Methodism

Methodism, one of the most successful forms of popular Protestantism in American history, matched only by the Baptists.With lay beginnings in the 1760s and official missionaries commissioned in the 1770s by its English founder John Wesley, Methodism grew from a marginal sect into the nation's largest Christian denomination by the early 1840s.

In 1844 Methodists experienced a major split between North and South over the issue of slavery. Throughout the nineteenth century, other denominations emerged from Methodism over matters of polity and theology and social issues. Race also divided the Methodists with the formation of the African Methodist Episcopal church (1816) and the African Methodist Episcopal Zion church (1821). The twentieth century saw merger rather than division. In 1939 the northern and southern branches and a smaller group reunited to form the Methodist church. In 1968 another merger produced the United Methodist church.

During its period of greatest growth, between the Revolutionary and Civil wars, Methodism flourished because of its ability to combine methodical organization and personal self‐discipline with emotional spontaneity and a warm, familylike religious community. Its theology stressed free grace and human agency in the quest not only to be “born again,” but also to attain “Christian Perfection,” a distinctive Methodist doctrine that claims grace to overcome all desire to sin. Its class meetings, love feasts, and camp meetings were major engines of revivalism. Its circuit‐riding clergy emerged from the laity and kept close to them even while a paternalistic episcopal organization, headed first by Bishop Francis Asbury (1745–1816), insured that Methodism kept pace with a mobile and growing population.

Between the Civil War and World War I, Methodism was an established institution, almost an unofficial national church. Bishop Matthew Simpson, whose sermons celebrated American nationhood, advised President Abraham Lincoln and preached his funeral sermon. As Methodism became an escalator into the middle class, the revivalistic ethos was replaced by an interest in benevolent enterprises such as missions, education, and temperance. Frances Willard, leader of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union; Lucy Webb Hayes, wife of President Rutherford Hayes and president of the Methodist Woman's Home Missionary Society; and Bishop John Heyl Vincent, founder of the Chautauqua movement, were prominent Methodists who embodied these changes. A “holiness” movement, advocating a renewed experience of Christian Perfection, dissented from such changes, but by the turn of the century many in this movement had withdrawn into new holiness sects.

Methodism's late nineteenth‐century identification with American nationhood and culture anticipated the evolution of mainstream Protestantism during the twentieth century. Methodism played major roles in the promotion of the Protestant ecumenical movement and the Social Gospel even as it coped with secularization and the end of Protestant cultural hegemony in America in the 1930s and after. As the twentieth century ended, Methodism struggled to find its own distinctive voice among the many religious and secular options competing in America's spiritual marketplace.
See also African American Religion; Antebellum Era; Cultural Pluralism; Education: Collegiate Education; Great Awakening, First and Second; Missionary Movement; Mobility; National Council of Churches; Religion; Social Class.

Bibliography

Russell E. Richey, Kenneth E. Rowe, and Jean Miller Schmidt, eds. Perspectives on American Methodism: Interpretive Essays, 1993.
Nathan Hatch , The Puzzle of American Methodism, Church History 63 (June 1994): 175–89.

A. Gregory Schneider