The Transatlantic Methodist Family

      In 1771, Freeborn Garrettson had a life-changing conversation with Methodist preacher Francis Asbury. Their talk was so affecting that Garrettson wondered, “How does this stranger know me so well!”¹ Many Methodists in the eighteenth century described their entry into the group in a similar fashion. “He spake to me,” converts recounted, feeling that the preacher knew their own story, marking the intimacy of the moment of awakening.² As a result of Asbury’s instrumental role in his conversion, Garrettson claimed Asbury as his “spiritual father.”³ Like most Methodists at this time, Garrettson was not born into the Methodist church; his parents had been members of an Anglican church in Maryland. After Garrettson’s conversion, he wrote, “something told me, these are the people. I was so happy in the time of preaching, that I could conceal it no longer; so I determined to chuse God’s people for my people.”⁴ These people would become Garrettson’s Methodist family.

      In this book, I examine the Methodist family as paradigmatic of the influence of religious ideas on the eighteenth-century family. During these formative years, Methodists used the central metaphor and organizational principle of “family” to organize themselves across a great geographical expanse. Methodism was a movement that spanned the transatlantic world, spreading throughout England, Wales, Ireland, and America during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. By the late eighteenth century, Methodism was the fastest growing denomination in America. In the early nineteenth century, Methodists and Baptists competed to claim the greatest number of souls in Protestant America.⁵ In England, Methodists dominated the revivalist scene of the eighteenth century and became a serious challenge to the Church of England.⁶ This group rose originally as a subset of the Anglican church, but they sought to associate with each other in a closer, more spiritually watchful way than could be done within a formal denomination. Instead of starting by building churches or congregations, they began by forming societies and bonds between each other as evangelicals. In this book, I explore how men and women related to one another within this rapidly growing transatlantic network of familial relations and how they claimed authority over the personal decisions within their own lives and within the family as a whole.

      This book addresses contemporary disputes over the history of family and marriage by examining this crucial period in which the contexts and meanings of family were open to debate.⁷ Most research has confirmed the dominance of the nineteenth-century romantic marriage model in both England and America, by opposing it to the earlier mode of spousal choice, in which economic concerns and parental control were the primary considerations.⁸ In examining this shift, historians have often pointed to secular literature, legal trends, the rise of the romantic novel, and prescriptive literature, but the roles of religious families and the significance of religious literature are almost entirely left out of the conversation. For the most part, we have assumed that religion had a conservative effect on the rise of individualistic, love-based marriages.⁹ I argue that we should revisit and reassess religious families to understand their effect on the formation of the modern family. I measure their impact on family history along three interrelated trajectories: (1) religious families were quite elastic in their ideas of membership, since unrelated evangelicals became “brothers,” “sisters,” “mothers,” and “fathers”; (2) this flexibility of familial association strengthened the emotional bonds of family by emphasizing the intimacy of this chosen family; and (3) evangelicals accelerated the turn toward romantic marriage through their exaltation of the “soul mate” as a central consideration for marriage.

      While it is easy to associate religious notions of family with conservative, backward-looking principles,