| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Methodism: Empire of the Spirit. By David Hempton. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. xvi, 278 pp. $30.00, ISBN 0-300-10614-9.)
David Hempton's important study not only illumines the expansion of international Methodism but also provides a refined model for the study of religion in the modern era. Contending that Methodism was the single most important Protestant development after the sixteenth century, he attempts—with remarkable success—to give an account of its swift rise and its apparent gradual decline.	1
The movement, as Hempton depicts it, embodied from its beginnings a number of tensions—including an admiration for enthusiasm and discipline, ambivalence about wealth, and a divided mind about learning—that gave it a distinctive voice in the eighteenth century. It proclaimed salvation and offered ecstatic experience, but it also promoted humanitarian sentiments, social reform, and disciplined self-improvement. And it offered these goods in a manner that could attract laborers in Massachusetts, slaves in the American South, miners and seafarers in Cornwall, and the oppressed Irish in Ulster. Hempton explores not only the message but also the "sounds" of Methodism and the social spaces in which Methodist "noise" attracted and repelled. These are familiar themes, but Hempton also moves in innovative directions.	. . .

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