METHODIST HISTORY October 2010 Volume XLIX Number 1

The Child’s Anti-Slavery Book (1859) EDITORIAL BOARD Morris Davis Drew University Paula Gilbert Duke University A. V. Huff Furman University Cornish Rogers Claremont School of Theology Ian Straker Howard University Douglas Strong Seattle Pacific University Anne Streaty Wimberly Interdenominational Theological Center Stephen Yale Pacific School of Religion Charles Yrigoyen, Jr. Lancaster Theological Seminary Assistant Editors Michelle Merkel-Brunskill Christopher Rodkey Nancy E. Topolewski Book Review Editor Christopher J. Anderson Cover: Illustration entitled, “A Slave Father Sold Away from his Family,” from The Child’s Anti-Slavery Book created by the Sunday-School Union of the MEC and published in 1859. See article by Cynthia M. Rogers (4).

METHODIST HISTORY (ISSN 0026-1238) is published quarterly for $25.00 per year to addresses in the U.S. by the General Commission on Archives and History of The United Methodist Church, 36 Madison Avenue, Madison, NJ 07940. Printed in the U.S.A. Back issues are available. Second-class postage paid at Madison, NJ. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to METH- ODIST HISTORY, P.O. Box 127, Madison, NJ 07940 or email [email protected]. METHODIST HISTORY

Robert J. Williams, Editor

Volume XLIX October 2010 Number 1

CONTENTS Contributors ...... 2 Editor’s Note ...... 3

The Child’s Anti-Slavery Book and Other Sunday School Books of the Methodist Episcopal Church, 1827-1880 by Cynthia M. Rogers ...... 4

Heralding the Call of Populism: Kansas Methodists and the 1896 Presidential Election by Darin A. Tuck ...... 20

Methodist Heretic: Thomas Altizer and the Death of God at Emory University by Christopher Demuth Rodkey...... 37

Mission in Methodist Perspective: Some Personal Deliberations by Helmut Nausner...... 51

Book Reviews ...... 58

Heritage Landmarks of The United Methodist Church ...... 64

Methodist History is included in Religious Index One: Periodicals, Religious and Theological Abstracts, Historical Abstracts and America: History and Life ATLA Religion Database

Manuscripts submitted for publication and all other correspondence should be addressed to Editor: METHODIST HISTORY, P.O. Box 127, Madison, NJ 07940. Prospective authors are advised to write for guidleines or visit www.gcah.org. CONTRIBUTORS

CYNTHIA M. ROGERS recently received her Master of Theological Studies degree summa cum laude from Drew Theological School. Her cap- stone project, an exhibit entitled “Instructing Children & Families: Sunday School Books of the Methodist Episcopal Church, 1827-1880” at the United Methodist Archives & History Center at Drew, was the basis for the article in this issue. Rogers holds a Masters of Education degree in Social Studies Education from the University of Virginia and received her B.A., summa cum laude, from Baylor University.

DARIN A. TUCK is a doctoral student in the department of history at the University of Missouri.

CHRISTOPHER D. RODKEY earned the Ph.D. degree from Drew University and now serves as pastor of Zion “Goshert’s” United Church of Christ, Lebanon, Pennsylvania, and teaches at Lebanon Valley College, Annville, Pennsylvania. He is author of the forthcoming book, The Synaptic Gospel.

HELMUT NAUSNER received the Distinguished Service Award from the General Commission on Archives and History in August, 2010. He stud- ied at the University of Vienna and the Methodist Theological Seminary in Frankfurt, Germany. Now retired, he served churches in Austria and was ap- pointed to serve as conference superintendent in Austria. He has been active in ecumenical work and served on the General Board of Higher Education and Ministry and the Ministry Study Commission (1984-1992).

2 Methodist History, 49:1 (October 2010)

EDITOR’S NOTE The next World Methodist Conference will be held in Durban, South Africa, August 4-9, 2011. This will be preceded by a meeting of the Council, August 1-3. The World Methodist Historical Society is planning a program for Thursday afternoon, August 4, which will be one among a variety of seminars to be offered. Though still tentative, plans are being made for an informative bus tour starting with lunch and ending with dinner on the Inanda Heritage Route with visits to Methodist Churches and lectures on South African Methodist history. The seminar will be limited to 45 people and registration will be required. Expenses for the bus, meals, and speakers will be covered by the World Methodist Historical Society. Once plans are finalized, information will be available through www.gcah.org; click on the World Methodist Historical Society link. Information on the Conference can be accessed through www.worldmethodistcouncil.org. The summer of 2011 will also be marked by the Seventh Historical Convocation, which will be July 21-24, in Oklahoma City. The theme will be “United Methodism in a Land of Many Cultures: Native American and Latino History.” The Convocation will begin on Thursday evening with the presentation of the General Commission on Archives and History’s Distinguished Service Award to Dr. Kenneth E. Rowe, long-time Methodist librarian at Drew University and a leading scholar and bibliographer on Methodist history. The Convocation will include lectures and visits to Latino and Native American churches. The meetings will be at Oklahoma City University and will be hosted by the Oklahoma Conference and the Oklahoma Indian Missionary Conference. The Convocation will include the annual meeting of the Historical Society of The United Methodist Church and will be preceded by the annual meeting of the General Commission on Archives and History. Registration will be available beginning in January. Four of the Jurisdictional Commissions on Archives and History in the United States will meet in the spring and summer: Western Jurisdiction: April 28-May 1, in Phoenix, AZ Northeastern Jurisdiction: May 3-5, in New Windsor, MD North Central Jurisdiction: July 11-14, in Winona, MN Southeastern Jurisdiction Historical Society: June 28-July 1, in Pineville, KY. It is a privilege to work with those dedicated to making known the rich heritage of our church. Robert J. Williams

3 Methodist History, 49:1 (October 2010)

The Child’s Anti-Slavery Book and other Sunday School Books of the Methodist Episcopal Church, 1827-1880

Cynthia M. Rogers

On April 21, 1859, John B. McFerrin, editor of the Publishing House of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, in Nashville, declared in the Nash- ville Christian Advocate that certain works published for the Methodist Epis- copal Church would “never see the light” in Southern church libraries. “In- stance, The Child’s Anti-Slavery Book, from the press a few weeks since—a work we regard as far worse than Uncle Tom’s Cabin . . . . Such publications are rank with abolition sentiments, and cannot be sold by our agency . . . .” Indeed the high emotions surrounding the split over slavery at General Conference in 1844, as well as a commitment to the development of Sun- day School library books, led the General Conference of 1848 of The Meth- odist Episcopal Church to order the Book Concern to publish “antislavery tracts,” which soon included The Child’s Anti-Slavery Book. This effort distinguished the Methodist Episcopal Sunday School Union (SSU) from the older and larger American Sunday School Union (ASSU), which refused to take a stand on slavery in its publications for children. An examination of The Child’s Anti-Slavery Book, in addition to several other books published for the libraries attached to Methodist Sunday Schools, offers a window into the religious, social, and educational priorities of the early Methodists. The plots, characters, and themes of the books reveal how concepts about childhood and children’s literature changed over the course of the nineteenth century. And the settings for much of this Sunday School literature reflect the broader social themes that resounded across the nineteenth century.

The Child’s Anti-Slavery Book: containing a few words about American Slave Children; and stories of slave-life (New York: Carlton & Porter for the Sunday School Union of the Methodist Episcopal Church, 1859). This paper draws from the exhibit, “Instructing Children & Families: Sunday School Books of the Methodist Episcopal Church, 1827-1880,” curated by Cynthia M. Rogers, at the United Methodist Archives & History Center, Drew University, Madison, NJ, in 2008. The Methodist Library at Drew University has become a repository for a large collection of books published for the Methodist Sunday School Union during this period. James Penn Pilkington, The Methodist Publishing House, vol. 1 (Nashville: Abingdon, 1968), 390-301. Pilkington, 391. Pilkington, 391. Anne M. Boylan, Sunday School: The Formation of an American Institution 1790-1880 (New Haven: Yale UP, 1988), 80. 4 The Child’s Anti-Slavery Book 5

One of the key figures in the early development of the Methodist Sun- day School and its publications was Daniel Parish Kidder (1815-1891), who served as Corresponding Secretary of the Sunday School Union and general editor of Sunday School books and tracts from 1844-1856. Kidder is widely credited with improving the Methodist Sunday School and its teaching and for dramatically increasing the number and selection of books available to Sunday School libraries. Kidder later served as Professor of Practical The- ology at Drew Seminary from 1871-1881, and his papers, which offer rich details of that early Sunday School period, are part of the Methodist Collec- tion at Drew University. An overview of the Sunday School movement and the emergence of the Methodist Sunday School Union with its commitment to the development of libraries for children and families will provide the backdrop for the discussion of several select Sunday School books (1827-1880), including The Child’s Anti-Slavery Book. Sunday School The concept of Sunday School, along with the development of books and teaching materials, began in England. Robert Raikes (1736-1811), a printer and publisher in Gloucester, England, known for his reform efforts in the jails and prisons, is widely credited with starting the first Sunday School in 1780 for children of the working classes who had virtually no access to any formal education. Raikes saw the children working in the pin-making fac- tories of Gloucester and concluded that religious instruction was the key to redeeming these “neglected and ragged children.” The Bible was Raikes’ central text for instruction, but since there was no public education system, literacy training was crucial, and he soon developed small manuals teaching the alphabet, spelling, and moral instruction and prayers. This concept of Sunday School, which was opposed early on by some of the English nobility who feared the effects of a literate lower class, quickly gained popularity and support from such reformers as William Wilberforce, John Wesley, George Fox, and others, leading to the formation of the Sunday-School Society of 1785 and later the London Sunday School Union of 1811. While Raikes generally received the credit for the formation and momen- tum of the Sunday School movement, W. A. Candler, who wrote a history of the Sunday School for one of the early Sunday School conventions in 1879, states us that the concept of religious instruction for youth and adults was hardly a novel idea. Indeed, John Wesley established a Sunday School in his Savannah, Georgia, parish in 1736; Bishop Asbury followed suit in Hanover County, Virginia, in 1783;10 and “in the year 1793 Katy Ferguson, a

