their positions. Chapter 4 addresses the issue of abortion. Here Dreff explains that some leaders within Methodism supported women's choice as a means of family planning for married couples. But after Roe v. Wade, Methodists divided into separate camps with the formation of a conservative Good News caucus that stridently lobbied in opposition to the denomination's statements of casual acceptance of abortion. These caucus groups remain the focus in the next chapter, on homosexuality. Here, the reader gets the impression that Methodism has been fracturing at a quickened pace since the 1970s, as these caucus groups have become ever more niche and entrenched.

On occasion, Dreff pauses to explain the theological issues at work in the divisions between these caucus groups, especially the conservative ones. In chapter 1 she explains that the opposition to birth control was led by ministers who were also sympathetic to fundamentalism. The ardent defense of conservative Biblicism went along with their conservative social stances. This pairing of theological and social conservatism emerges again in chapter 4. The reader will see that Good News was just as much an advocate for an evangelical expression of Methodism as it was vehemently opposed to abortion.

How successful is this monograph? Dreff is adept at navigating the murky waters of the Methodist polity, and she goes to some length to help the reader understand these waters. However, an office of the United Methodist Church published the monograph, which was...