Methodist Families: A Review of Three Recent Books
Christopher Jones
Anna M. Lawrence. One Family Under God: Love, Belonging, and
Authority in Early Transatlantic Methodism. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press. 2011.
Charity R. Carney. Ministers and Masters: Methodism, Manhood,
and Honor in the Old South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.
2011.
Mark Auslander. The Accidental Slaveowner: Revisiting a Myth
of Race and Finding an American Family. Athens: University of Georgia
Press. 2011.
Note: I first read
Anna Lawrence’s book last summer and planned on reviewing it at the
time. As I prepared to post my thoughts, though, I became aware of the pending
release of Charity Carney’s book and decided to hold off and review the books
together. And then, while browsing the UGA Press Catalog for Fall 2011, I came
across The Accidental Slaveowner, and
figured it might be worthwhile to review all three together. I’m now
posting my review of all three before another book dealing with Methodism
and the family is published. Unfortunately, reviewing all three together means this review is a bit lengthy—my apologies, but all three books deserve the attention. Thanks to Paul Harvey and the presses who provided a copy of each book for review for their patience. --CCJ
In One Family Under
God, Anna Lawrence takes a cue from 18th century Methodists themselves
and uses “family” to refer to both biological families and the religious family
of “brothers” and “sisters,” “fathers” and “mothers,” converts to Methodism
joined. Citing religious families’ “elastic … ideas of membership,”
“flexibility of familial association” that emphasized choice, and their
“exaltation of the ‘soul mate’ as a central consideration for marriage,” she
argues for a reassessment of “the formation of the modern family” that
privileges evangelical contributions to that process (2).
In the eighteenth century, Methodists and other evangelicals
both challenged existing notions of family by expanding its meaning and also
led the shift toward what are today recognized as conservative domestic values.
Their ability to do so was a result of their careful positioning of themselves
within the larger society. “Unlike Moravians, Methodists never sought to create
separate Methodist settlements,” Lawrence explains. “They lived with within
communities and families that held different, often conflicting, values” (100).
Early chapters examine the place of family and families in conversion
narratives, church organization, and Methodist sermons and publications, while
later chapters focus on Methodist (and anti-Methodist) discourse about
sexuality and its actual practice as manifest in Methodist marriages and ministerial
and lay celibacy. Especially good is Lawrence’s consideration of both male and
female celibacy. John Wesley and other Methodists departed from other
Protestants in promoting the practice (if sometimes only temporarily). Far from
copying the much-despised Catholics, though, Wesley emphasized not only the
religious motivations for sexual abstinence (male itinerants and female
exhorters alike could remain focused solely on their ministry) but also the
more practical temporal concerns (the difficulty of supporting a family on an
itinerant’s meager earnings). Once ministers located and/or retired from the
ministry, they could and did settle down and start families of their own.
Unlike others who have focused their analyses of religious
families on the very local communities they joined and in which they worshipped
and lived, Lawrence argues that the Methodist family transcended these local
ties by seeking to organize and unite adherents throughout the Atlantic world
into “one family under God.” This explicitly transatlantic focus builds on the
work of David Hempton and others in looking beyond national borders in
narrating the story of early Methodism and is a welcome addition (although it
unfortunately ignores Canada and the Caribbean). The final chapter explores the
political and social realities Methodists faced during the American Revolution,
a conflict that within the Methodist community became “a struggle between
Wesley and ‘his sons’” (192). When American Methodists separated from their
British brothers and sisters and formed the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1784,
they became something akin to cousins instead of fathers and sons, mothers and
daughters, and siblings living in distant locales. The ever-increasing number
of black slaves and free people of color who converted to Methodism presented American
Methodists with new challenges and opportunities in defining familial roles. While
Methodism allowed for some mobility for African Americans, black preachers were
always seen as little brothers and black laypeople as children, never the
spiritual “fathers” and “mothers in Israel” their white counterparts understood
themselves to be.
Over time, the issues of race and slavery divided Methodists
in America into northern and southern factions. Even as Methodists exerted an
impact on developing notions of family, the powerful forces of local community
and regional culture in turn affected them. Charity Carney’s book picks up at
this point. Focused less on families and more on Methodist notions of
masculinity and manhood, Ministers and
Masters nevertheless complements Lawrence’s book quite well. As Paul noted
in his brief summary of the book last month, Carney argues that “the
combination of cultural influences and Methodist disciplinary practices created
a distinctive manhood for ministers who were eager to prove their masculinity
as southern men and their spiritual purity and authority as southern ministers”
(13). Marking a distinct departure from the eighteenth century precedent
described by Lawrence, Methodist men in the nineteenth century South came to
reject celibacy as an ideal and instead embraced their identity as southern
patriarchs. But this didn’t make them any less Methodist. Drawing upon the
legacy of Francis Asbury (if somewhat selectively), Carney explains, they “felt
the need to prove themselves as powerful patriarchs while also submitting to
church discipline,” thus “caus[ing] the MEC, South to buttress patriarchal (and,
by extension, episcopal) authority and gradually push aside debates over
democracy and equality” (42). Thus staking out something of a middle ground
within southern culture, Methodist preachers established “a new type of
patriarchy in the South,” highly moralistic and thoroughly manly. Methodists,
for example, “deplored dueling, but their doctrine did not exempt them from the
rituals of confrontation promoted by southern patriarchy,” and “clergymen still
incorporated elements of the duel into their rhetoric” (23). This southern
Methodist masculinity was evident in the ministers’ defense of the episcopacy,
their interactions with non-Methodist rivals and challengers, their poverty,
and their theology. It was also evident in their domestic lives, and Carney
carefully examines attitudes toward wives, toward children, and toward slaves
in succeeding chapters. In each instance, the Methodist stance was one that
simultaneously upheld and challenged southern norms. Wives of Methodist
ministers were thus expected to not only be spiritual and moral guardians, but
also “thrifty, healthy, pleasant, well-educated, and submissive” so as to be
best suited for “the itinerant lifestyle” (85). Children, meanwhile, were
sometimes portrayed as “models of piety and spirituality” whose disobedience to
parental rule was justified by appeals that privileged piety over ungodly
patriarchy (91). Nevertheless, the ideal remained a Methodist father presiding
over his strong but submissive wife and obedient children.