Edwin Wilbur Rice, The Sunday School Movement and the American Sunday School Union 1780-1917 (Philadelphia: American Sunday School Union, 1917), 14. Rice, 18. Rice, 19-23. 10 W. A. Candler, History of Sunday Schools (New York: Phillips & Hunt, 1880), 42-48. 6 Methodist History poor African woman, with no knowledge of Raikes or other Sunday-schools, established the first Sunday-school in New York City.”11 Thus the Methodists were supportive of the reform and instruction of the working class through this movement. Within the United States, however, the impetus for a Sunday School movement dated back to the 1790s. It flowed primarily from a concern for working children who were “slipping through the cracks” of the educational system and “receiving neither the literacy training nor the religious knowledge that potential citizens of the new republic needed.”12 Historian Anne Boylan argues that the Sunday School movement fell within the overarching nineteenth-century theme of institution-building, engineered by reformers committed to evangelical Protestantism (as were many nineteenth-century reformers). These evangelical reformers believed Sunday School could help effect the transmission of such personal values as “self-control, delayed grat- ification, and self-improvement,”13 all of which were viewed as imperative for the progress of the individual and the nation. The First Day Society of Philadelphia launched the most ambitious Sunday School program in the United States for children of the lower classes. Organized in 1791 by an interdenominational group of “enlightened republican gentlemen,” which included Episcopalians, Friends, and Catholics, the First Day Society reflected the conviction that this new republican experiment could only succeed with an educated populace.14 The leadership of the First Day Society generally hired teachers, paid bills, and set policy, but remained rather remote from the day-to-day operations. By 1810, however, enrollments began to decline, due largely to the development of the free public schools and the growth of Sunday Schools whose evangelical mission eclipsed their educational goals.15 These evangelical Sunday Schools, which were started by individual congregations, differed in many ways from the schools of the First Day Society whose primary focus was interpreting the Bible, so literacy training was only the means toward that end. Their organizers were driven by the goal of personal conversion, and they were intimately involved in the schools’ operation, fostering great activism and geographical growth. They began forming associations to encourage the growth of evangelical Sunday Schools and to provide educational resources, culminating in the formation of the Sunday and Adult School Union in 1817, renamed the American Sunday School Union (ASSU) in 1824.16 The proliferation of evangelical Sunday Schools also coincided with the growth of the free (public) school movement, and in general a complemen- tary arrangement prevailed, whereby literacy became the domain of the pub-

11 Candler, 48. 12 Boylan, 6. 13 Boylan, 3. 14 Boylan, 8. 15 Boylan, 8-11. 16 Ellen Shaffer, “The Children’s Books of the American Sunday School Union,” The American Book Collector 17 (October 1966): 21. The Child’s Anti-Slavery Book 7 lic schools, while Sunday Schools attended to religious instruction. These boundaries were not absolute, however, for Sunday Schools often continued the practice of reading instruction to insure biblical literacy for those un- able to attend weekday public schools, while public school curricula were infused with Protestant assumptions.17 What distinguished these American Sunday Schools from their English counterparts, however, was their broad appeal across the boundaries of social class, their role in the recruitment of new church members, and their efforts to spread a “culture of evangelical Protestantism” with its mission of spiritual and personal reformation.18 Boylan cites several reasons for their rapid growth and development, including the Second Great Awakening; a new approach to child psychology which argued that children could experience conversion; the inclusion of children from church-going families which provided a middle class orientation; and the growth of the public school movement which allowed for the comple- mentary arrangement described above.19 The American Sunday School Union (ASSU), while functioning as an ecumenical association of individual Sunday Schools rather than church bodies,20 was largely dominated by Presbyterians, and “low” Episcopalians. Denominationalism soon threatened its unity. Methodists, Baptists, and high church Episcopalians began forming their own Sunday School organizations, which often closely resembled those of the ASSU, particularly with their focus on publications.21 For Methodists the issue was primarily theological in their insistence that their Sunday Schools apply their Wesleyan-Arminian theology and organize their instruction toward conversion.22 Indeed James Pilkington argues that during this period the heated disputes between the Calvinists and Methodists often overshadowed even those between Catholics and Protestants. In any case, these partisan denominational scuffles led to the ASSU finally copyrighting and restricting its own publications, providing even more impetus for Methodists to develop their own materials.23 Thus by April, 1827, the Sunday School Union of the Methodist Episcopal Church (SSU) was formed in New York City, led by Corresponding Secretary Nathan Bangs, who also headed the Methodist Publishing House. Thereafter followed the all-important publication of Bibles, tracts, teachers’ manuals, lesson books, hymnals, and other literature, so essential to the work of the Sunday School.24 Bangs had headed the Methodist Book Concern since

17 Boylan, 19-21. 18 Boylan, 168. 19 Boylan, 12-20. 20 Emory Stevens Bucke, gen. ed., The History of American Methodism, vol. 1 (New York: Abingdon, 1964), 582. 21 Boylan, 77-78. 22 James E. Kirby, Russell E. Richey, and Kenneth E. Rowe, The Methodists (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 1998), 180. 23 Pilkington, 253. This happened sometime between 1830 and 1844. Pilkington does not give the exact date. 24 Kirby, Richey, and Rowe, 181. 8 Methodist History

1820 and was instrumental to its growth.25 Among his significant contribu- tions were an expanded Methodist Magazine, the Sunday School Advocate (in newspaper form), and a series of inexpensive books, the “Sunday School and Youth’s Library,” which contained over 200 titles by 1842.26 In The Methodist Episcopal Church, as with Robert Raikes a generation earlier, the development of the Sunday School was inextricably linked to publishing. One significant setback for the Methodist Sunday School and publishing endeavors was the 1836 fire which completely destroyed the Book Concern headquarters on Mulberry Street in New York City. Numerous setbacks notwithstanding, the General Conference of 1840 enacted legislation which gave “official sanction to the Sunday School Union,” required it in every congregation, established its reporting and control, and expanded its reach to youth as well as children.27 Thus the foundation was laid for what early twentieth-century Methodist historian Addie Grace Wardle called “the glad new day in the program of Sunday school work,” 28 when in 1844, the Rev. Daniel Parish Kidder became the first “editor of Sunday School Books and Tracts,” as well as Corresponding Secretary of the Sunday School Union. Wardle praised his organizational ability, his literary standards, and his skill in business management. Of specific importance to the collection at the Methodist Library at Drew, however, was Kidder’s arrangement with the Religious Tract Society of London for free book exchange; his solicitation of American writers; and his compilation and editing of approximately 800 Sunday school books,29 over half of which now reside in the Drew Methodist Library collection. In the context of Kidder’s influence over the content of SSU books and libraries, and the ready access to his papers at Drew, it is helpful at this point to review some of the highlights of his life and leadership within the nineteenth-century Methodist Episcopal Church. Kidder’s son-in-law, the Rev. G. E. Strobridge, wrote a biography of Kidder in 1894.30 James Richard Joy’s commemorative biography, The Teachers of Drew 1867-1942, notes Kidder’s conversion to Methodism as a teenager “though his family had no liking for Methodism,” his graduation from Wesleyan University in 1836, and his early service (1838-1840) as a missionary to Brazil.31 His brief missionary sojourn, which resulted in the death of his first wife, also inspired two books on Brazil, which Joy describes as the “best account of these ‘good neighbors’ that had been printed in English.”32 Following pastorates in

25 Frederick Norwood, The Story of American Methodism (Nashville: Abingdon, 1974), 212. 26 Norwood, 212-213. 27 Pilkington, 283. 28 Addie Grace Wardle, History of the Sunday School Movement in the Methodist Episcopal Church (New York: The Methodist Book Concern, 1918), 82. 29 Wardle, 83. 30 G. E. Strobridge, Biography of the Rev. Daniel Parish Kidder, D.D., LL.D. (New York: Hunt & Eaton, 1894). 31 James Richard Joy, The Teachers of Drew 1867-1942 (Madison, NJ: Drew U, 1942), 82. 32 Joy, 82, describing Sketches of Residence and Travel in Brazil (1845) and Brazil and the Brazilians (co-authored in 1857). The Child’s Anti-Slavery Book 9

Paterson and Trenton, New Jersey, in 1844 Kidder was elected secretary of the SSU and editor of Sunday School Books and Tracts, a position he held until 1856. Kidder’s subsequent seminary career included professorships at the newly-formed Garrett Biblical Institute (1856-1871) and Drew Seminary (1871-1881), where he served as Professor of Practical Theology, assumed many administrative and library duties, and penned a homiletics textbook.33 Kidder retired from Drew in 1881 and was named secretary of the Board of Education of The Methodist Episcopal Church. It is relevant to note that Kidder took this position very conscientiously at the age of 28, traveling extensively to promote and carefully document the expansive growth of Sunday Schools and libraries. He also attempted to improve the overall standards for Sunday Schools, developing a constitution defining positions and duties34 and as early as 1847 called for “teacher institutes” to improve instruction, an innovation finally put in place decades later.35 Furthermore, he was very committed to “character building,” as his book selections and “Sunday School Temperance Pledge” demonstrate.36 Finally, he exerted much energy into organizing Sunday School anniversary celebrations featuring children to generate interest in the cause. It is also important to note some of the standards Kidder applied to book selection. Strobridge notes Kidder’s interest in “protecting as well as in- forming . . . the minds of the young,” and his belief that “the guarantee of substantial truth be required in the publication and purchase of SSU literature,” which led him to include biography, history, natural history, mission narratives, and travel, and often to exclude material appealing to the imagination and emotions.37 Fiction had to promote morality or religious conversion. Kidder borrowed heavily from Europe, particularly English authors, and he spent much of 1852-1853 in Europe visiting Sunday Schools and seeking out children’s books and authors.38 While some of the books described here were published slightly later than his 1844-1856 leadership of the Sunday School Union, it is safe to argue that he set the standards and tone for their development. Sunday School Books While it is very difficult to choose which books to highlight among the hundreds from Drew’s collection, the following, arranged roughly chrono- logically, are representative of popular authors, social reform movements that were important to early Methodists, and the changes in religious chil-

33 Daniel Kidder, A Treatise on Homiletics: designed to illustrate the true theory and practice of Preaching the Gospel, 1864 (numerous printings). 34 “Constitution of a Sunday-School Society” (2128-5-3:17), Daniel Parish Kidder Papers, Methodist Collection of Drew University, Madison, New Jersey. 35 Candler, 100-101. 36 “Sunday School Temperance Pledge” (2128-5-3:17), Daniel Parish Kidder Papers, Methodist Collection of Drew University, Madison, New Jersey. 37 Strobridge, 182-183. 38 Strobridge, 190-191. 10 Methodist History dren’s literature that occurred from 1827-1880. Books by the first two authors were first published by the Religious Tract Society of England, which supplied much of the early religious literature for children. The balance is by American authors who wrote for the Methodist Sunday School Union of the Methodist Episcopal Church. History of Little Henry and his Bearer, by Mrs. Sherwood39 Mrs. Mary Martha Sherwood (1775-1851) was one of England’s most famous Evangelical40 children’s authors, and her books were often reprinted in the U.S. for the Methodist Sunday School Union. Edwin Rice, the noted historian of the American Sunday School Union, noted that Little Henry was the first book published by the ASSU in 1817.41 Mrs. Sherwood spent ten years in India with her husband Captain Henry Sherwood, and her letters and journals reflected her commitment to the young and “the heathen,” and were often the source of her many published tracts, stories, and books. In fact, Evangelical authors often wrote from their own experiences, since fiction was shunned as valued literature for children. Little Henry was named for her son who died at age two, but he was the prototype of the missionary child,42 concerned in this story about the “soul” of his “Hindoo” servant, or bearer. Lynn and Wright note that in this early genre, “child-size religious virtuosos could convert servants, parents, older relatives, friends, hardhearted benefactors and strangers.”43 Children were viewed and presented as little adults, so it wasn’t unusual that “at eight and one-half years of age Henry could read the Bible in two languages, conduct learned ar- guments about the Christian faith, cite Scripture appropriately in diverse situations and ably assist others toward conversion.”44 Margaret Bendroth argues that much of this tract literature “was oppressively didactic, replete with instructive examples of upright boys and girls overcoming temptation or dying happy deaths,”45 as did Little Henry, once he learned of his bearer’s conversion. Nevertheless, Sherwood’s biographer Nancy Cutt writes that “the first generation of her readers grew up to shape the Victorian world,” while her popularity in America, though shorter, “helped to form children’s taste for narrative literature before the appearance of home-grown Sunday School writers.”46

