Entangled: A History of American Methodism, Politics, and Sexuality

Abstract

As The United Methodist Church teeters on the brink of schism, Ashley Boggan Dreff's book Entangled: A History of American Methodism, Politics, and Sexuality offers new insights into the conflicts over human sexuality that have brought the denomination to the breaking point. Director of women and gender studies at High Point University, Dreff draws on her PhD research at Drew University, tracing two strains within American Methodism and how both responded to changing sexual practices since the First World War. By exploring politics in Methodism and in United States society, she demonstrates how the Church both influences and is influenced by cultural change.These two competing ideologies have deep Methodist roots, one growing from the Church's legacy of social reform and the other from its focus on evangelism. Dreff explores how sexuality became the site of contest between these branches in their differing responses to birth control, sex education, abortion, divorce, and homosexuality. Reformers articulated a new sexual ethic based on love and personal agency, as birth control allowed for non-procreative sex within and outside of marriage. Resisting cultural influences on the Church, conservatives emphasized a traditional rules-based morality that defined heterosexual marriage as the only appropriate setting for sexual expression, alienating those who did not fit that norm. By the time the Church addressed homosexuality, the conservative caucus Good News was positioned to challenge the denomination's more liberal approach, paralleling the New Christian Right's ascension in US political life.The strength of Dreff's book lies in her meticulous use of primary sources, which include articles, pamphlets, study materials, and other publications from The United Methodist Church and its predecessor denominations, including the Evangelical United Brethren. She also uses publications and websites of caucus groups that have formed in recent years to explore their role in the Church's fracture. Analysis and quotations from these sources gives clear voice to the divergent perspectives around changing sexual norms.Primary sources also root these perspectives in their own context, preventing us from reading current assumptions into them. The new sexual morality that many associate with the 1960s actually began in the 1940s with wider access to birth control and a more scientific ethic that eclipsed religious authority. The white, heterosexual, middle-class family that conservatives portray as a traditional social structure under threat dates only to the 1950s and a unique confluence of economic, social, and political factors. Dreff demonstrates how The Methodist Church helped to enshrine that ideal through Together magazine's annual ‘family of the year’.Published by New Room Books, an imprint of The United Methodist General Board of Higher Education and Ministry, Entangled is clearly for a Methodist audience, as it assumes an understanding of Methodist process and structure. This social history, read through the lens of queer theory, is accessible to scholars and non-academics, as it is written in a lucid style with thorough introductions and summaries for each chapter and the book itself, although lay readers could have benefited from more explanation of the finer points of Methodist polity.Dreff centres her book on Americans who are classified as white, acknowledging the challenge of doing justice to the distinctive history of African Americans and the wide diversity of cultural understandings of sexuality within the international denomination. She brings in race at points, specifically in discussing the elevation of the white middle-class family and the denunciation of groups that do not fit the norm. Further research might contrast more fully the associations of whiteness with sexual purity and the portrayal of African Americans as hyper-sexual.Entangled is a welcome contribution to the ongoing conversation about American Methodism and sexuality, and the use of primary sources offers a deep dive into the evolution of competing moralities and the political forces aligned with each. Scholars have long acknowledged the divergent strains within Methodism, and other books have analysed the Church's division over homosexuality—see Dawne Moon, God, Sex, and Politics: Homosexuality and Everyday Theologies (2004); Amanda Udis-Kessler, Queer Inclusion in The United Methodist Church (2012); and Jane Ellen Nickell, We Shall Not Be Moved: Methodists Debate Race, Gender, and Homosexuality (2014). Dreff brings these ideas into conversation with scholarship on changing sexual morals in the United States, making her work a distinctive look at the impact of larger political movements on one denomination. While she offers no solution to the current impasse, her insights help explain how the Church got to this point and how it may find its way through.