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“The Devil Begins to Roar”: Opposition to Early Methodists in New England

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Eric Baldwin
Eric Baldwin
Affiliation:
doctoral candidate in Religious and Theological Studies at Boston University.
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Extract

In the several decades after their arrival in the New England states in the late 1780s, Methodists were the objects of a wide variety of attacks, some of them mutually contradictory. Their preachers were accused of being pickpockets, horse thieves, and sexual predators, while on the other hand some converts were mocked for their excessive moral seriousness. They were suspected alternatively of being agents of the English crown, spies for the French government, and Jeffersonian radicals. Further, to some it seemed that their episcopal form of government and ecclesiastical tribunals functioned as a sort of shadow government undermining the political institutions of the nation. They were attacked for their Arminian theology, in defense of which they vigorously condemned Calvinist doctrine. They were mocked as enthusiasts and fanatics whose preachers, pretending to an immediate divine calling, inflamed the passions of their listeners and whose gatherings degenerated into bedlams of disorder, confusion, and moral scandal. They were disturbers of churches, transgressing parochial boundaries, sowing disorder, and fracturing the covenant relationship between minister and flock, all of which recalled memories of the upheaval accompanying the awakenings of the 1740s. They were unlearned rustics not fit to instruct people in divinity, but they were also sly enough to worm their way into the hearts and minds of people by shrewdly hiding their true intentions and prejudicing their hearers against the standing ministers.

Type
Articles
Information
Church History , Volume 75 , Issue 1 , March 2006 , pp. 94 - 119
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 2006

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References

1. There had been limited and sporadic Methodist activity in New England prior to this time, and there were a handful of Methodists in New England prior to this date, but the start of the itinerant ministry of Jesse Lee (nicknamed the “Apostle” of New England Methodism) in Connecticut in June of 1789 marks the real beginning of Methodist activity in the region.

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85. Richard Kasserman, David, Fall River Outrage: Life, Murder, and Justice in Early Industrial New England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), 222–23.Google Scholar

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104. See Williams, , Fall RiverGoogle Scholar, and Kasserman, , Fall River OutrageGoogle Scholar, for the details of Cornell's life. Kasserman argues persuasively that the murder and the ensuing trial served to pit the culture of the emerging factory system against that of the Methodists, each blaming the other for the young woman's loss of virtue and ultimate death.