Thread by @danielsilliman

This morning at the Midwest American Academy of Religion: Fractured Methodisms, giving a historical overview, with @broke_historian, Gregory R. Coates, Thomas Grinter and Diane H. Lobody.

Gregory Coates: This is timely. Hopefully we can glean some knowledge from the past.

Gregory Coates: Teddy Roosevelt once said he loved talking to Methodists, because they were "the great middle class." But how did they get that way. Wesleyan political theology (to the extent that exists) transformed at end of 18th c., conforming to a new political climate.

Gregory Coates: This is a case study of the founding of the Republican Methodist Church, by James O'Kelly, which later became the Christian Connection.

Gregory Coates: James O'Kelly split from Asbury, opposed to what he saw as the British bishop's "ecclesial monarchism." He said what do we expect of some one raised in the land of kings?

Gregory Coates: With highly charged republican political language, a minority of American Methodists, with O'Kelly, tried to curtail the power of bishops. And then, when that failed, founded the Republican Methodists.

Gregory Coates: This was not just personal feud, though. There was about a shifting political order. The split was, in a way, a Methodist referendum on the political issues of the day.

Gregory Coates: The Methodist division reflects the divisions between federalists and republicans.

Gregory Coates: The only proper hermeneutic to understand this ecclesial dispute is its politics.

Gregory Coates: Schism also--important to note--happens exactly at the moment the church stops growing. Schism may be responsible for stunting growth.

Gregory Coates: Republicanism, a political change in the 18th c., transformed American religion. The Republicanization of Christianity shifted, first, who could read the Bible, then questions of authority. Then: who belongs to a church, and how.

Gregory Coates: Republican believers, rightly or wrongly, believed their vision was more truly in accord with primitive church. And their fight against the bishops was, they thought, continuous with the American revolution.

Gregory Coates: Belonging became less institutional, less centered on sacrament (access to the sacrament restricted by apostolic succession). Now churches were more about individual piety, free association serving the individual, and were preaching centered.

Gregory Coates: The most fascinating aspect about this research is it's very hard to tell whether evangelicalism influenced republicanism more than republicanism influenced evangelicalism. There was both.

Gregory Coates: O'Kelly's followers thought they were continuing the work of the revolution, which didn't end at Yorktown, but would continue to Christ's second coming.

Gregory Coates: You may have noticed that populism still exists today. O'Kelly and the Republican Methodists show us this start of this dramatic shift in American religion and culture.

Gregory Coates: This all happened about a decade before Cane Ridge, and sets the stage, I think, for the larger revivalistic movement of this new evangelicalism that emerges.

.@bartonprice points out the populism is maybe better thought of as authoritarianism of a different sort. "They were called O'Kellyites for a reason." Anti-intsitutionalist religious groups were often cults of personality.

Diane H. Lobody: you can see, in the O'Kelly story, the divisions between institution and anti-institution, and clericism and anti-clericism, and those fractures merge and re-emerge.

Diane H. Lobody: So I was asked to talk about Methodist splits over the social gospel. Which when I talked about it, astonished me. Because there is no split in Methodism over the social gospel. That's very strange. Why is that?

Diane H. Lobody: Methodism, there are three significant splits before it's an official denomination. And then a fourth immediately after. Then O'Kelly, which we just heard about. Then the departure of Richard Allen and the separation of African Americans. Then the AME Zion.

Diane H. Lobody: Question again and again is over whether lay people can have a voice, what control they can have, and whether clergy can pick their own supervisors.

Diane H. Lobody: Methodist clergy, again and again, crack down. Sometimes even punishing people for subscribing to magazines that question the authority of the bishops.

Diane H. Lobody: And then there's the divisions, always growing over the history, the divisions over slavery.

Diane H. Lobody: It's pretty normal, in the history, for the church history to parallel really closely the secular political history. The general conference has a gag rule, just like the congress has a gag rule, so they don't respond, can't respond, to thousands of petitions.

Diane H. Lobody: 1840, abolitionist methodists withdraw and form the Wesleyan Methodist church. In 1845, you get the split between Northern and Southern Methodists. All the holiness divisions, over questions like dancing, masonic membership, women preaching. Cultural issues.

