This hybrid book is part memoir and part scholarly reflection on the attitudes of white Methodists toward blacks and their long-term reckoning with race. Russell E. Richey, an eminent Wesleyan scholar and author of numerous studies on the history of the United Methodist Church and its predecessor religious bodies, grounds this narrative in Methodist polity and distills it through the categories of connection, formation, and outreach. Though the author examines how Methodism engaged multiple constituencies, the treatment of African Americans is central to his exploration. These foci in matters of polity and race are pursued in the contrasting developments of Methodism in the adjoining states of Kentucky and Ohio. This Mason-Dixon Methodism illustrates how an ecclesia whose British and Anglican origins yielded to the civic and cultural norms of an American society where freedom and slavery developed in tense interaction with each other. Methodists were scarcely responsible for the genesis of these powerful forces, but they surely accommodated themselves, sometimes nobly, and, at other times, ignobly to these American realities.
In noting the blended governance and missional character of Kentucky and Ohio Methodists, Richey discovered their sharply different approaches in outreach to subordinate populations. While all peoples were spiritually equal, white Methodists, whether in Kentucky or Ohio, seldom challenged the racial and gender hierarchies that the broader society established and enforced. Because racism was concretized as black chattel slavery in Kentucky and as a restricted freedom for African Americans in Ohio, Methodists adjusted their polity and praxis to accord with pernicious societal systems. Ironically, Kentuckians belonging to the pro-slavery Methodist Episcopal Church, South, while affirming the acceptability of “the buying and selling of men, women, and children, with the intention to enslave them,” recognized that those in bondage possessed souls. Hence, they inaugurated catechesis for enslaved blacks though their instruction focused on the bare rudiments of salvation and on a Pauline exhortation to obey their masters.
Ohio Methodists affiliated with the Methodist Episcopal Church, a largely anti-slavery sect. They parted with Kentuckians and other pro-slavery Methodists who formed the ME Church, South at whose 1845 meeting in Louisville the new denomination formally was organized. Richey contended that Ohio's ME Church exhibited greater indifference to the spiritual well being of blacks, and many believed that black emancipation should be followed by repatriation to Liberia. Others ME adherents in the state, however, held that the slave catechesis undertaken by their Kentucky counterparts was inadequate and instead advocated a much higher level of education for blacks. Wilberforce University, which these Ohio Methodists founded at Tawawa Springs, would energize a better freedom for blacks than what the civic society provided. The purchase of this Ohio site, which later was sold to the African Methodist Episcopal Church, some hoped, would portend additional collaboration with a black Wesleyan body of similar longevity.
Richey mentions additional ironies in this Mason-Dixon Methodist dichotomy. Despite the North/South denominational split over slavery, both bodies acknowledged the principle of black inclusion within the ecclesia, albeit in a clearly defined subordinate status. Southern white Methodists engaged in religious instruction and in some cases allowed the licensure of black exhorters. Henry M. Turner in South Carolina, later an AME bishop, is one example. Richey notes another example at a Lexington congregation whose quarterly conference recommended an African American man for deacon's orders. Ohio Methodists, though often assigning blacks to separate quarterly conferences, at the discretion of the presiding elder, received black Methodists as members just like their counterparts in Kentucky. Nonetheless, African Americans knew that in each white Wesleyan venue they occupied subordinate positions. What Richey did not emphasize was that such circumstances motivated blacks, where possible, to exercise another ecclesial option in choosing to affiliate with an autonomous body of black Methodists. In these two states, especially in the ante bellum period, this meant the African Methodist Episcopal Church. In Kentucky during this era, AME congregations emerged in Lexington, Louisville, including one congregation known as “the abolition church,” and in other towns. Even larger numbers of AME churches flourished in Ohio all across the state from Cleveland to Columbus to Cincinnati. Black Methodists, neither in Kentucky or Ohio, were without alternatives to avoid an assured subjugation among Wesleyan whites.
Hence, it is unsurprising that John Stewart is overlooked in the Richey volume. Born free in Virginia in 1786 and converted to Christianity in an Ohio ME Church, Stewart pioneered the denomination's ministry among the Wyandotte Indians. Before an untimely death in 1823, Stewart shifted his allegiance to the AME Church, an independent body then spreading rapidly in Ohio. Stewart's experience shows that too often scholars have designated majority white Wesleyan bodies as normative Methodism and fail to emphasize the multivalent character of Methodism in the United States, even when they extensively discuss the issue of race. Stewart's lived religious experience demonstrated how he distinguished between ruling Wesleyan whites in denominations with slave and subordinate black adherents from an equally influential Wesleyan black ecclesia in independent interstate bodies. Clarity about an ecclesial landscape that provides no narrative privilege to white-ruled bodies as monopolistically Methodist would put the present volume and others like it into a more complicated context. Richey's helpful case study of two states and their reckonings with race without any corresponding acknowledgement of black Methodist activity in these same states misses those examples when blacks, at times overtly and at other times subtly, upended the ecclesiastical dominance that their white Wesleyan counterparts tried to enforce.
Richey provides a detailed survey on polity and how it governed missional initiatives in faith formation, education, ministerial preparation, and other identity markers crucial to Methodist ecclesial cohesion. He extensively buttresses this discussion about how the Kentucky and Ohio jurisdictions intersected and disconnected on several ecclesiastical matters with statistical tables and a variety of rosters of persons, programs, and funding mainly from annual conference minutes and other denominational records. He demonstrates how these pursuits produced tensions and divergences among Methodists. Hence, disconnection, especially on issues of race, Richey says, became a “Methodist signature.”
The glue that holds this hybrid volume together, however, is Richey's autobiographical reflections about experiencing Methodism's racial dilemma in his own life. He laments the Methodist legacy of slavery revealed in the 1844 split that produced two majority white Wesleyan bodies, the subsequent segregation compromise in 1939 that brought about a flawed reunion of these separate denominations to contemporary racial reckonings in church and society. For Richey, Methodism remains a broken and unfinished ecclesial venture.