39 Mrs. Sherwood, History of Little Henry and His Bearer (New York: J. Emory and B. Waugh, for the Methodist Episcopal Church, 1829). 40 The capitalized Evangelical refers to the reforming wing of the Church of England. 41 Rice, 146. 42 M. Nancy Cutt, Mrs. Sherwood and Her Books for Children (London: Oxford UP, 1974), 2-3. 43 Robert W. Lynn and Elliott Wright, The Big Little School (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 44. 44 Lynn and Wright, 45. 45 Margaret Lamberts Bendroth, Growing Up Protestant: Parents, Children, and Mainline Churches (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2002), 22. 46 Cutt, ix, x. The Child’s Anti-Slavery Book 11

Books by Old Humphrey (1787-1854) Old Humphrey, sometimes called Old Alan Gray, pseudonyms for the English George Mogridge, penned more than sixty titles found in Sunday School libraries. Of note are The Monster47 in which Old Humphrey tells children who have heard the silly stories of dwarves and giants that “I am going to speak of a real monster, which has been roaming about the world for almost six thousand years . . . SIN”48; The Balloon,49 which describes a hot- air balloon released into the sky which he compares to prayers and praises sent up to God; Precious Stones,50 in which Aunt Andrews compares the ranking of Chinese mandarins to the jewels of adornment of a meek and qui- et spirit, truth, temperance, eternal life, etc.; and Perhaps Not,51 the title and phrase used as a rhetorical device by Old Richard the gardener in response to the expressed passions of a young man! Old Humphrey was a well-known British author for the Religious Tract Society whose fiction went beyond the somber death-related conversion stories of the early nineteenth century. He used humor and clever imagery in his stories and was evidently a favorite of D. P. Kidder, who revised and edited many of his books. Books by the Reverend Daniel Smith (1806-1852) The Reverend Daniel Smith was a Methodist minister of the New York Conference and a prolific writer for the Sunday School Union. Believing that there was a dearth of good books for young people, he resolved to pen and compile over fifty books for the Sunday Union addressing such topics as natural history, biography, advice for parents, missions, Bible characters, and essays and anecdotes for young people. Daniel Smith appears to have been an author favored by D. P. Kidder. His nature stories reflect a gentle, reverent respect for creation, as well a commitment to teaching. Morning Walk52 is a simple story for young children, in which a father takes his young son to examine a bird’s nest. He tells his son: “birds are a very interesting part of the Creator’s works. They fill the groves and fields with their music: they destroy thousands of insects that would otherwise prey upon the trees and roots of the plants and grain; and they are very harmless, as well as useful creatures.”53 Smith also assembled selections for a multi-volume Natural History series, which reflected considerable scientific and historical understanding, as well as a commitment to caring for

47 Old Humphrey; revised by D. P. Kidder, The Monster (New York: Lane & Scott for the SSU, 1851). 48 Old Humphrey, The Monster, 10-11. 49 Old Humphrey, The Balloon, and Other Stories (New York: Carlton & Philips, 1855). 50 Old Humphrey, Precious Stones (New York: Lane & Tippet for the SSU, 1848). 51 Old Humphrey, Perhaps Not (New York: Lane & Tippet for the SSU, 1848). 52 Daniel Smith, Morning Walk (New York: Lane & Scott, for the Sunday School Union of the Methodist Episcopal Church, 1849). 53 Smith, Morning Walk, 7. 12 Methodist History

God’s world.54 The Parent’s Friend, based on Smith’s pastoral experience, is a series of letters written to parents on such topics as understanding how children imitate their parents, how parents should act in concert with each other, the agreeable home, the impact of peers, selecting books, profanity, the importance of recreation, etc. Letter XVI on “Method of Conveying Instruction” underscores Smith’s commitment to indirection in teaching, seizing on accidental occurrences, lessons from observing nature, such as the organization and industry within the anthill and beehive, the wonder and usefulness of trees, bubbling springs, etc.55 Smith also urged parents to “con- descend” or go to the child’s level, as he illustrates:

The minister of state, coming into the apartment of Louis XV of France, found the monarch upon his hands and feet, with the young prince mounted on his back. “Monsieur,” said the king to the minister, “are you a father?” “Yes, sire,” was the reply. “Well,” said Louis XV, “then let us have our frolic.”56 What Smith infused into much of this work was the importance of the parent and the home in the Christian upbringing of children, an important shift in emphasis from the early literature from the Religious Tract Society. Boylan cites new discussions in this mid-nineteenth century period regarding the child’s inner nature and the more romantic images of the child’s “bloom- ing cheeks and laughing eye,” as opposed to the child as little adult, full of depravity and original sin. Horace Bushnell’s widely-read Views of Human Nature (first published by the Massachusetts Sabbath School Society, 1847) challenged the old views of childhood and presented a theory of the child’s impressionability and the baby’s innocence. Bushnell wrote of “an organic union between parents and child in the early years,” and stressed the essential nurture of the child through “the spirit of the house.”57 He viewed revivalism as “intrinsically detrimental to family relationships,” leading to “indoctrination” and “drill,” and his Christian nurture theory followed a more longstanding (and somewhat controversial) view of “conversion as a gradual, unfolding process.”58 While salvation remained a central goal of the Methodist Sunday School Union, the literature written from the mid-nineteenth century onward also reflected the importance of the parents and home in nurturing behavior and decision-making.59 The Brandy Drops, or Charlie’s pledge: a temperance story and The

54 Daniel Smith, Natural History For Sunday Schools, Compiled, Chiefly from the Library of Entertaining Knowledge (New York: Lane & Scott, for the Sunday School Union of the Meth- odist Episcopal Church, 1851). 55 Daniel Smith, The Parent’s Friend: or Letters, on the Government and Education of Children and Youth (New York: G. Lane & C. B. Tippett, 1845), 90-93. 56 Smith, The Parent’s Friend, 95. 57 Boylan, 147. 58 Bendroth, 25, 26. 59 It should be noted that Lynn and Wright (Big Little School) argue, in contrast to Boylan and Bendroth, that Bushnell had little impact on the Sunday school movement, 1802-1876, and “his contention that children should be raised as if they had always been Christian flew in the face of Sunday school ideology” regarding conversion, 80-81. The Child’s Anti-Slavery Book 13

Temperance Boys: a sequel to “The Brandy Drops”60 by Aunt Julia (Julia Colman, 1828-1909) These books are illustrative of a group of novels by American authors that underscored the Methodist Sunday School Union’s commitment to temperance. Aunt Julia’s characters, such as the boy whose “fear of ridicule” led him to overindulge in brandy drops and collapses inebriated(!), are drawn with humor and affection. Charlie’s infraction is handled with care and repentance within his home, for the temperance house is the very picture of peace and happiness. Colman’s characters ask many hard questions about temperance. Why is it called temperance if it’s really abstinence? What about Uncle John, the favorite relative who imbibes on occasion? Does one drink really lead to a life of drunkenness? Clearly the ultimate goal is the signing of the temperance pledge and the formation of children’s temperance societies to promote “moral courage” among children as well as adults. While Colman’s purpose is instructive, it is the child’s point of view which drives the narrative, and the children display a range of traits and motives, differing dramatically from the prototypical “missionary child” of Mrs. Sherwood’s books. The social backdrop of these novels explores poverty, child abandonment, and illiteracy, mostly relating them to the effects of al- coholism. But as in the early literature, the reformed child can serve as an agent for change in the adult, and the institution of Sunday School provides the training ground for such change. The Child’s Anti-Slavery Book; containing a few words about American slave children and stories of slave life (1859) The introduction to The Child’s Anti-Slavery Book, “A Few Words About American Slave Children,” delineates its key messages. Its first sentence, “Children, you are free and happy,” contrasts the fate of “hundreds of thousands of American children [who] are slaves,” due not to these children’s parents, but to the masters of these children who say: “your children are OURS—OUR PROPERTY! They shall not be taught to read or write; . . . they shall not be taught to read the Bible; . . . we shall whip them, sell them, and do what else we please with them . . . .”61 Anticipating the questions of child readers, this introduction gives emphasis to the powerlessness of the slave parents and answers the hypothetical boy’s questions, “but why did those slaves let their masters bring them into this state? Why didn’t they fight as our forefathers did when they threw off the yoke of England’s laws?” The answer stressed the cruel conditions by which “wicked men . . . from England and other parts of Europe” preyed upon African villages, placing them in ships “packed like spoons below the deck.”62 It stressed the forced

60 Julia Colman, The Brandy Drops, or Charlie’s Pledge, and The Temperance Boys (New York: Carlton & Porter, 1858). 61 The Child’s Anti-Slavery Book, 7. 62 The Child’s Anti-Slavery Book, 8. 14 Methodist History

Illustration 1: “Little Lewis Sold,” from The Child’s Anti-Slavery Book separation of families and underscored the primary truth: “it is always A SIN AGAINST GOD to thus hold . . . a human being as property!”63 The book contains three main stories aimed at presenting children with an accurate picture of what slave life was like for slave children and the parents from whom they were so often separated. There are also ten illustrations, in contrast to most of the books of this period which contained only a single illustration on the frontispiece opposite the title page. The author of the first story, “Little Lewis,” was by Julia Colman (who wrote Brandy Drops and The Temperance Boys), and the next two, “Mark and Hasty; or Slave-Life in Missouri” and “Aunt Judy’s Story: A Story from Real Life,” were written by Matilda G. Thompson. “Little Lewis” was the precocious slave child of a Kentucky owner, whose daughter was teaching Lewis to read. His mother, separated from her husband and children, grew disturbed and violent, and, believing death a better fate than slavery, tried to stab Lewis and herself when they happened to meet. Although sold to other masters opposed to literacy, Lewis was able to find others who would continue teaching him, and he finally made his way to Boston, where he secured his freedom, married, and became a teacher and a Christian.

