Wesley and the Wesleyans: Religion in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Trinity Journal, Fall 2004 by Hamilton, Barry W

John Kent. Wesley and the Wesleyans: Religion in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 229 pp. $22.00 paper.

Written a year prior to the bicentennial (2003) of John Wesley's birth, Kent's trenchant essay brings a contemporary Anglican perspective to the historical significance of Methodism and its founder. Kent can hardly be regarded as sympathetic to the Wesleyan Revival -in fact, his account discounts the latter as a fiction devised to buttress evangelicalism and its legacy in today's "Religious Right." Rather, Methodism addressed "primary religious impulses" -a need for supernatural interventionism -not met by eighteenth-century Anglicanism. Kent spurns the label of "laxity" for latitudinarianism and defends Anglicanism as a venerable bulwark against the encroachments and excesses of Rome. Rejecting the characterization of Wesleyanism as "Scriptural Christianity," his unflattering portrait emphasizes the "enthusiastic" side that paralleled Catholicism.

Chapter 1 attributes the first rise of Methodism in the 173Os to "primary religious impulses of certain social groups, especially in the Church of England" that were "unsatisfied." Kent states, "The primary religious impulse is to seek some kind of extra-human power, either for personal protection ... or for the sake of ecstatic experience, and possibly prophetic guidance" (pp. 1-2). His view of religion is functional: "In effect, Wesley was offering a transformation of personal identity as an antidote to despair or as a cure for circumstances, and it is evident from the start that his approach appealed to numbers of people who were dissatisfied with their personal or social lives" (p. 2). From this perspective, Wesleyanism flourished because it ameliorated the feelings associated with individual needs. Sympathetic to the broader Anglican tradition, Kent justifies the "persecution" of Methodists as the understandable reaction of local, "closed" societies (cf. pp. 16-20). Rather than restoring "Scriptural Christianity," Methodism addressed a void in Anglicanism - a legacy of the English Reformation (cf. pp. 25-28).

Chapter 2 identifies John Wesley as a leader out-of-touch with the best ideas of his day, particularly empiricism, clinging to a "perfectionist subculture." As Kent puts it, "Wesley remained uninfluenced by the information he had gathered over more than a generation of Wesleyan development, because he interpreted what he saw, or what was reported to him, in terms of a set of biblical texts whose meaning, as far as he grasped it, took precedence over empirical data" (p. 38). In the end, Methodism as an embodiment of "primary religious impulse" overtook Wesley, and he never established a "critical distance" from himself or his movement (p. 39). Neither could Wesley's biblical doctrine of perfection be permanently embodied in consciousness; rather, the predominant element that remains in Wesley's Journal is "a deep dread of inscrutable divine power" (p. 40). As Kent observes, "But the Calvinist flavour remains: nothing guarantees the final vision of God" (p. 41). Kent's Anglicanism dominates his analysis of perfection: he shares the horror of his eighteenth-century forbears (cf. p. 62).

Kent should be commended for his extensive research and detailed analysis in ch. 3 of Methodism in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Perhaps his greatest strength is his identification of Wesleyanism's political location between Dissent and the Church of England -a "limbo" that created dissonance for its ministers and marginalized the movement's status. However, his account reckons Methodism as generally superstitious (pp. 75-76), intolerant with respect to ecclesiology (p. 77), and tied to an unrealizable ideal of perfection, part of the movement's "enthusiasm" "making claims that could not be substantiated" (p. 87). On this latter point, Kent includes Calvinists and their doctrines of predestination and election. Throughout his account, Kent supports Anglicanism as the definitive, unfailing religious tradition of England, and minimizes the historical and theological significance of Methodism.

In ch. 4, "Women in Wesleyanism," Kent portrays Methodist women as initially speaking with their own voice, but eventually giving way to male dominance and definition. Far from liberating women from their circumstances, Wesley and his preachers often circumscribed Methodists with their own constructions of supernatural experience that took advantage of the impulses of primary religion. Far from revering Methodism's early leaders, Kent highlights their fallibility: "It should not be assumed that the mercurial Charles Wesley always assessed his contacts correctly" (p. 115). And as a movement, Methodism failed to "make more generous use of women" which "partly explains why Wesleyanism had lost its unity by the 184Os" (p. 121). Overall, Kent's assessment minimizes the significance of John Wesley and the movement he founded.

In his efforts to overturn the notion of a "Wesleyan Revival" that restored "Scriptural Christianity" - a "myth" that apparently galls Anglicans - Kent sharply contrasts Methodism and "moderate Anglicanism" in ch. 5, "Anglican Responses." While the "moderates" might have sympathized with Thomas Hobbes's "humanized pattern of social behavior" after the "ruins left by the [seventeenth-century] Civil War," Methodists were supernaturalists who "fully believed that sometimes faith and wisdom could be blown into a man or woman from heaven" (p. 141). Moreover, Kent contrasts the Church of England as a "national institution" with its role in the "formation of a peaceful, hierarchical community," and "a Wesleyan society dedicated to the pursuit of religious 'revival,'" and concludes, "the social consequences would be unbearable" (p. 154).