“sister,” “father,” and “mother,” and they offered one another spiritual, emotional, and economic support as family members. Often these familial bonds helped to loosen or dissolve ties to their birth families. At the same time that individuals temporarily or permanently broke their bonds with their blood families through conversion, Methodist leaders and laity provided a way to assuage this loss through the institutions and culture of the religious family.
In the eighteenth century, men and women used “family” flexibly, and it took on varying meanings in different religious associations during this period. I argue that eighteenth-century Methodists understood family in a way that seemed compatible with current models, yet they also redefined them. They based their family on the model of the nuclear family, but they were also operating outside of nuclear families. If they challenged nuclear families in some ways, they also expanded and elaborated on nuclear families, providing crucial support from outside of nuclear families. When Quakers and Baptists called themselves brother and sister, their language and actions implied the erasure of hierarchical distinctions between people, acknowledging each other, to some extent, as real equals.20 When Methodists used the terms “brothers” and “sisters,” they also evoked egalitarian spiritual bonds. Fathers and mothers held more authority, having earned those titles by being mentors and leaders to other converts. As Susan Juster shows in her work on American Baptists, evangelical use of family terms changed distinctly over the course of the eighteenth century. It generally evolved from a fraternity of equals to an association of duty, rule, and authority.21 The metaphor of family was a sword that cut both ways in the Methodist family as well. Sometimes the family ideal emphasized the equal nature of believers and at other times, highlighted the need for conformity to the rule and discipline of the fathers and mothers.
Anti-Methodists saw the bonds of family as a cult-like encroachment on legal families and as a unifying force that caused divisions outside the Methodist family. The religious divisions within their own families often alarmed parents of converted Methodists. Parents witnessed psychological and social transformations in their children after they joined the Methodist family, and parents often blamed the religious group for radically altering their children’s behavior. Examining anti-Methodist literature is crucial to understanding how Methodism became synonymous with insanity, infidelity, illness, and insurrection. Consistently, anti-Methodists accused this group of causing converts to reject their families’ ways and prevailing cultural mores, to wear serious clothes, to think serious thoughts, and to avoid irreligious company including their friends and family. So unified did this religious family seem that it caused its opponents to charge that, like a close family, they seemed to care only for their members and to shun everyone else.22 Juster writes, “Evangelicals did consider themselves a ‘family’ united by the bonds of grace, but they were nonetheless a peculiar family—one in which the parental authority was reserved for God alone and earthly domestic ties were irrelevant.”23 A family of like-minded converts who created a unified culture and closed ranks was not a comforting idea to those who fell outside those bonds.
The Methodist family did not replace individual nuclear families altogether. However, I argue that the religious family did affect the meaning of family bonds, both natural and chosen. Although nuclear families have been central to European societies for more than five hundred years, their emotional, social, and economic meanings have changed.24 A significant trend in the development of modern families has been the growing concentration on emotional relationships and the focus on children as the center of family life. In the eighteenth century, families were cultivating this mode of affective relationships, developing some of the hallmarks of what would become the domestic Victorian model. Another aspect of the family that has changed remarkably over the modern period is the extent to which families were dependent upon a network of associates outside of the nuclear family. In the eighteenth century, extended family members and close family friends were invaluable to children and young adults. The Methodist family was similar to an extended kinship network, forming a voluntary network around individual converts.25 Although Methodists used the titles of the nuclear family, they did not entirely replace nuclear family bonds; rather, they supplemented the converts’ nuclear family and became a kind of familial network. Methodists further imbued their religious family members with a more modern emotional significance, coming closer to the sorts of sentimental bonds exhibited among Victorian family members. Significantly, evangelicals assigned these meanings to chosen family members, not reserving them for their blood family ties.
Gender and the Methodist Family
In the First Great Awakening, women’s spirited participation in revivalism concerned some Protestant onlookers, even though women were only a slight majority of all converts. Anti-Methodists claimed that preachers like George Whitefield drew women away from their fathers and husbands and then encouraged these unruly women to take over roles normally reserved for men. As Gentleman’s Magazine complained in 1741, “Many silly women” attended Methodist meetings “every morning, leaving their children in Bed until their return, which sometimes is not til 9 O’Clock.” This movement caused women to neglect their duties as mothers, “contrary to the Laws of Nature.”26 The vocal participation of early American Methodist women drew the criticism that in Methodist meetings “women often prayed, and even stood up and made speeches just like men.”27
This study of gender within evangelicalism uncovers not simply the participation of women but also the way that both women and men took up new roles within the evangelical family, influencing broader secular understandings of marriage, sexuality, and familial roles. By examining the particular language and practice of evangelical sexuality and family formation, I highlight how the evangelical movement in the eighteenth century was central to the rise of familial and romantic discourse in England and America.
To understand the roles that evangelicals enacted within their chosen religious families, we must first understand the gender implications of evangelical discourse and practice. Philip Greven was one of the first historians to specifically categorize evangelicalism and its gendered discourse, both masculine and feminine. In The Protestant Temperament, Greven paints a portrait of the evangelical temperament: “While the aggressive and bold public behavior of evangelicals who saw themselves as soldiers in Christ’s army provided many people with a sense of self-assertion and of manliness, the ideal evangelical, nevertheless, was self-less and feminine.”28 Greven argues that in order to be saved, men and women accessed and emphasized their feminine sides; they had to become submissive, passive, and guilt-ridden in order to be fit for conversion. Susan Juster’s work on Baptists, Cynthia Lynn Lyerly’s study of early Methodists in the South, and Christine Heyrman’s expansive study of southern evangelicals also demonstrate how eighteenth-century men and women tapped feminine language and affect, which was particularly challenging to codes of masculinity in the American South.29
Establishing the feminine discourse and behavior of evangelicals alongside the broad swell of women involved in this movement could lead us to the conclusion that eighteenth-century evangelical movements empowered women. Methodist women did have more powerful positions within this group than in the Church of England, due to the increased emphasis on lay participation. Even though female preaching was not broadly encouraged, Methodist founder John Wesley approved some English female preachers. There was an expansive network of female leaders within English and American Methodism.30 Many women took on a more widely acceptable feminine role as exhorters, who spoke publicly to lead prayer or expand on a particular biblical passage, oftentimes in connection with a preacher’s sermon.31 Women also assumed lay leadership of classes and bands, two of the basic units of Methodist organization. Classes were groups that met regularly to provide discipline and improve each other spiritually. Female band leaders organized selective groups of women, who met in small, intimate sessions to provide mutual spiritual support. Similar to other evangelical denominations, Methodism seemed initially open to female lay leadership and even preaching, but by the nineteenth century most Wesleyan Methodist women were limited to being band leaders and exhorters. As the nineteenth century progressed, an increasingly hierarchical conservatism was compounded by the embourgeoisement of Wesleyan Methodism in England and America.32
Yet, early Methodism did not always