63 The Child’s Anti-Slavery Book, 9. The Child’s Anti-Slavery Book 15

Illustration 2: “Hasty’s Grief,” from The Child’s Anti-Slavery Book

“Mark and Hasty; or, Slave-Life in Missouri,” concerned the separation of families through the slave trade. Hasty, a slave laundress, and Mark, were owned by two separate families in St. Louis (Missouri having become a slave state under the Compromise of 1820). One Saturday night Mark stayed up all night with his sick child Fanny, and as a result, fell asleep as he was getting the carriage ready for his master’s (Nelson’s) ride to church. Nelson, furious, whipped Mark, and decided to put him up for sale. Hasty went to a sympathetic white woman, Mrs. Jennings, who tried to persuade her husband to intervene with Nelson, and when that was unsuccessful, Mrs. Jennings went to Mrs. Nelson. Mrs. Jennings, described as “a true Christian woman,” was equally unsuccessful with Mrs. Nelson, who called her husband, “a rigid disciplinarian . . . [who] makes it a rule never to overlook the first symptom of insubordination,”64 and lamented that “we wives can do nothing; however great our repugnance may be to it [slavery].”65 Mark was sold to an owner in the deep South, and Hasty, hopelessly distraught, became ill and died. Before her death, nevertheless, she persuaded Mrs. Jennings to purchase and free her daughter Fanny, which Mrs. Jennings did, and the Jennings moved to Chicago where Mrs. Jennings became “an active worker among the anti-

64 The Child’s Anti-Slavery Book, 35, 36. 65 The Child’s Anti-Slavery Book, 36. 16 Methodist History slavery women in that liberty-loving city.”66 An important theme of this story was that neither church-going nor Christian charity could alleviate the suffering or injustice of this repugnant institution. “Aunt Judy’s Story: A Story From Real Life” told the story of an elderly former slave of James Madison, who was befriended by the Ford family in Indiana. Aunt Judy was of special interest to the Ford children, for they with their mother provided food and other assistance to the impoverished Aunt Judy. Even though Madison’s widow had emancipated Aunt Judy as a young woman in Virginia, Aunt Judy faced danger and violence in a country only half free. To set the stage for the telling of Aunt Judy’s story, the Ford children were actively engaged in questioning the social and legal ramifications of slavery. Young Cornelia Ford was faced with the decision of whether to surrender one of the eggs from the chickens she was raising to go into the basket for Aunt Judy. (Cornelia’s mother let this be Cornelia’s own struggle.) Likewise, young Alfred Ford engaged his father in a debate over whether it was the slave or the “poor Indian” who’d been worse treated. While Mr. Ford pointed to the “cruel and vindictive course” taken by some Indians toward whites,67 Alfred felt he had the stronger argument when he noted that the Creek Indians refused to return fugitive slaves to the masters, even though the government withheld the $250,000 owed the Creek for some of their lands, and paid the masters with it instead. Alfred argued that the Creek Indians’ decision to ignore the Fugitive Slave Law showed great humanity.68 The stage being set, Mrs. Ford then told Aunt Judy’s story. Emancipation papers notwithstanding, Judy, who had moved with Madison’s daughter to Kentucky (a slave state) and married a slave on a plantation, found herself and her young son imprisoned and sold as slaves after her husband died from a lifetime of severe abuse. After a long life of enslavement, despair, and separation from her children, Aunt Judy was finally recognized and rescued by a friend of Mrs. Madison’s daughter. Emancipation clearly held no guarantee of freedom for many slaves. The Child’s Anti-Slavery Book ends with a brief vignette and illustration of an “aged negro” with a missionary in the West Indies, entitled, “Me Neber Gib It Up.” Although “once a slave he had a freeman’s soul,” and because England had abolished slavery, now this man struggled to learn to read so he could read the Bible. Many themes are summarized in the final paragraph: “Let us hope the time is not far distant in which the colored people of our own happy land will also all be free, all able to read the Bible, all possess that soul freedom with which Christ makes his disciples free.”69 This was the legacy of John Wesley and the message of the early Methodist Sunday School Union.

66 The Child’s Anti-Slavery Book, 47. 67 The Child’s Anti-Slavery Book, 52. 68 The Child’s Anti-Slavery Book, 54. 69 The Child’s Anti-Slavery Book, 67. The Child’s Anti-Slavery Book 17

Illustration 3: “Me Neber Gib it Up,” from The Child’s Anti-Slavery Book

Hawk Hollow Stories (circa 1863) and the Blossom Books (circa 1879) These series reflect the changes that took place in Sunday School books over the course of the 50 year span considered in this paper. Change is somewhat hard to trace, since books went through many revisions and printings. By the 1860s, however, many multiple-book series of children’s stories were being published. Drew holds at least 25 such series. In general, these books aimed to be physically appealing to children and contained more illustrations and shorter selections. The Hawk Hollow Stories are very small, purple books, with titles like Bertha and her Brother,70 The Church by the Springside,71 and Captain Lee’s Present.72 Tragedy, death, and disappoint- ment were still ever-present, but the stories spotlighted families and the impact siblings can have on one another. By the time the Blossom Books were published over a decade later, much of the fiction still promoted “good behavior,” but children were generally depicted in a lighter vein, affectionately at play. Illustrations are large and plentiful, and selections are generally a page in length. Gender predicted the desired character traits—caring, patient girls and bold, courageous boys, and stories were often set in the context of family and home. In A Summer Wreath73 (Blossom Book), we find stories entitled “Little Mother”; “Tommy’s Orchestra,” in which the all-boy band plays “Yankee Doodle,”

70 Bertha and her Brother (New York: Sunday School Union, 1863). 71 The Church by the Springside (New York: Sunday School Union, 1863). 72Captain Lee’s Present (New York: Sunday School Union, 1863). 73 A Summer Wreath (New York: Phillips & Hunt, 1879). 18 Methodist History and “God Save America”; and “A Hard Lesson,” in which a sister helps her brother learn patience. We also read of little girls knitting for the soldiers and boys fishing, and then being persuaded to return their catch to the water. While all of these books contained some moral truth or posed a choice regarding behavior, they were written to appeal more to the child’s imagination and experience than to the salvation of the child’s soul. Libraries It is virtually impossible to determine a time when the SSU of the Methodist Episcopal Church did not attach libraries, however rudimentary, to their Sunday Schools. They functioned as lending libraries for children and families, a means of standardizing SSU instruction, a source of rewards for scholars, and a way to forge connections between the Sunday School and the home.74 Of course, there were challenges, in financing publication as well as determining how efficiently to produce and distribute books as cheaply and broadly as possible. Upon assuming the secretariat of the SSU and editorship of Sunday School Books and Tracts for The Methodist Episcopal Church in 1844, D. P. Kidder inherited a finance arrangement, whereby Sunday Schools were to provide one cent per quarter for every teacher and student, with the sum to be split between literature and Sunday school work.75 Kidder was quite critical of this approach, which burdened those who had already given their time and energy, and soon the responsibility was shifted to individual churches.76 Interestingly, Kidder and his nineteenth-century successors gave considerable attention to providing statistics regarding the number of Sunday Schools, scholars, books, pages printed, libraries, conversions, collections, etc. Kidder was pleased to report in 1857 that from 1844 to 1857 collections for Sunday School had increased from $700 to $12,000; and books published rose from “hardly worth counting” to 1,000 separate volumes, that year alone printing 70,000,000 pages and binding nearly 2,000 volumes per working day of the year.77 One assumes publicizing these statistics was a great motivator for growth, although the question of quality versus quantity figures as well, particularly with respect to books. Marketing strategies came increasingly into play. An 1849 catalogue of SSU Publications and tracts lists the following categories:

Five dollar library of the first 100 volumes of the Youth’s Library; Children’s Library-A, 130 volumes, Children’s Library-B, 130 volumes; Youth’s Library-460 volumes; Five Dollar Library, No. 1, 50 volumes; Five Dollar Library, No. 2, 50 volumes.78

74 Wardle, 155. 75 Bucke, 586. 76 Strobridge, 176-177. 77 Strobridge, 211. 78 Descriptive Catalogue of the Sunday School Publications & Tracts of the Methodist Episcopal Church (New York: Lane & Scott, 1849), 181. The Child’s Anti-Slavery Book 19

Such packaging encouraged churches to buy in quantity and enabled Sunday School libraries to be readily established. With respect to distribution, books were sold through ministers and the mail, and the Book Concern opened retail establishments in six cities for their publications.79 From all evidence these strategies worked. W. A. Candler reported that Sunday School libraries (of all denominations) were so important that they were included in the 1870 census, which reported 33, 580 Sunday school libraries and 8,346,153 volumes.80 However, numbers fail to tell the whole story. Theories about children and childhood were changing by the latter half of the nineteenth century, as was the emerging secular literature for children, which offered imaginative fiction and fairy tales.81 In short, by the 1880s the publication of Sunday School library books began to be eclipsed by the availability of more popular children’s literature from other sources.82 Ironically and prophetically, the Methodist centennial publication, Methodism and Literature (1883), warned, “There is a spirit abroad which, especially since our late war, demands a lighter, less serious, less instructive, more exciting, and more miscellaneous literature for children and youth than is either healthy for young minds or fitting for a Church press to produce.”83 Although we can see some evidence of changing trends in the books published for the SSU of the Methodist Episcopal Church from 1827 to 1880, the denominational presses soon lost ground to the secular production of children’s literature. While theories regarding child development and religious education in- evitably change, these early Sunday School library books, while quaint and didactic by today’s standards, provide a useful glimpse into the literature and priorities of the early years of the Methodist Sunday School movement as it navigated the challenges of the nineteenth century.

