Reviews of Books

Methodism and the Southern Mind, 1770–1810. By Cynthia Lynn Lyerly. Religion in America Series. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Pp. x, 251. $45.00.)

Methodists have been among the most important artisans of American culture, but as a people they have largely been invisible to historians. They did not set a city upon a hill, as did the Puritans; they did not coax scholars to follow the unfolding of American destiny through the New England way; they did not compose sermons suited for anthologies of American literature. They did something more ordinary and innovative. From the earliest days of their movement they insisted that believers were, in the words of Cynthia Lynn Lyerly, mistresses and "masters of their fate and that this fate was daily in the making" (p. 45). Actually, that phrase does not put the matter quite right; for it highlights the social effects of Methodism as seen two centuries later and downplays the spiritual experiences of the first generation of American converts. To the religious seekers who flocked into the movement in the several decades after Independence, Methodism's appeal was, first and foremost, personal. It triggered ecstatic feelings of boundlessness and love through its exciting message that salvation offered could be salvation received, whatever a person's learning, estate, gender, or condition. This liberating moment released an incipient individualism, but that wayward impulse was disciplined, in turn, by social organization: the experience of praying, testifying, conversing, confessing, and reforming in the bands, societies, and conferences of this new faith. Methodism was the most intense, ubiquitous, and aggressive popular movement in the early republic, but its cultural consequences are difficult to extricate from other culturally transforming processes of the day, such as Jeffersonian democracy. Yet Cynthia Lyerly and Dee Andrews attempt to do just that. Methodism and the Southern Mind, 1770–1810 studies Wesleyans in what would become the Upper South; The Methodists and Revolutionary America, 1760–1800 examines "the shaping of an evangelical culture" in the middle states. Together, these two books invite us to think differently about early American religious and cultural history.

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Methodism was at once innovative and traditional in toppling the aloof God of predestinarians, rationalists, and deists and making the divine palpable to ordinary souls. Wesleyan hymns possessed a sensual and embarrassingly compelling power, as E. P. Thompson demonstrated long ago in The Making of the English Working Class (New York, 1966), but Andrews's understanding of that feeling, of the ways in which it changed people, and of its importance in shaping American culture is one of the finest productions of American religious history in years. Having thoroughly immersed herself in the religion, society, and culture of early America for two decades, Lyerly is well equipped to show how and to whom Methodist preaching, ubiquity, aggressiveness, and organization appealed. Sensitive to the theoretical mantra of gender-class-sex-and-race, Andrews has, through detailed, careful, exhaustive, and intelligent research, traced specific Methodists and recreated the social situations in which they lived and to which they aspired. In Methodism and the Southern Mind, one can survey a complex social spectrum: a few greater and lesser gentry; many women up and down the social ladder from the wealthy to the enslaved; large numbers of "poor . . . Africans" (p. 12) both free and bound; artisans and entrepreneurs, merchants, scriveners, teamsters, and carpenters; Scots, Scots-Irish, Irish, English, and Germans. Methodists brought people together across the many lines that divided Americans; but they also tore them apart from families, inherited positions, and traditional ways of thinking. More precisely, Methodists gathered up all those who for one reason or another were already freeing themselves from the constraints of estate, family, ethnic identity, and religion and led them into a new holy way of life, fusing self-discipline with social control. If Methodists absorbed the supernatural practices of folk religion--the cultivation of dreams, visions, healing, and the like--they transformed these into means of connection between the human and the divine. God became accessible not just through the spirit (or the "religious affections") but through the senses as well and was celebrated in intimate social sharing of bands, classes, and societies.

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