Meanwhile, “ministers adopted the idea of slaveholder
paternalism but combined it with an egalitarian religious ideal.” They
“continued to support both white superiority and spiritual equality, two
concepts suspended in fundamental tension within the Methodist worldview” (117).
This increasingly distinct sense of southern Methodist masculinity—especially
as it related to slavery—ran into and against their ministerial colleagues in
the North, culminating in the 1844 split of the MEC into Northern and Southern
organizations. The man at the center of the controversy—Bishop James O.
Andrew—looms large in Carney’s book. His many writings provide wonderful
evidence and examples of several of her main points. Somewhat surprisingly,
though, she ignores a key element of Andrew’s life and the 1844 schism—the
accusations of his illicit affair with one of his female slaves, “Kitty.”
That subject is
taken up, though, in the third book reviewed here. Mark Auslander’s The Accidental Slaveowner investigates
the episode and the way competing memories of it have shaped life in the town
of Oxford, Georgia, where Andrews lived in 1844. Bishop Andrew’s ownership of
Kitty and other slaves stood at the center of the controversy, and white
residents of Oxford from then until now have embraced a particular version of
that story, in which the Bishop inherited slaves that he could not legally
manumit. When offered her freedom, Kitty--out of loyalty to Andrew--volunteered to remain in slavery instead of being shipped to Liberia,
thus signaling the reciprocal bonds of friendship and respect that united
master and slave. Black residents of Oxford, however, have consistently
contested that memory, passing down through the generations an alternative
history in which “Kitty was the coerced mistress of Bishop Andrew, and the
Bishop was the father of her children” (171). An anthropologist, Auslander is
interested in not only the “myth” at hand (the history and its contested
memory), but also “ritual” and “place” (the way that history is reflected in
the relationships, values, practices, and local landscape of Oxford. He thus
spends considerable time examining (among other things) the white-run “Kitty’s
Cottage” (a small museum and historical site school kids visit) and the
racially segregated cemetery that he, his wife, and a group of their students
from Oxford College worked with community members to beautify and repair.
Interested primarily in “the long-term consequences of this peculiar
mythologized geography for local white and African American families,”
Auslander argues that “the varied versions of the Kitty myth … may be
understood as a series of attempts to resolve the fundamentally irresolvable
paradoxes of blood and law posed by slavery” (34). Central to his narrative,
then, is family, and if one can tolerate the occasional lapses into
theory-laden anthropological jargon, that narrative if well worth reading.
In addition to providing a thoroughly-researched and critical
look at James Andrew’s relationship with Kitty (Auslander concludes that he is
“inclined to trust the oral historical accounts that have been passed down in
the Oxford black community … that Kitty was sexually involved with Bishop
Andrew under conditions that were not of her own choosing” (201)) and its
conflicted legacy in Oxford and beyond, he also provides biographical portraits
of the other known slaves owned by Andrews, traces the fascinating story of
Kitty’s offspring, and even managed to track down some of her living
descendants (who knew nothing of their ancestor and her central role in
American and Methodist history). Methodist families, we are reminded, were
interracial not only in the metaphorical sense of denominational family but
also sometimes in the biological and sexual sense, too. Auslander’s analysis thus
points to an important component of Methodist patriarchy—the coercive power
that often underlay its claims to both ecclesiastical and sexual authority. As
Paul Harvey, Ed Blum, Charles Irons, and others have demonstrated, evangelical
religion in the American South cannot be properly understood without
consideration of the ways in which black and white religionists reciprocally
shaped each other’s experiences. The same appears to be true of evangelical
families, too.
Unfortunately (at least for the purposes of this review),
Auslander is less interested in exploring what is uniquely Methodist about his
subjects. In his reading, “the white story of Kitty and Bishop Andrew …
presents in microcosm the idealized image of the Christian plantation, in which
a benevolent white master oversees a community of loyal bondservants bound
together in Christian matrimony” (25). This may be an accurate assessment, but
bringing it into conversation with Carney’s more nuanced reading of Methodist
masculinity and Anna Lawrence’s exploration of early Methodist families might
illuminate the narrative in important ways.
All three books deserve to be read by anyone interested in
race, religion, gender, and the family. Each succeeds in taking Methodist
history beyond linear narratives of its early growth and eventual accommodation
to American society and collectively point to family, gender, and race as
crucial to understanding the movement in all of its regional and chronological
manifestations.
Comments
thanks for these very helpful reviews. Seems like these works build on in important ways books such as Donald Mathews', "Religion in the Old South," and Christine Heryman's "Southern Cross," both of which give a central place to Methodists and advance an argument about the significance of a move away from a general valoration of celibacy and the exemplary figure of a single itinerant minister charging into the frontier to that of the ideal of a more settled and formed family (as a model of piety and the locus of religion formation. Of course, Heryman suggests that church discipline, with its intense intervention in the personal lives of devout Methodists, eventually gave up some of these functions to the internal "judgment" of the family. I look forward to reading these books and perhaps incorporating some of their particular insights into my "Christianity and Slavery Class."
And thanks for commenting and offering that correction, Dr. Auslander. I've updated the post.