79 Kirby, Richey, and Rowe, 183. 80 Candler, 83. 81Boylan, 149. 82 Shaffer, 28. 83 “The Ideal Sunday-School Library,” Methodism and Literature, published for the Methodist Centennial (Cincinnati, 1883), 205. Methodist History, 49:1 (October 2010)

HERALDING THE CALL OF POPULISM: KANSAS METHODISTS AND THE 1896 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION

Darin A. Tuck

The 1896 presidential election between William McKinley and William Jennings Bryan was one of the most pivotal and dramatic elections in American history. It not only represented a realignment in party policies and strongholds, but it also effectively ended the reform-minded Populist Party. The Republican McKinley defeated Bryan, who headed the Democratic and Populist tickets, largely by winning the coastal and former Northwest Territory. In his election campaign, Bryan faced enormous challenges. First, the relatively unknown Nebraska orator became a serious contender on the Democratic ticket only a few months before the convention. Second, Bryan faced a severe lack of funds in comparison to the enormous war chest collected for McKinley by his influential ally, Mark Hanna. McKinley enjoyed superiority in the press and sat atop a political machine that, according to historian Paul Glad, made Bryan’s campaign look like a “peanut operation.” Third, the currency question split the Democratic Party between “Gold Democrats” and “Silverites.” Bryan was a member of the latter group that supported the coinage of silver as currency and wanted to set its value as equal to one-sixteenth of gold. Proponents believed the policy change would raise the amount of money in circulation, increase the lending powers of Midwestern banks, and help struggling laborers and farmers. Symptomatic of the polemic nature of the currency issue, the potential by- product of inflation concerned many Democrats who left the party to form the National Democratic Party after Bryan’s nomination. Furthermore, McKinley proclaimed that gold was the only “sound money,” and he was helped by his reputation as an expert on economic and tariff issues that gave him credibility in the eyes of potential voters. In addition to these national challenges, Bryan also faced serious problems at the state level. In Kansas, for example, the Populist Party split over whether to continue being a third party in the national election or to com-

Paul W. Glad, McKinley, Bryan, and the People (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1964), 170. For an in-depth analysis of the currency issue and the 1896 election nationwide, see Stanley Llewellyn Jones, The Presidential Election of 1896 (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1964); and R. Hal Williams, Realigning America: McKinley, Bryan, and the Remarkable Election of 1896 (Lawrence: UP of Kansas, 2010). 20 Heralding the Call of Populism 21 promise and fuse with Democrats. Populist Henry Demarest Lloyd summed up the predicament: “If we fuse, we are sunk; if we don’t fuse, all the silver men we have will leave us for the more powerful Democrats.” This projection proved accurate as the alliance between the Populist Party and Bryan caused several of its members to leave for the Republican ticket. Furthermore, a Democratic nominee for President had never previously won Kansas. Kansas’s support of the Republican Party dated back to the Civil War and increased because of the large immigration of northerners. One Kansan alleged that “hell is peopled by two kinds of folks, those who don’t read the Bible and those who vote Democratic.” Finally, the largest denomination in Kansas was McKinley’s own Methodist Church. This problem was further compounded because Methodists had a long-standing history of voting for Republicans who had instituted statewide prohibition in 1880. To win Kansas, Bryan would have to garner substantial support from Methodists and convince them to cross denominational lines and vote for a Presbyterian. How then did Bryan win Kansas? Why did the majority of Methodists break, not only with the Republican Party, but also with their fellow Methodist McKinley? If the Methodist Church had explicitly endorsed Bryan, the answer would be less complicated. Because the Church believed that politics should be separate from the pulpit, however, they declined to support either candidate. Methodist newspapers took a similar stance, as they frequently reported on both candidates, but never endorsed either politician. Instead, the combination of four important factors resulted in support for Bryan among Methodists. First, the deteriorating economic conditions in Kansas from the mid-1880s until the election created a dissatisfied populace that faulted the Republican Party. Second, the Populist Party attracted Methodists and other denominations that had intimate knowledge of scripture and were exposed to powerful speakers, which prepared the way for the master orator Bryan. Third, the destitute Methodist farmers and laborers turned to the vibrant Populist Party that valued humanitarian concern for all denominations. The Methodist Episcopal Church, Methodist newspapers, Populists, and Bryan all spoke in the same religious language, articulated the same humanitarian concern and social gospel, and professed a godly message that resonated with the Methodist people. Finally, Methodists, who valued prohibition highly, became dissatisfied with Republican lack of enforcement of Kansas

Cited in Glad, McKinley, Bryan and the People, 155. Cited in Russell B. Nye, Midwestern Progressive Politics: A Historical Study of Its Origins and Development, 1870-1958 (Lansing: Michigan State UP, 1959), 48; from 1891 to 1896, only twelve of 350 seats in the Kansas legislature were held by Democrats. The largest denominations in Kansas ordered by number of members: Methodists, 95,781; Roman Catholics, 67,562; Baptists, 34,511; Presbyterians, 31,393; Disciples of Christ, 25,200; Lutherans, 16,262; United Brethren, 14,356; Congregationalists, 11,915; Friends, 8,257; and Mennonites, 4,620 (U.S. Department of the Interior, Census Office, Report on Statistics of Churches in the United States at the Eleventh Census, 1890 [Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1894]). 22 Methodist History temperance laws and began to look to the Populist Party for a solution. Although it is impossible to know for certain why the population voted for a particular candidate, an analysis of the 1896 election reveals that Bryan received significant support among Methodist voters. Religious affiliation alone was surely not the only motive in voting, but the election results suggest that it was an important factor. Statewide, the Methodist population per county averaged 6.53%. Out of the forty-four counties with an above average population of Methodists, it is notable that Bryan won the majority of votes in thirty-two. The twelve counties with an above average Methodist population that McKinley won were traditional Republican strongholds and had voted for Republican candidates in the 1892 and 1900 presidential, the 1896 gubernatorial, and the 1896 At-Large Representative elections. This result would be negligible if the Bryan-Methodist correlation were a phe- nomenon that occurred only in sparsely populated counties. However, in the twenty most populous counties that contained 42% of the state population, the Populist Bryan won fourteen. Of these fourteen, ten had an above average population of Methodists. As the proportion of Methodists in the general population lowered, Bryan’s advantage was less pronounced. In short, as demonstrated by the solid line in Chart 1, the higher the percentage of Methodists in the population, the more likely the county was won by Bryan. Although this correlation does not prove that Bryan enjoyed full Methodist support, it does suggest a link between the Methodist population and Bryan’s success in Kansas.

This figure is somewhat misleading because many children of Methodist families were not counted as communicants, but they still counted in the state population. Therefore, Methodists are underrepresented in the 7%. Nevertheless, because the figure is applied across all counties, it provides a reliable pivot point for determining locations with the highest density of Methodists in a county. The 1890 census defined communicants as “meant to embrace all, without distinction of sex, who are privileged to participate in the ordinance of communion in denominations which observe it, and all members in other denominations, such as Unitarians, Friends, and Jews.” Figures are based on U.S. Department of the Interior, Census Office,Report on Statistics of Churches in the United States at the Eleventh Census, 1890, xii; U.S. Depart- ment of the Interior, Census Office, Report on Population of the United State at the Eleventh Census, 1890, Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1894, 20; and June Cabe,Kansas Votes: National Elections, 1859-1956 (Lawrence: Governmental Research Center, U of Kansas, 1957). The counties with an above average Methodist population that voted for McKinley were Wood- son, Riley, Reno, Pottawatomie, Morris, Logan, Jackson, Kiowa, Harvey, Douglas, Allen, and Shawnee. The counties with an above average Methodist population that voted for Bryan were Anderson, Bourbon, Butler, Chase, Clay, Coffee, Cowley, Crawford, Dickinson, Elk, Franklin, Graham, Greenwood, Johnson, Kingman, Labette, Linn, Lyon, Montgomery, Neosho, Ottawa, Pawnee, Phillips, Pratt, Rooks, Scott, Sedgwick, Stanton, Sumner, Thomas, Trego, and Wilson. The counties that were among the twenty most populous are in italics. Of the remaining seven most populous counties with below average Methodist population, Bryan won four (Wyan- dotte, Leavenworth, Cherokee, and Osage), while McKinley won three (Atchison, Marshall, and Washington). Heralding the Call of Populism 23

Chart 1 Counties Won in Relation to Methodist Population Density

12 Bryan 10

6 McKinley

Counties Won 4

2 Difference 0 between the two candidates

Methodist Population in County (%)

Source: See Footnote 6 Furthermore, when the election results are applied geographically one sees that Bryan performed extremely well in both the northwest and southeast portions of Kansas. Because population was densest in the eastern half of Kansas, it is important to note that southeast quarter of Kansas also contained the densest population of Methodists. When the Methodist population percentage is applied to the election results, the advantage in southeast Kansas is significant. In addition, the two Methodist newspapers in Kansas were located in the southeastern portion of the state, in the towns of Wichita (Sedgwick County) and Winfield (Cowley County). This correlation between Populism and Methodism further indicates that Bryan enjoyed support from McKinley’s own denomination. To account for this result, one must examine the political climate in Kansas before the election. From the 1870s until the mid-1880s, Kansas experienced both an economic and a population boom. The railroads invested heavily in westward expansion and a huge migration followed. Kansas farmers benefited from a period of increased rainfall, which resulted in large profits that were invested into more property. In addition, land speculators moved into Kansas and inflated the price of property even further. Between 1880 and 1885, the population of Kansas increased from 900,000 to 1.2 million while property values doubled. Following the boom,

At the time of the election, only two Methodists newspapers were in production in Kansas—the Western Methodist (Wichita, KS) and Christian Herald (Winfield, KS). With little support from the Methodist Church and fewer subscribers with disposable income, several Methodist newspapers in Kansas were forced to close, including the Epworth Advocate (Frankfort), Manhat- tan District Methodist (Manhattan), Methodist Lever (South Haven), Kansas Church Tidings, The Kansas Methodist, First Methodist, Kansas Methodist Times and The Kansas Christian Advocate. The latter five were located in Topeka and faced stiff competition from a myriad of newspapers, specifically theState Journal and Topeka Daily Capital. Raymond Curtis Miller, “The Background of Populism in Kansas,” Mississippi Valley Histori- cal Review 11: 4 (March 1925), 470. 24 Methodist History however, the high land values and the onset of poor weather contributed to an eventual economic collapse, because farmers found they could not grow and ship enough crops to meet the rising railroad prices. Many Kansas farmers still owed substantial debt on their newly acquired property, which plummeted in value. In addition, prices for crops fell nationwide at alarming rates. One Methodist newspaper warned its readers: “Do not starve your preacher because ‘times are hard.’ They will be much harder if the preachers cannot live in this country and hold up the standards of truth.”10 Out of these conditions, the Populist movement emerged and sought political reform to aid the besieged Kansans who confronted increasingly deteriorating financial conditions. Despite the Populist movement’s popularity among historians, a consen- sus in terms of its causes and key players has been unattainable. Historian John D. Hicks viewed the Populist movement as a political development that sought governmental reform to aid struggling farmers.11 Richard Hofstadter’s Age of Reform rejected Hicks’s assessment and concluded that the Populists were backward-looking reactionaries who were paranoid, nativist, and anti- intellectual.12 In 1963, Walter T. K. Nugent challenged Hofstadter’s findings and suggested that Kansas Populism was primarily due to economic concerns and actually displayed tolerance towards outsiders.13 Gene Clanton’s study of Kansas Populism among its influential leaders found that the movement was a rational and progressive call for governmental intervention.14 Recently, Charles Postel’s The Populist Vision, winner of the 2008 Bancroft and Frederick Jackson Turner Prizes, argued that the Populists were both forward thinking and modern in their reform through technology, organizational tactics, and ideology.15 However, despite these various conclusions, these historians have given insufficient attention to an essential element of Populism—religion. Historian Peter Argersinger asserted that the Populist movement was “not only a movement of religious people, but a religious movement of people.”16 Rhys H. Williams and Susan M. Alexander concluded that “while scholars allude to the similarity between the People’s Party’s organizing style and that of revivalist camp meetings, or to the use of religious imagery in Populist stump speeches, few treat religion with ex-

