Religion and Violence in Early American Methodism: Taking the Kingdom by Force

Two. Contesting the Good Fight: Warfare and the American Revolution

two contesting the good fight Warfare and the American Revolution John Wesley firmly entrenched the Christian life in a physical and spiritual battle with God and the forces of evil that required Christians to enlist as soldiers to “fight the good fight” and take “the kingdom by violence.” The militant ways that Wesley described the Christian life raise the question of whether a relationship existed between Christians’ battle against sin and the temporal struggles of war. Did the violent nature of early Methodists’ spiritual battles—Satan’s ravaging the body, God “killing” penitents, Christian “warriors” committing themselves to unceasing acts of vigilance against the evil in their souls and societies—lead adherents to commit acts of physical violence against other human beings? Or did the nature of the battle against sin render armed conflict against human beings meaningless? This chapter explores these questions through an examination of Methodist contestations over the American Revolution. The warfare Wesley portrayed as essential to the practice of the Christian life occupied a complicated and at times contradictory relationship to bodily violence between humans. Wesley simultaneously championed an aggressively militant expression of Christian spirituality while often advocating peaceful and nonviolent interactions between human beings. The true believer battled sin, the world, and Satan while ideally displaying love toward saints and sinners alike. But by no means did Wesley imagine himself a pacifist.1 He believed that certain occasions could necessitate violent physical responses that transformed the Christian into a soldier for God and country. By examining Wesley’s rationale for the Christian’s participation in war we can begin to identify the boundaries and intersections Methodists constructed between the wars fought among nations and those fought for salvation . Wesley did not always make the two forms of fighting mutually exclusive. Rather, his justification of the state’s warfare depended heavily upon his ability to both conceptualize the war in terms of the battle against evil and embrace the use of the weapons of the state to fight the Christian’s war. Across the Atlantic, many Methodists in America refused to participate in or condone the Revolution, casting their resistance in religious terms. These Methodists rejected Wesley’s conflation of the Christian’s religious battle with armed political conflict. This rejection did not come by way of a less vibrant or expansive notion of the Christian’s warfare. Quite to the contrary, American Methodists shared Wesley’s insistence on the importance of the “good fight” and the terrifying dangers that plagued all those who entered into it. Rather, American Methodists refused to read the political conflict through the lens of their battles against evil. American Methodists constructed an inverse relationship between the two forms of warfare. They emphasized that their participation in the battle leading to spiritual liberty left them with little interest in the military struggle for liberty’s political correlate. These Methodists insisted that war distracted them from their greater battle for salvation. Some even rendered war entirely inconsistent with a Christian life that they defined as inherently aggressive and dangerously contested. I argue in this chapter that though the holy violence of the good fight for salvation played a divergent role for Methodists in the Revolution, the battle is an essential piece in the puzzle of Methodist motivations for war and peace. The very same commitments that discouraged Wesley’s American followers, and 42 Religion and Violence in Early American Methodism at times even Wesley himself, from resorting to violence could, when applied to the public realm, provide an equally powerful justification for horrendous violence. John Wesley and War The warfare that inhered in Wesley’s theology and practice of the Christian life did not demand that Christians commit physical violence against other human beings. Christians might be ardent soldiers of God who waged a battle against the powers of evil and even suffered in order to realize their salvation at the hands of a warrior God, but they did not target other humans as meaningful opponents in their “good fight.” Wesley often insisted that the believer did not fight against “flesh and blood, but with principalities and powers, and spiritual wickedness in high places.”2 Wesley made this battle against spiritual forces his primary concern. Those who wandered from it exposed themselves not only to physical death, but also eternal punishment. Wesley’s focus on battling spiritual rather than earthly forces intersected with his deeply conservative political philosophy. Wesley regularly...