Outside Looking In: Early Methodism as Viewed by Its Critics

Abstract

My introduction to anti-Methodism in the eighteenth century came over twenty years ago while reading Tobias Smollett's Humphry Clinker (1771). At the time, I knew nothing about the Methodist revival or why Smollett seemed so intent on ridiculing the revival's adherents. I quickly discovered that Smollett was one of many writers who targeted the Methodists in what turned out to be a substantial body of anti-Methodist publications produced during the period. Several bibliographers, most notably Clive Field, had catalogued the corpus of anti-Methodist publications, but relatively little had been written about this literature, and what had been written was several decades old. Albert Lyle's Methodism Mocked (1960) helped orient me to the issues that preoccupied Methodism's critics, as did two unpublished dissertations, one by Terrance McGovern (‘The Methodist Revival and the British Stage’ [1978]), and the other by Donald Kirkham (‘Pamphlet Opposition to the Rise of Methodism: The Eighteenth-Century Evangelical Revival under Attack’ [1973]), which to my delight has (finally!) been updated and published in the present volume.Kirkham, a retired elder in the United Methodist Church and former adjunct associate professor at Yale Divinity School, provides the most comprehensive account of the literature written in opposition to Methodism. Whereas Lyles focuses primarily on hyperbolic attacks in more imaginative literary types, Kirkham deals more with ‘serious theological debate’ in polemical pamphlets (1), and he references more than 600 anti-Methodist titles; Lyle, by comparison, includes fewer than 150 titles in his bibliography.Kirkham likewise acknowledges more recent scholarship, most notably Misty Anderson's Imagining Methodism in Eighteenth-Century Britain (2012), which examines the ways authors caricatured Methodism as a means of interrogating notions of a modern British self, as well as my own Textual Warfare and the Making of Methodism (2014). Kirkham, however, is more interested in describing the particular arguments raised in opposition to Methodism and contextualizing those arguments than examining how anti-Methodist charges played in the larger culture or informed Methodist belief, practice, and identity (the focus of my study). Kirkham includes chapters on the anti-Methodist reaction to the following topics: Methodist stereotypes; Methodist doctrines and practices; the social upheaval purportedly caused by the revival; Methodism's relationship to the Church of England; the Methodists' forays into politics; their means of worship; and the infighting between Calvinist and Wesleyan Methodists. He also includes in an appendix an updated list of all the known anti-Methodist publications printed in England during the eighteenth century, an invaluable resource in its own right.In addition, Kirkham provides a more nuanced sense of what we mean by ‘anti-Methodist’ by identifying from whose pens the anti-Methodist arguments emerged, whether the upper and lower clergy within the Anglican Church, disaffected ex-Methodists, other denominational leaders, or the secular community. Just as anti-Methodists usually applied the term ‘Methodism’ indiscriminately to any form of deviant religious practice or belief, historians often apply the term ‘anti-Methodist’ to any published attack on the revival without recognizing that these attacks often derived from substantively different sources for markedly different reasons, even in cases where arguments overlapped. Kirkham accounts for these subtle variations, noting, for example, how Anglican divines were preoccupied with the threat Methodism posed to ecclesiastical order, while other denominational leaders worried more about distancing their own beliefs and practices from the Methodists to avoid guilt by association. Kirkham demonstrates how Calvinist Methodists effectively joined with Anglicans in criticizing the Wesleyan belief in Christian perfection, and he likewise details the doctrinal sparring between Wesleyans and Calvinists in comprehensive and discerning fashion.While Kirkham has done a fine job updating research he began nearly fifty years ago, there are places where I felt like I was reading the original dissertation rather than a newly published and finely tuned monograph. For example, he supports the claim that ‘many historians today depict Methodism in eighteenth-century England as a counterrevolutionary force’ by citing several sources, all published between 1945 and 1973 (159–60); and while Kirkham dutifully exhausts every imaginable topic, I could not help but wonder if he could have cut a hundred pages without sacrificing breadth or depth.These criticisms aside, students and scholars of early Methodism, religious historians, and literary critics will welcome Kirkham's analysis of the reach, character, and motivations for the anti-Methodist literature. Despite his own ties to Methodism, ties I would imagine are deep and personal, Kirkham maintains scholarly distance, observing that many of the anti-Methodist charges were well founded and that Wesley and Whitefield actually invited some of the criticism that tailed the revival. Even though much of the anti-Methodist literature distorted reality, Kirkham insists that it provides ‘another perspective, sometimes even a corrective’ to idealized accounts of the revival (11). Kirkham thus shows how our historical sense of Methodism is complicated and enriched by the perspectives of its critics. I highly recommend this fine contribution to Methodist studies.