Diane H. Lobody: So, this happens all through the 19th c. In the 19th c., Methodists divide or split at the minimum of once every decade. Some are traumatic. Some are a pressure release (way better to get rid of the sanctification people. It's quieter now that they're gone).

Diane H. Lobody: If I were a different kind of scholar, I would try to map this on to generational family systems theories, and the way trauma leads to generations repeating cycles of trauma. But that's for someone else.

Diane H. Lobody: So. Why no split over the social gospel? There is a social gospel proposal that comes from lay people to the general council for a statement on social issues, like the rights of labor. It's endorsed. Pretty radical.

Diane H. Lobody: These are basically Methodist socialists. Why didn't they lead to a split, in this church of splits, which is mostly middle class Americans, at this point. The church is not naturally sympathetic to this radical politics.

Diane H. Lobody: One difference: the socialist Methodists didn't push for kind of punitive rules, like you can't be a Methodist if you're a robber baron, or can't be a Methodist in good standing if you invest in the stock market. Different than the strategy of abolitionists.

Diane H. Lobody: But the statement was very radical. And it got more radical. And didn't lead to a split. So I got to wondering why.

Diane H. Lobody: I think it was pressure release valves, that kept it from fissures over class and race and gender, must as the nation was trying not to split over these lines. Ohio Methodists are an example of these strategies.

Diane H. Lobody: Ohio strategies that worked: 1. give dissenters influence rather than authority. Gen. conf. gave the socialists authority to direct concerns on labor and econ.

Diane H. Lobody: These were a bunch of trouble makers! But it wasn't authority. They gave them influence, but it did change some things. The Book of Discipline was produced by a union shop, because of these concerns.

Diane H. Lobody: Ohio Methodist strategy 2: internal delegation. People who had no power, the women, were given role of fleshing out the social gospel concerns.

Diane H. Lobody: Side note: there's a fascinating moment when Methodists decide that when the Book of Discipline says it "all men are sinners" it means all people. When it says all men can be preachers, that just means men.

Diane H. Lobody: But you see women, in this time, start building hospitals, forming mission orgs., starting settlement houses. Internal delegation to women, was one way church responded to social gospel challenge.

Diane H. Lobody: My favorite donation I found was an Ohio church giving $5 to a Methodist deaconess in New Mexico so she could buy a motorcycle. That's so cool.

Diane H. Lobody: 3rd approach. Differences in different churches. Rural churches were just allowed to be different than urban.

Diane H. Lobody: There are also divisions that aren't splits. 4. racial conferences. Ethnic conferences. Which mean the church doesn't have to integrate.

Diane H. Lobody: 5. There is a lot of external focus, like with prohibition. Going outside.

Diane H. Lobody: I think that was why there wasn't a split. We can have a policy, a statement of principles, but it isn't enforced on anybody, and if you really want to do social gospel, you can go into that, women go into that. It's off over there, available if you want it.

Q. from @bartonprice: are these things a strategy to avoid confronting systemic issues? Diane H. Lobody: absolutely. Absolutely.

Diane H. Lobody: I think the denomination was traumatized by the split over slavery. A trauma that continues to reverberate. So the Methodist socialists didn't want to split. They would consider leaving as individuals, but they didn't want to cause a split and hurt the church.

Q. about black Methodists who, for a while, could get licensed to ministry but not ordained. Lobody: in 1939, as part of reunification of North and South, there were jurisdictions created.

Lobody: This was institutionalization of racism in national polity. Bishops weren't elected nationally. African Americans were made their own jurisdiction, so no white Southern Methodist would have to serve under an African American bishop.

Lobody: The Evangelical United Brethren Church opposed this, when they were considering merger in the 60s, unless there was an explicit plan to integrate church, at least by regions. Southerners said, what will do with black bishops? They'll serve as bishops.

Lobody: It's important that Methodists don't believe in coercion. They don't believe God coerces people into salvation. The gospel is a persuasive thing.

Thomas Grinter, who was going to talk about the division of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, unfortunately had trouble getting here and couldn't join the panel.

.@broke_historian: This overview of Methodist fracture shows us how intertwined religion and politics have always been. Always are. Social divisions of race, region, gender, politics, with tenuous unities.

And that's the end of a great and extremely timely session.

This American religion and culture session, I should note, was sponsored by the @WesleyMWRC.