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Popular Evangelicalism and the Shaping of British Moral Sensibilities, 1770-1840

2007; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 8; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/hsp.2007.0021

1944-6438

David Hempton,

Religion and Society Interactions

16 Historically Speaking July/August 2007 Popular Evangelicalism and the Shaping of British Moral Sensibilities, 1770-1840 David Hempton Historians of British abolitionism have variously emphasized the role of heroic individuals (often motivated by serious religious convictions), changes in economic conditions and perceptions, the political calculations of the governing classes, the unanticipated coalescence of unlikely circumstances , and subde shifts in cultural sensibilities .' Those changes in cultural sensibilities have in turn been explored through the additional lenses of gender, race, religion, identity, and economic theory. However subde and wellinformed these approaches may be, the primary question at issue, namely how to explain both the extent and the limits of antislavery sentiment , forces an unavoidable narrowing of one's gaze to the issue of slavery itself. But to begin to understand the emergence of antislavery activity, a bird-like peripheral vision , beyond the single issue of slavery itself, is essential. In the British Isles between 1770 and 1840 several interlocking changes were taking place, of which the rise of antislavery sentiment is only one. One way of linking antislavery to the larger web of change is to look at the political ecology of one of the most important antislavery constituencies, namely popular evangelicalism. Within that broad constituency there is general agreement among historians that by the early 1830s the Methodists played a particularly significant role. According to recent calculations, during the high water mark of petitioning against slavery in 1 832-33 Methodists accounted for about 80% of all Nonconformist signatures, and over 95% of all Wesleyan Methodists signed petitions. This proportion was the highest by far of any English religious denomination.= How then can one account for the superficially startling fact that a small religious society that started within the old High Church wing of the established church, and whose founder and leader largely eschewed political activism, became by the 1830s such a significant backbone of the popular antislavery movement? In the 1770sJohn Wesley, who mostly urged his followers to avoid political issues, published a range of opinions on controversial issues that helped chart the political course for his followers over the next half-century and beyond. Throughout the decade Wesley, by then an elderly man who suffered bouts of serious illness, was also worried about securing the future of Methodism by protecting its distinctive connectional structure and itinerant ministry. In a nutshell, Wesley set the Methodist political compass to point to anti-radicalism, anti-materialism, anA 19th-century print of John Wesley preaching in public. Marianne Kirlew, The Story ofJohn Wesley (New York, 1898). tislavery, anti-Catholicism, anti-corruption, and antiSocinianism , all laced with a strong emphasis on Methodism's need to establish itself as a religious movement independent of outside coercion from church and state. He wanted more toleration for his own movement and less political freedoms for others , especially Roman Catholics; he enjoined obedience to the established order but hated the theatrical materialism of the rich at the top of English society; and he opposed slavery but spoke against the wider political mobilization of his movement lest it become deflected from its religious mission. Above all he wanted to spread scriptural holiness across the land—and to other lands for that matter—without the restrictions of governments, churches, or officials . Methodism's antislavery trajectory is relatively easy to chart, but more difficult to interpret. The story probably begins with the visit of the Wesley brothers to Georgia and parts of South Carolina in the 1730s as agents of the Anglican Society for Propagating the Gospel. In their respective journals of the period, Charles is more generally forthcoming about the inhumanities of slavery than John, who though not disengaged from the sufferings of the slaves, is usually more concerned about their education and spiritual condition. As is well known, the Wesley brothers returned from Georgia in some disarray, and the issue of slavery, though not entirely absent from the Wesleyan corpus, especially when related to Methodist expansion in the Caribbean Islands, made only episodic appearances over the course of the next thirty-six years. That changed in 1 772 when John Wesley came under the influence of the antislavery activists Granville Sharp and Anthony Benezet. Wesley received a tract...