10 Christian Herald (September, 1896). 11 John D. Hicks, The Populist Revolt (Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1931). 12 Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1956). 13 Walter T. K. Nugent, The Tolerant Populists: Kansas, Populism and Nativism (Chicago: U Chicago P, 1963). 14 O. Gene Clanton, Kansas Populism: Ideas and Men (Lawrence: U Kansas P, 1969). 15 The sheer scope of Postel’s work prevented him from investigating the influence of religion on Populism extensively. His work examined several topics from “education, technology, women’s rights, and business, to government, race, religion, and science,” but suggested that each topic needed to be investigated further for a “many-sided reevaluation of what Populism meant” (Charles Postel, The Populist Vision [Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007], viii). 16 Peter Argersinger, “Pentecostal Politics in Kansas: Religion, the Farmers’ Alliance, and the Gospel of Populism,” Kansas Quarterly 1:4 (Fall, 1969), 24. Heralding the Call of Populism 25 tended analytic seriousness.”17 Although many authors have written large treatments on Populism, none have devoted sufficient attention to the influence of religion on the movement. The present article takes a highly focused approach to demonstrate that, in the 1896 Presidential election, religion, particularly Methodism, played an enormous role in not only influencing voting behavior, but also providing the Populists with an organizational structure and rhetorical medium to disseminate their message. Without understanding the religious, pietist impulse in the Populist movement, one cannot understand why so many evangelicals were attracted to the party. In his study of North Carolina Populism, historian Joe Creech found that evangelicalism “fundamentally shaped the way Populists perceived the world and formulated solutions to its problems. Evangelicalism provided leadership and organizational models for the movement, and evangelical beliefs infused the movement with meaning and motive force.”18 Creech’s findings about evangelicalism, which includes Methodism, are equally ap- plicable to Kansas, where religion provided an important base for the reform movement. William Peffer, an exemplar of Kansas Populism in the United States Senate, noted in 1891 that “these [Populist] meetings to a large extent, and in many instances wholly, take the place of churches in the religious en- joyment of the people.”19 Creech echoed Peffer’s statement and summarized the importance of religion in Populism:

Evangelical ideas about politics, democracy, economics, and relationships of class, race, and gender not only shaped Populists’ blueprint for reform but, more important, motivated Populists to set duty to God above allegiances to party . . . in order to restore what they understood to be America’s God-Given system of economic liberalism and political freedom. As their religious ideals shaped the way Populists understood themselves and their movement, they wove their political and economic reforms into a grand cosmic narrative pitting the forces of God and democracy against those of Satan and tyranny.20 This belief that the Populist cause was divinely sanctioned infused the movement with tremendous energy and enthusiasm that, in turn, influenced many Kansans. Methodist leaders certainly were aware of the political change in Kansas, especially with respect to the growing dissatisfaction with the Republican Party. In 1892, the Reverend Richard Wake wondered “whether this alliance [between Methodists and the Republican Party] will continue

17 Rhys H. Williams and Susan M. Alexander, “Religious Rhetoric in American Populism: Civil Religion as Movement Ideology,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 33:1 (March, 1994), 1. For a brief overview of the Populist historiography, see “The Populist Vision: A Roundtable Discussion,” edited by Worth Robert Miller, ed. Kansas History: A Journal of the Central Plains 32 (Spring 2009), 18-45; and “Agricultural History Roundtable on Populism: Robert C. McMath, Jr., Peter H. Argersinger, Connie L. Lester, Michael F. Magliari, and Walter Nugent,” Agricultural History 82 (Winter, 2008), 1-35. 18 Joe Creech, Righteous Indignation: Religion and the Populist Revolution (Urbana: U Illinois P, 2006), xx. 19 William A. Peffer, The Farmers’ Side: His Troubles and Their Remedy (New York: Appleton, 1891), 149. 20 Creech, Righteous Indignation, xviii. 26 Methodist History is becoming each year more and more uncertain.”21 Because of the deteriorating economic conditions, many Kansans looked for aid from the federal government. Many perceived the Republican Party as corrupt and greedy. Populists accused Mark Hanna, McKinley’s campaign manager, of buying votes with large sums of money collected from the wealthy eastern indus- trialists. The Reverend W. G. Todd proclaimed that “the Republican Party started out right, but greed and selfishness took possession of it and we have laid it aside.”22 On the eve of the election, a Kansas Methodist newspaper commented that the distrust of political leaders led to “a revolution in political thought” because leaders “promised relief and when entrusted with power, relief has not come.”23 The growing frustration with the Republican Party combined with a religiously infused Populist movement attracted many Methodists to the Populist Party. Numerous Populist leaders interjected their speeches with religious imagery, but perhaps the most well known was a fiery Kansas woman named Mary Elizabeth Lease. Known as “Mary Yellin’” by her detractors, she exemplified the fusion of politics and religion into extreme partisanship that left little doubt as to who was on the side of God, as she demonstrated in 1894:

The People’s Party is in accord with the right and justice. It is in accord with the teachings of Christ and the Constitution of the United States. If you vote for any other party you vote for a hell upon earth . . . . Our social conditions have no part with the teaching of Christ. If you are afraid to attack the plutocrats, then you need a new Christ—one who will hobnob with the rich and who will preach Heaven for the rich and Hell for the tramps.24 Lease illustrates a recurring theme in Populist rhetoric. Populists often referred to themselves with religious language as the oppressed while referring to their political counterparts as the oppressors. In Populist newspapers, for instance, Republicans were continually demonized as the party of money and corruption. The Populist newspaper Advocate published an article by C. G. Allen of Meade, Kansas, in which he identified McKinley and his followers as corrupt and greedy. He then proceeded to make a plea for the oppressed:

Now, my dear brethren, we have the rich on one side and the common people on the other. Upon which side are your sympathies? ‘The common people heard Christ gladly . . . .’ The rich were the crucifiers and murderers of the Lord of Glory. I do not know of a single passage of Scripture that commends the rich as such. Paul says: ‘The love of money is the root of all evil;’ James says: ‘Do not rich men oppress you, and draw you before the judgment seats? Do they not blaspheme that worthy name by which ye are called?’ I hope none of you who read this are worshiping the golden calf, but if you are, I exhort you to cease such worship and come over on the Lord’s side.25

21 Richard Wake, “The Methodist Episcopal Church in Politics,” Agora (July, 1892). 22 Cited in Elizabeth Barr, “The Populist Uprising,” in William Connelley, ed., A Standard His- tory of Kansas and Kansans (Chicago: Lewis Publishing, 1918), 1170. 23 Christian Herald (September and October, 1896). 24 Cited in Williams and Alexander, “Righteous Rhetoric,” 8. 25 C. G. Allen, Advocate (Topeka, KS; October 18, 1896). Heralding the Call of Populism 27

These charges against Republicans proved even more potent with the deteriorating economic conditions, and Bryan was quick to draw upon this sentiment to create his own religious discourse. Although less divisive than Lease and Allen, Bryan masterfully used religious language to emphasize the virtue of his crusade, which resonated with Methodists. Bryan did not regard his election as merely a political contest, but as a struggle between good and evil. For example, in a speech in front of Jewish Democrats in Nebraska, he recalled a story from the Old Testament: “David conquered not because he was stronger, but because he was on the right side; and if in this contest I am likened to David, let me reply that as David triumphed because he was right, so my only hope of victory is in the righteousness of my cause.”26 Historians have long noted Bryan’s gifted oratory, especially in the famous “Cross of Gold” speech.27 Historian Richard Hofstadter aptly described him as the “Democrat as revivalist.”28 A staunch detractor of Bryan and lifelong Republican, Emporia newspaperman William Allen White later responded to the “Cross of Gold” speech: “It was the first time in my life and in the life of a generation in which any man large enough to lead a national party had boldly and unashamedly made his cause that of the poor and the oppressed.”29 Populists such as Lease prepared evangelical Kansas Methodists for Bryan’s religiously infused political message and created powerful dichotomies in order to build support for their cause. During his incredible traveling schedule during the campaign, Bryan apologized for his hoarse speech because “a large portion of my voice has been left along the line of travel, where it is still calling sinners to repentance.”30 Dissatisfied with the Republican Party, Populists also increased coop- eration among Protestant denominations in Kansas. In previous decades, denominations, especially the Methodists and Baptists, viewed the western frontier as battleground for winning souls to their Christian beliefs and practices. However, the Populist movement reduced the importance of denominationalism in Kansas. Religiously imbued political language not only helped to alleviate hostility between people, but it also provided common ground “for what otherwise might have remained factions separated by cultural differences.”31 A brief examination of the religious denominations of the Populist leaders in Kansas reveals that various Protestant groups were

26 Cited in Glad, McKinley, Bryan, and the People, 177. 27 See Louis W. Koenig, Bryan: A Political Biography of William Jennings Bryan (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1971); Robert W. Cherny, A Righteous Cause: The Life of William Jennings Bryan (Norman: U Oklahoma P, 1994); and Michael Kazin, Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006). 28 Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (New York: Vintage Books, 1948), 186. 29 Cited in Glad, McKinley, Bryan, and the People, 136-137. 30 Kevin Phillips, William McKinley (New York: Times Books, 2003), 78. 31 Williams and Alexander, “Righteous Rhetoric,” 3. 28 Methodist History represented.32 Although Methodism was the largest affiliation among leaders in Populism—followed by Baptists, Disciples of Christ, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists—all contributed significant leaders to the movement.33 Bryan embodied the cross-denominational and religious changes that occurred in Kansas. Son of a Baptist father and Methodist mother, Bryan’s childhood home was constantly filled with ministers from many religious affiliations.34 Although a devout Presbyterian and an elder in his church, he was capable of speaking across denominational lines. Just as Bryan was an exemplary Christian, William McKinley devoutly attended the Methodist Church and did not partake in dancing, card playing, or liquor. However, the Populist effect of de-emphasized denominational lines facilitated the selection of Bryan by Methodist voters despite his church affiliation. In the end, McKinley and Bryan’s personal religious beliefs had little effect on Kansas voters. Both were perceived, and rightly so, by Methodists in the state as devout and pious individuals with an intimate knowledge of the Bible. What attracted groups like the Methodists in Kansas to Bryan and the Populists was the ability of the party leaders to formulate a message with religious enthusiasm, and address issues Methodists were concerned with, such as humanitarianism. Populists united behind their Christian orientation that centered upon social concerns and interest in human welfare.35 Humanitarian aid had always been an essential element in Methodism. Westward expansion only increased the need for missionary efforts. Despite the extreme fiscal crisis in Kansas, Methodists still supported missionary efforts around the world. In Kansas, Methodists promoted prison reform and supported increased pensions for Civil War veterans. They also advo- cated for the establishment of a government savings bank to help struggling farmers secure loans.36 Methodists, along with many other denominations during the late nineteenth century, were reform-minded postmillennialists

