Imagining Methodism in 18th-Century Britain: Enthusiasm, Belief & the Borders of the Self (review)

Misty Anderson’s study of how Methodism was represented in the eighteenth century, Imagining Methodism in 18^th-Century Britain: Enthusiasm, Belief & the Borders of the Self, opens up her subject into broad historical narratives about gender, sexuality, the relationship between Christianity and the secular, and, indeed, the very nature of identity itself, all without losing its grounding in dense, evidential detail drawn from a dazzling array of diverse sources. In the book, close readings work dialectically with important theoretical and political concepts instead of being driven and constrained by them. While focused on answering a very specific question—not what Methodism was but how Methodism was imagined in the eighteenth century—Anderson’s analysis of print texts from the novel to the hymn, of visual representations, and of embodied performances presents new ways of thinking about not just religion but also gender, sexuality, and such bedrock modern concepts as “the self.” This is not a book with its telos in any one theoretical camp or subdivision of cultural studies, though it has its roots in many. Imagining Methodism starts with an open-eyed, honest interest in figuring out what Methodism and Methodists meant to eighteenth-century British publics and individuals. In the process of that investigation, Anderson contributes invaluable, field-changing insight to queer, feminist, materialist, and performance-oriented work on early modern Britain and its place in the history of “the modern.”

Of course, as the introduction amply documents, Anderson’s focus on Methodism is hardly random but rather places her book in the midst of historical debates over the social relationships between various types of Christianity and the alleged secularism emergent with European Enlightenment. There is a real need for good, historical, materialist work in this area. As Anderson points out, the work of Marxist cultural historians such as E. P. Thompson and Max Weber tends to subsume religion into capitalist ideology as “the Protestant ethic” while Marxist literary critics like Ian Watt edge it out of their readings altogether to focus on an emergent, secularly motivated middle class and its “realist” aesthetic. Much otherwise excellent work in literary and historical cultural studies has been limited by this implicit alignment between secularism and progressive politics. Anderson joins cultural critics who are skeptical about the dominance of skepticism by taking seriously the proposition that “Methodism, the largest new religious movement in the period and at the heart of modern evangelicalism, might be intrinsic to our understanding of eighteenth-century culture and its active negotiation of religion in ‘a secular age,’ which redefines rather than destroys modern belief” (6). This is not to say that Anderson embraces religion over secularism as the key to understanding the formation of modern identities. As she puts her argument, it is “not that secular and religious capture the complete horizon of possibility in the project of modernity, but that their opposition achieves a cultural dominance that defines the era” (11).

The concept of the self is central to Anderson’s cultural analysis, a turn back to an older term and away from the well-theorized, post-structuralist preference for “subjectivity.” Of course, Anderson has strong methodological backup in Dror Wahrman’s The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England on the historical formation of modern gender identities, but her choice is primarily historical; she takes her definition of the term back to John Locke’s “conscious, thinking thing,” individual consciousness. The Lockean self links this consciousness with sensation, opening itself up to feeling as well as thought. Methodism’s power and threat lie in the openness of consciousness to sensual experience. Because of its emphasis on “warming of the heart,” an embodied, sensual conversion experience that makes the self vulnerable even as it fulfills it, Methodism marks the greatest moment of spiritual self-realization as a moment of loss, of the self dissolving. Hence, Methodism represented to readers and audiences “a negative...