One Family Under God. Anna M. Lawrence
as Christians called by a particular name in legal distinction from the established church. English religion, that is, was denominationalized.”12 Linda Colley similarly argues that while religious dissension generated hostility and violence during the English Civil War period, the eighteenth century was a time of cool disregard toward religious dissent. This shift in religious tolerance was significant. In the previous century, religious dissent had been viewed as a political and social scourge, but for most of the eighteenth century, dissension was reduced to a mere legal stigma. Adherence to the Church of England was still a requirement for public office, but the Toleration Act of 1689 had taken the sting out of dissenting. Colley maintains that, in practice, Protestant dissenters faced no discrimination, and religious discord centered on emotional and political opposition to Catholicism, rather than internal Protestant divisions. Britons, as Colley argues, became unified as Protestants against internal and external enemies; exactly which brand of Protestantism one espoused mattered less than ever before.13
American attitudes toward religious dissent were shifting by the eighteenth century as well. The Puritan hegemony of the North and the strictly Anglican culture of the South gave way to a deeply pluralist religious culture that had taken root in the colonial period.14 During the late 1730s, the Great Awakening, which began with small revivals in New England, opened the way for the establishment of multiple churches. Additionally, fresh immigrants brought new religious institutions with them, especially in the form of Lutheran and Presbyterian churches in the mid-Atlantic colonies of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York. This was a period of rapid institution building, and churches of many different denominations began to spring up on the American landscape.15
While official church and governmental policies were demonstrating some tolerance of Protestant dissent by the early eighteenth century, wider social acceptance of dissent was slower to emerge. In America and England, Methodists faced violence on the streets and repudiation in the press. Even though laws against dissenters were not enforced in the penal codes, dissenters were still barred from universities and civic offices. There were fewer legal penalties, but social penalties remained in the eighteenth century. Many Methodist preachers experienced the violence of mobs on their preaching circuits. Wives incurred their husbands’ wrath when they joined with evangelical groups, and children felt their parents’ displeasure after attending meetings. Pamphlets warned that Methodists were political and social scourges equal to the dissenters of the seventeenth century, even Catholics in disguise.16 The eighteenth-century Methodist experience in England complicates Colley’s assertion that hatred of dissenters dissolved in the face of anti-Jacobite fears, or that society drew a stark division between Catholicism and dissenting Protestantism. The early Methodist story points to the fact that eighteenth-century English religious culture was still an inhospitable place for dissenting religious groups to grow.
Throughout the eighteenth century, leaders within the Church of England feared nonconformist sects that threatened to woo believers away. Dissent worked both inside and outside the Church of England. Though the church claimed that 90 percent of English people were members, their formal allegiance masked the fact that many English were no longer centrally involved with the Anglican Church. There were many people who called themselves Anglicans, while attending dissenting group meetings. The Church of England had lost numbers to the dissenting splinters of radical Protestantism, such as the Quakers and Baptists in England. As the eighteenth century progressed, the Anglican Church had a sense of withering, while nonconformist sects bloomed. Similarly, prior to 1740 in America, the Church of England was growing through its establishment of new churches and expansion of membership, particularly in Virginia. Yet during this same period, there was a sense of formal membership without much fervor.17
Faced with this sense of growing disaffection, Anglicans embarked on a missionary course. In the beginning of the eighteenth century, Anglican leaders became more active in recruiting and retaining their members. Though the Church of England had formerly repudiated itinerant preaching, it embraced the itinerancy of ordained ministers for the purpose of mission work in the eighteenth century. The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG) and the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge (SPCK) formed as missionary branches of the Church of England. These groups were working in both England and America, seeing the home mission as important as the mission to convert the apathetic English populations in America.18 Thomas Bray, the Anglican commissary for Maryland, founded the SPCK for colonial work in 1698. The SPG was specifically founded for missionary work abroad in 1701. In the same vein, thirty to forty reforming societies sprang up in London by the 1730s. They converted the unchurched and unbelieving in England and promoted the idea that the Anglican Church was fulfilling a primitive Christian mission by forming these societies.19
The Anglican missionary impulse was part of a larger wave of what David Hempton calls “a more benign religious version of the infamous triangular trade of slavery and cotton that fueled the economies of empire.” As Hempton’s work on transatlantic Methodism confirms, evangelical pietists, and particularly Moravians, fed an unprecedented wave of mobility. The movement included not just people, but also a print culture that spread its influence from areas in central Europe through western Europe and the broader Atlantic world. Hempton writes, “As the expansion of Europe into the New World gathered pace in the eighteenth century, the spoils would go to those who were prepared to be mobile, and who had a powerful religious message to trade.”20 John and Charles Wesley volunteered to be part of the SPG mission to America, to retain the English souls of the colony and convert the Native American ones. The SPG was especially keen to remedy the underrepresentation of Anglican ministers in the less populated areas of America, particularly the American South where Anglo-American colonists needed ministerial attention.21
Methodist Beginnings in America
As John and Charles Wesley headed for Georgia during the winter of 1735, they found themselves in a motley, multinational shipboard community. John Wesley immediately began learning German in order to converse with the largest group of immigrants on board, a band of twenty-six Moravians, and he attended their evening services. Wesley wrote in his journals that he and his associates quickly reestablished their regularly scheduled ways once on board. They instituted daily public prayers and preaching to some of the eighty English-speaking passengers, alongside a few Moravians. The Anglicans and Moravians established regular Sunday services, and John Wesley noted that he administered communion to “[a] little flock” of half a dozen people, which included some unconverted shipmates. The Wesleys even set a schedule for catechizing and exhorting their fellow passengers. This evangelical pattern fit easily into the shipboard context where the diverse, captive audience would have provided a ripe opportunity for the Anglicans to try out their evangelizing methods.22
The trip to America was an important formative chapter in Methodism because this transatlantic journey prompted John Wesley to realize that he had not experienced a full conversion. The vulnerability of this realization, coupled with his exposure to Moravianism, made him ripe for incorporating Moravian ideas into the bedrock of Methodist practice. In the violent Atlantic storms, he confronted the shameful realization that he feared death, which revealed the unprepared state of his soul. During one particularly harrowing storm, he noticed his Moravian shipmates were wholly at peace. “In the midst of the psalm wherewith their service began the sea broke over, split the mainsail in pieces, covered the ship, and poured in between the decks, as if the great deep had already swallowed us up. A terrible screaming began among the English. The Germans calmly sung on. I asked one of them afterwards, ‘Was you not afraid?’ He answered, ‘I thank God, no.’ I asked, ‘But were not your women and children afraid?’ He replied mildly, ‘No: our women and children are not afraid to die.’”23 The Moravians’ stalwart faith and pietistic spirituality appealed to Wesley, and they became an important inspiration for Methodist spirituality and organization. Moravians possessed something else that Wesley envied—a sense of belonging, a real sense of religious family.24
In February 1736, after almost three months of rough sea travel, the ship made it to Georgia. Once on dry land, John Wesley was able to further observe the Moravian community in action when he set up his first temporary residence with the Moravians. In his journal, Wesley described the group’s daily devotion