32 For an in-depth analysis of the religious affiliations of the Populist leaders, see Lengel, “The Righteous Cause: Some Religious Aspects of Kansas Populism,” PhD diss., U. Oregon, 1968, chap. 2. Lengel provides the most in depth analysis of the religious influences on Kansas Popu- lism, but focuses primarily on the humanitarian reform championed by many of its leaders. 33 To a lesser extent, other denominations like the Quakers, Universalists, United Brethren, and a few Roman Catholics joined the Populist leadership. In North Carolina, historian Joe Creech found that the Methodists, Baptists, and Free Will Baptists were the evangelical forces behind the movement (Creech, Righteous Indignation, xviii). In Texas, Robert McMath found similar results and concluded that an important element of the form of agrarian protest was evangelical Protestantism (Robert C. McMath, “Populist Base Communities: The Evangelical Roots of Farm Protest in Texas,” Locus 1 [1988], 53-63). 34 Methodists were probably unaware that Bryan was raised in such a diverse religious environment. Newspapers consistently reported that Bryan was a devout Presbyterian and usually included that he was an elder in his church. 35 Leland Levi Lengel, “Radical Crusaders and a Conservative Church: Attitudes of Populists Toward Contemporary Protestantism in Kansas,” American Studies 13:2 (Fall, 1972), 57. 36 Methodists undertook notable missionary efforts in Africa, South America, China, Germany, Switzerland, Scandinavia, India, Bulgaria, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Korea, and Hawaii. These missions not only brought Christ to people, but also set up hospitals, built schools, and provided food and shelter (Western Methodist, September 10, 1896; October 22, 1896; September 24, 1896). Heralding the Call of Populism 29 who adhered to the social gospel. These Christians believed that improved worldly conditions would reform and better people’s lives and enhance their spirituality. Sydney Ahlstrom, an American religious historian, included the Populists among the social gospelers.37 In short, the Populists’ beliefs in worldly reform and humanitarian concern paralleled Methodists’ own beliefs and practices. Even though the Methodist Church did not officially endorse either Bryan or McKinley, Methodist sermons and newspapers were similar to Populist rhetoric in both tone and substance. In his analysis of Kansas Populism, historian Leland Lengel argued that the Populist movement primarily was a humanitarian effort to aid financially weakened farmers. Lengel stated the two tendencies of Kansas Populism: “On the one hand, they demonstrated a widespread humanitarian concern, whether by means of political action, political evangelization, or utopian colonies. On the other hand, this humanitarianism among the leaders of the party stemmed from religious, the- istic, and philosophical backgrounds as varied as the men who held them.”38 One of the principal reasons that the Methodist Church survived the poor economic conditions of the time was its ability to respond to its congregations through humanitarian efforts. For instance, the Western Methodist, published in Kansas, printed a sermon that concluded that God’s people in the Old Testament gave about one-third of their total income to “charitable and religious purposes.” The paper added that selfless giving was “the road to wealth, but history records the fact, that they [Old Testament people] were never so prosperous financially, never so strong nationally, and never so virtuous and happy as when giving with scrupulous honesty.”39 Furthermore, in a sermon suggesting that the Methodist Church should refrain from political preaching, the Reverend Joseph Long of Kansas nevertheless conveyed the importance of the humanitarian spirit in language similar to Populist rhetoric. He believed that “wise reform” should be done by active Christians and not by the church. In a comparison with the early Christians, he stated, “Then, as now, capital exploited labor, the money power corrupted legislation, and the masses of the people were ground down beneath the heel of oppression.”40 These sermons are strikingly similar to many of Bryan’s speeches. For instance, Bryan stated that “this is an age of rapid accumu- lation of wealth, and the multiplication of corporations gives to money an extraordinary power.”41 Bryan was able to appeal to the Methodists because his ideology was similar to the evolving viewpoints that Methodists held at the time. Despite the Church’s politically neutral stance, Methodists as individuals

37 Sidney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven, Yale UP, 1972), 788. 38 Lengel, “The Righteous,” 45. 39 Western Methodist (August 13, 1896). 40 “The Proper Attitude of the Church to Reforms,” Western Methodist (September 24, 1896). 41 William Jennings Bryan, The First Battle: A Story of the Campaign of 1896 (Chicago: W. B. Conkey, 1896), 55. 30 Methodist History did not abstain from the political arena. The Western Methodist reprinted an article from the Zion’s Herald stating that “there may not be any politics in Methodism, but . . . there is a good deal of Methodism in politics.”42 Methodists represented the largest denomination in the Kansas Legislature at a higher percentage than the Kansas population. Not all Methodists were Populists, as is evidenced in McKinley, but the Methodist politicians in the Kansas Statehouse were more often Populists than they were Republicans. For instance, of the members whose church affiliation can be identified in the 1895-1896 Kansas Senate, 45% were Methodists with 70% of those Methodists in the Populist Party.43 The Methodist Church was the only denomination with the organizational and financial strength to expand into the rural areas of Kansas where farmers struggled to survive the economic depression. Historian Peter Argersinger, in an attempt to answer why the Populists were strong in the state, pointed to the failure of the mainstream churches to provide for their congregations both economically and spiritually. He explains that out of desperation and dissatisfaction, many church-goers turned to the religiously inclined Populist Party.44 Although this was certainly true of many of the Protestant denominations, Argersinger failed to cite any evidence that the financial situation affected the Methodist Church in the same way. Methodists certainly felt the immense economic pressures of the various “panics,” but they still increased in membership, built churches, and organized more conferences to meet the needs of the Kansas population.45 Furthermore, intense and charismatic oratory enlarged the church membership, which flourished during the early nineteenth century based on extemporaneous and impassioned preachers like Charles Finney and Peter Cartwright. Populist meetings were exhilarating and galvanizing events with energetic leaders who spoke the language of religious revivals. Writing years later, Elizabeth N. Barr described the powerful movement in Kansas:

The upheaval that took place . . . [c]an hardly be diagnosed as a political campaign. It was a religious revival, a crusade, a pentecost of politics in which a tongue of flame sat upon every man, and each spake as the spirit gave him utterance. For Mary E. Lease . . . and half a hundred others who lectured up and down the land, were not the only people who could talk on the issues of the day. The farmers, the country merchants, the cattle-herders, they of the long chin-whiskers, and they of the broad-brimmed hats and heavy boots, had also heard the word and could preach the gospel of Populism. The dragon’s teeth were sprouting in every nook and corner

42 Western Methodist (August 13, 1896). 43 Of the 23 Populist members of the 1895 to 1896 Kansas Senate, the denominations of twelve could not be identified. Seven were Methodists, two were Presbyterians, one Roman Catholic, and one Quaker. Republicans had only three Methodists (Lengel, “The Righteous,” 348-353). 44 Peter Argersinger, “Pentecostal Politics,” 24-39. 45From 1890 to 1894, Methodists increased the number of ministers from 420 to 512; members from 68,638 to 78,640; and churches from 653 to 813 (Don Holter, Fire on the Prairie: Meth- odism in the History of Kansas [Kansas City, MO: Editorial Board of the Kansas Methodist History, 1969], 298). Heralding the Call of Populism 31

of the State.46 Populists recreated the intense camp-meeting revivals so vital to Methodism’s success in the West. Following the Populist convention in 1896, the Western Methodist proudly reported that there was a “noteworthy Methodist flavor at the St. Louis Convention.”47 Bryan personified many of the elements Methodists found so appealing about the Populist Party. If at the conference level the Methodist Church declined to support any political ticket, it did not stop the local Methodist clergy from supporting Populism. The Ottawa Journal and Triumph reported that a Methodist minister who told his congregation that “those who heeded Republican claims and voted for [Republican John] Ingalls . . . denied the Decalogue and the Sermon on the Mount.”48 The Reverend D. E. Hoover, a Methodist minister from the Garden City area, angered the Republicans among his parishioners by boldly speaking “for free silver.”49 An exemplary illustration of the compatibility of Methodism and Populism was the Reverend Jeremiah Botkin. Botkin, a Methodist preacher, left his Wellington pastorate to join the Populist movement to “heal those broken hearts” crushed by the weight of the “Money Power.”50 He faced severe criticism, especially from the Republican press, for his decision. In 1894, Botkin defended his actions in the Populist newspaper, the Advocate: “There is but one thing for me to do and that is take the stump and preach to the mul- titudes the gospel of reform; of humanity, of God.”51 Botkin saw Populism as an extension of religion and left his pastorate because he believed politics would lead to true reform. The Topeka Daily Capital, a Republican-friendly newspaper, referred to Botkin as radical and quoted him as saying that he was a “Christian socialist.”52 Whatever the case, Botkin’s background as a Methodist preacher with notable oratory skills led to a successful career in politics. Even as he announced his resignation from his pastorate, Botkin displayed his familiarity with the traditional Populist rhetoric:

By a series of the most damnable legislative enactments on record, beginning more than thirty years ago, our national congress has stealthily proceeded to enthrone gold, contract the currency and place the entire monetary system of the country in the hands of a few men in whom greed is the only motive and personal interest the only care . . . . I have taken this new departure because I am convinced that the People’s party affords me the best opportunity for working hopefully for the triumph of true reform.53 Botkin utilized evangelical rhetoric to speak of political issues and focused

46 Elizabeth N. Barr, “The Populist Uprising,” A Standard History of Kansas and Kansans, Wil- liam E. Connelly, ed., (Chicago: Lewis, 1918), 1148-1149. 47 Western Methodist (August 13, 1896). 48 Ottawa Journal and Triumph (Topeka, KS; October 11, 1894). 49 Cited in Lengel, “The Righteous,” 245. 50 Industrial Advocate (El Dorado, KS; February 11, 1892). 51 Advocate, August 22, 1894. 52 Jeremiah Botkin, Topeka Daily Capital (Topeka, KS; September 2, 1894). 53 Advocate (August 22, 1894). 32 Methodist History on Populism as the answer to the nation’s woes. This synthesis of Populist ideas and Methodists beliefs can also be seen in the issue of prohibition. In 1880, Kansas Methodists celebrated the passage of a state law that outlawed the sale of intoxicating beverages. As evidenced in the abundance of articles and advertisements demonizing liquor, Methodist newspapers stayed politically neutral in almost everything except prohibition. The Kansas Methodist Northwest Conference stated the general sentiment of all the Kansas Conferences in April 1896: “We believe that no candidate ought to expect, nor ought he to receive the votes of Methodist lay- men unless he will place himself on record as being unalterably opposed to the liquor traffic.”54 The Methodist General Conference of 1892 proclaimed itself “strenuously non partisan” and acknowledged allegiance to no political creed. However, “when moral issues are before the public,” the Church affirmed that “our people are invariably found on the side of the highest standard.”55 In fact, the quintessential issue in Methodist newspapers was prohibition, with little respect for either political party if they demonstrated tolerance for liquor. The Western Methodist advised its subscribers to refrain from casting a ballot in the 1896 gubernatorial election for either Republican Edmund Morrill or Populist John Leedy because of their weak stance on enforcing prohibition.56 The Christian Herald asked: “Which is the worse, the demonization of silver, or the dehumanization of humanity by legal- ized rum?”57 Furthermore, the Prohibition Party’s platform supported the remonitization of silver, which was a central issue in the Populist platform.58 The fact that Methodist newspapers endorsed the Prohibition Party’s entire platform evidences that Methodists were comfortable with Bryan’s stance on the silver issue. Methodist dedication to prohibition is an important factor for understanding why Bryan won the 1896 election. Although the Populist Party did not take a formal stand on prohibition, it had many avid prohibitionists in its ranks.59 The forerunner to the Populist Party, the Alliance, favored prohibition.60 Jeremiah Botkin ran for Kansas governor as the Prohibition Party candidate in 1888. In 1890, it nominated John Willits, who strongly favored temperance, for governor. Ben S. Henderson, a notable prohibitionist, acted as the temporary chairperson of the Kansas Populist state convention. William Peffer, the first Populist Kansas senator, was a dry candidate and

