Loosening the Bonds of Family and Society

      In the eighteenth century, the ideal Methodist convert was a young individual, someone who used her youthful energy to further evangelical growth. In Dee Andrews’s meticulous survey of membership records in the Middle Atlantic region of America, she discovered a “prototype” for Methodist laity in the late eighteenth century: a woman who was sixteen to twentyfour years old, unmarried, and still living at home or making her living as a servant.¹ Reaching young men was also necessary for sustaining evangelical growth; the grueling pace and sacrifice of the preachers’ circuit was seen as a young man’s job. The prototypical circuit preacher Freeborn Garrettson joined the preaching ranks at the age of twenty-four, covering much of the Middle Atlantic and upper South, traveling over 100,000 miles from 1776 to 1793.² As young as many converts were, they had to consider their ties to their blood families when they joined the evangelical family.

      Alienation from one’s birth family was often a necessary preliminary step toward becoming a Methodist, especially from the late 1730s to the second decade of the nineteenth century. In their letters and journals, young Methodists regularly recorded the scorn and disapprobation of their families. Evangelical literature and fellowship helped these young converts through the pangs of separation from their previous lives, families, and friends. At the same time, anti-Methodist literature stoked the idea that there were two competing cultures in a young convert’s life, one belonging to their natal family and tradition and the other to the strange ways of the Methodists. Early converts heard gossip and read pamphlets that characterized evangelicals as low class, deranged, self-serving, and false. As the first generations of evangelicals joined this group, they encountered social and familial opposition based on these negative characterizations of Methodism. Most Methodists did not become orphans in the literal sense, but many experienced profound distancing from their natural families as they joined a larger family of believers.

      The erosion of familial bonds was both a stereotypical anti-Methodist critique and an accurate description of reality. In multiple pamphlets and journals, Methodists were charged with being antifamily, leading young, impressionable minds away from their normal dispositions.³ In reality, Methodism did provide an impetus for separation from one’s given family, and evangelical narratives illustrate the details of this separation. In these narratives, Methodists described their new religious ideas as a source of conflict in their families, and they further described real and symbolic ruptures between evangelicals and society as a whole. New converts changed their ways by dressing differently, associating with different people, and generally holding different values, many of which transgressed gender and class norms. Methodists encouraged one another to take up the cross, to suffer in seriousness against the obstacles of family and friends. In 1792, American preacher Stith Mead encouraged young converts to avoid their old irreligious friends, writing that a truly religious convert would

      not take pleasure in Company profane

      Who wishes to Adulterate and alter her name …

      Declaring she never her God will offend

      To be the Companion of a wicked friend.⁴

       Dissent into Madness

      One signal that others saw Methodists as a distinct and disturbing family was the regularity of association between madness and Methodism in the eighteenth century. This was not simply a fictional caricature, because some Methodists described themselves as truly consumed by the psychological trials of conversion. The first step in conversion was conviction of sin, which made some evangelicals merely melancholy. In others, awareness of their sinfulness caused them to act in ways that would seem insane—crying, trembling, groaning, talking to God, and displaying severe emotional swings. After attending a Methodist sermon, the young English convert Mary Maddern was awakened to her sinfulness, and she became convinced that she would go to hell. When Maddern discovered Methodism, she was a teenager. Soon after she attended her first meetings, her parents forbid her to go to any more, arguing that the Wesley brothers “had drove Many to dispare through [their pernicious] Doctrine.”⁵ She seemed to confirm these rumors, when she left the Methodist meeting, “crying out what shall I do to be saved.” She felt worse, not better, after successive sermons, and experienced several months of deepening depression. She went through several more months of feeling alternately at peace and in despair, which continued until she joined a band and felt some spiritual stability after a few months with that group.⁶ Her inconsistency and her attraction to a society that seemed to make her lose her senses alienated her parents and friends. The behaviors of evangelical children made their parents fear for their children’s sanity, as parents saw firsthand the sort of depression that many Methodists described as the beginning stages of their conversion. This made Methodists seem dangerous and further produced an insider/outsider mentality that separated the believer from friends and family by a chasm of language, belief, custom, and culture that must have seemed unbridgeable at times.

      Yet, American and British Methodists purposefully sought this suspension of the rational mind. If the believer truly felt the weight of his or her sinfulness, evangelical melancholy was a convincing sign of a convert’s conviction. Benjamin Abbott, who was a farmer in New Jersey, became part of a Methodist revival in 1772. He wrote that traveling home one day he was suddenly struck with the idea that “as I was one of the reprobates and there was no mercy for me, I had better hang myself and know the worst of it.” He denied himself all earthly pleasures, shunned his wife, avoided food, and had visions of the devil; he generally looked and felt awful. When he was born again after several days of being at the bottom, physically and mentally, it was a great relief to his family and friends as well as himself.⁷ This spiritual journey into darkness, visions, anxiety, and depression was part of a common stage in conversions. This period of conviction required the believer to wallow in his or her state of inherent sinfulness. For many, this meant reliving past sins as well as becoming acutely, painfully aware of the ways in which those sins were increasing daily. In fact, many Methodists never felt entirely free of this stage, since there were usually multiple backslidings in any Methodist’s life.

      Parents’ worries were justified, according to anti-Methodist pamphlets that circulated in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In 1809, Leigh Hunt proclaimed that liberal British society agreed that evangelical conversion was the first step toward the madhouse: “The Arminian and Evangelical Magazines are full of the dying comforts of their disciples, but why do they not give us a candid account of those who die in wretchedness of mind? Why do they not give us a list of the Methodist lunatics throughout the hospitals of England? If they wish to terrify sinners, it is strange they should conceal that most alarming fact in their church-history. I returned a short time since from a large manufacturing town in the North, where I had an opportunity of inspecting the godly a little more closely than in the mazy multitude of London.… Those who were more seriously affected became either melancholy or mad.”⁸ Parents had reason to fear for their children’s mental health, anti-Methodists maintained, if they became unmoored from their traditional religion and blood families to join with these dangerous fanatics. This widespread belief in Methodist-induced madness was so persistently circulated that Wesley felt it necessary to defensively claim the rationality of Methodists in the inaugural issue of the Arminian Magazine in 1778.⁹ This magazine was published in London originally, and then in Philadelphia as well, beginning in the 1780s. The association between ardent religiosity and insanity was already fully developed in eighteenth-century Anglo-American society, drawing upon a deep well of associative images from the Puritan ascendancy and the explosion in enthusiastic dissenting religions of the seventeenth-century interregnum period.¹⁰

      In the late seventeenth century, medical authorities declared “religious melancholy” a category of mental illness, alongside the more serious category of “religious madness” with its symptoms of delusions and hallucinations. Eighteenth-century physicians took the visions and dreams of evangelicals as proofs of insanity, committing people under the diagnosis of “Methodically mad.”¹¹ Whereas early seventeenth-century dissenters risked being labeled as heretics