54Official Minutes of the Northwest Kansas Conference (Salina, KS: April 1-6, 1896), 20. The Southwest Conference had a similar sentiment: “That since the liquor traffic cannot be legal- ized without sin, neither can those who favor its legalization be voted for without sin, when it is an issue”; Official Minutes of the Southwest Kansas Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, Fourteenth Session (Wichita, KS, March 25-30, 1896). 55 “Address of the Bishops,” Journal of the General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church (Omaha, NE: May 2-16, 1896), 60. 56 Western Methodist (October 29, 1896). 57 Christian Herald (October, 1896). 58 Western Methodist (July 3, 1896). 59 Robert Smith Bader, Prohibition in Kansas: A History (Lawrence: UP Kansas, 1986), 108. 60 Clara Francis, “Prohibition in Kansas,” Kansas and Kansans, 1143. Heralding the Call of Populism 33 would later run for governor on the Prohibition Party ticket in 1898. Leroy Ashby, a Bryan biographer, wrote that: “Members of the Farmers’ Alliances, and later of the Populist movement, were typically ‘Bible people’ to whom religion was both a source of comfort and a call to action. Strongly mor- alistic, often supporters of Prohibition, they staged political rallies that resembled religious camp meetings.”61 The issue of prohibition also led Methodists to be dissatisfied with the Republican Party. Republicans had previously been known as the party of prohibition, but their failure to enforce temperance laws caused disruption in the party. For instance, in August, 1896, the Kansas Temperance Monitor reported that J. J. Stewart of the board of police commissioners refused to enforce the prohibition laws and “would rather be a Republican and do Wrong than a Methodist and do Right.”62 Furthermore, there was a vocal anti- prohibition wing, also known as the Republican Resubmissionists, in the Republican Party that maintained strong support in the Wichita region. Both Populists and Republicans struggled with the issue, but the problem became so acute in the Republican camps that by 1894, they removed prohibition from their platform completely. The Kansas Temperance Monitor declared that “prohibition is doomed in the case of Republican success.”63 The acceptance of the Prohibition Party’s objectives by the Methodist newspapers, which otherwise refused to endorse any major ticket, indicates the importance of prohibition. One paper stated that the Prohibition Party platform “suits us so well, for real practical purposes.”64 In July, with the election just four months away, the Western Methodist stated that the Prohibition Party “is still faithfully battling for ‘God, Home, and Native Land’ regardless of any other distracting issue that may come up to divert them from their noble purpose.”65 Praise for fighting against the “liquor demons” was not restricted by political affiliation. After Georgia Populists adopted a prohibition platform, the Christian Herald praised their decision, adding that liquor “fosters the saloon and generates its manifold evils in consideration of revenue that pays less than a tithe of the public burdens it entails. It is non-American, monopolistic and essentially immoral.”66 Once again, Methodist beliefs paralleled Populist principles. The Prohibition Party presidential candidate Joshua Levering enjoyed the most favorable praise of all the candidates in the Methodist press. However, the Baptist millionaire stood little chance to win nationwide, and the politically informed Kansas Methodist laity did not cast their votes to support him. In fact, Levering and the other small party candidates only received a com-

61 Leroy Ashby, William Jennings Bryan: Champion of Democracy (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1987), 61. 62 “The Republican Party and Prohibition,” Kansas Temperance Monitor (Salina, KS; August, 1896). 63 “The Republican Party and Prohibition.” 64 Western Methodist (July 30, 1896). 65 Western Methodist (September 10, 1896). 66 Christian Herald (September, 1896). 34 Methodist History bined 1.1 percent of the total vote in the 1896 election in Kansas.67 Levering aside, Methodist newspapers typically showed no direct approval for either Bryan or McKinley. In fact, the Western Methodist shared with its readers that all the presidential nominees are:

not only clean and honorable men, but are good Christian men . . . . McKinley is an active member, and we believe a local elder in the Methodist church at Canton. His private life and character as especially exemplified in his devotion to his invalid wife, are such as to win the admiration of all who know him. Hon. W. J. Bryan, of Nebraska, the nominee of democratic and populist parties, is a prominent and honored member of the Presbyterian Church, and a man whose life and character all young men would do well to emulate.68 Despite the candidates’ personal integrity and devotion to their respective churches, each possessed qualities that, if known, would have significantly hurt their chances to win the state. For instance, Bryan, who never drank or smoked, campaigned against statewide prohibition in Nebraska as late as 1890 and secured many votes and funds from the liquor interests.69 A son of a temperance worker and someone who personally abhorred the liquor traffic, Bryan was a political opportunist who ventured into saloons while one of his aides bought beer for potential immigrant voters.70 McKinley was addicted to cigars, yet because he knew the political damage it would cause, he never appeared around photographers with one in his mouth.71 Methodist newspapers, which certainly had an interest in any candidate’s moral failures, did not report any of these stories. If the Methodist public had been informed about these personal issues, it could have resulted in a political disaster for a candidate. This is evident in a close call McKinley faced a month before the election. On October 8, the Western Methodist reported a rumor that Mrs. McKinley rented buildings used for saloon purposes. This rumor led the paper to “advocate the great temperance reform.”72 The rumor turned out to be false and was retracted in the following issue, but this story underscores the high regard Methodists placed on this single issue.73 Methodist newspapers identified each candidate’s church affiliation, but they did not endorse the Methodist McKinley. The neutrality of Methodists helped Bryan to overcome the differences in church affiliation. In fact, the lack of emphasis on denominational labels provided by the Populist movement allowed Methodists to look to other denominations in their fight against liquor. For instance, Bryan’s Presbyterian Church stated that “No political party has the right to expect the support of the Christian men so long as that

67 Cabe, Kansas Votes, 22-23. 68 Western Methodist (August 13, 1896). 69 Glad, McKinley, Bryan, and the People, 29. 70 Kazin, Godly Hero, 26. 71 Lewis L. Gould, The Presidency of William McKinley (Lawrence: Regents’ Press of Kansas, 1980), 10. 72 Western Methodist (October 8, 1896). 73 The Kansas Temperance Monitor reported the same story less than a month before the election (October, 1986), but because the next issue did not come out until afterwards, no retraction was made. Heralding the Call of Populism 35 party stands committed to the license policy, or refuses to put itself on record agains[t] the saloon.”74 One Kansas Methodist leader commented that the idea of a multi-denominational temperance movement “is a wise one, and ought to be entered into with great earnestness.”75 In addition to the unification provided by the issue of prohibition, the out- cry against alleged Republican economic injustices in Kansas helped Bryan to victory. Kansas Populists continually identified McKinley and Hanna as corrupt easterners who preyed on the Kansas farmer, an association that disturbed Kansas Methodists due to their humanitarian disposition. Although this investigation has centered on Kansas, a similar result can be seen nationwide. Of the states where Methodism was the largest denomination or contained at least 25% of the people who identified a religious affiliation, 12 of 15 were won by Bryan.76 Although the inflamed rhetoric against the eastern industrialist endeared Bryan to the agrarian minded states of the Midwest and South, it was less effective in the Great Lakes region and the Northeast, where McKinley prevailed. The Republican won, by and large, because of this success in the most populous states with the majority of electoral votes. After the election concluded and McKinley took office, the Methodist Church was intent on returning to church business. The Western Methodist wrote that because “the exciting political campaign is over, for which we are truly thankful we expect to see a great and better campaign inaugurated at once: the kindling of revival fires all over the Kansas and Oklahoma prai- ries.”77 The Wesleyan Advance wrote “that it is evident that the American people have declared for the republican party, we believe that no obstacles should be placed in its way.”78 After the loss in the 1896 election, Populism failed to recover. The movement continued in Kansas, but as a noticeably weakened political force. In the same way that they had previously criticized Republicans, Methodists denounced the newly elected Kansas Populists for corruption and for their inability to enforce prohibition. Historians have attributed the downfall of the Populist movement to several factors, nota- bly, its failure to become a national party, its fusion with Republicans and Democrats, and the nation’s increased economic prosperity. Despite his de- feat, Bryan did not remove himself from the political arena; he would run and fail two more times in bids for the presidency. In 1900, the Populist Party split its support between Bryan and Wharton Barker, thus removing a crucial voting block from Bryan’s success in Kansas. Not until Woodrow Wilson’s candidacy would the majority of Kansans again vote for another Democrat for president. The 1896 presidential election in Kansas presents a strong correlation

74 Kansas Temperance Monitor (November, 1896). 75 Western Methodist (October 8, 1896). 76 U.S. Department of the Interior, Census Office,Report on Statistics of Churches in the United States, 1-49; Bryan ran not only as a Populist, but also as a Democrat, so he received substantial support in the solidly Democratic South. 77 Western Methodist (November 5, 1896). 78 Wesleyan Advance, (Salina, KS; November, 1896). 36 Methodist History between politics and religion. Kansas voters witnessed a unique synergy of Populism, humanitarianism, and religion that produced an environment in which Methodists could cross denominational lines and support a man who spoke for the struggling farmer. The similarities in the message of the Populists, Methodists, and Bryan created a sense of political and religious unity in Kansas. One disapproving New York newspaper summed up Bryan’s message as “bombastic phrases in Western Methodist camp-meeting style.”79 As is evident from this detraction and his loss in the election, Bryan’s message was not embraced nationwide, but within Kansas, Methodists and Populists alike heralded his call for a humanitarian, God fearing government.

79 Cited in Kazin, Godly Hero, 77. In Ohio and Indiana, Bryan faired far better than the previous Democratic candidate James Garfield in 1892 not only in locations where Populism was more popular, but also in “concentrations of evangelical or pietist Republicans embraced another crusade for redemption and morality . . . .” (Phillips, William McKinley, 83). Methodist History, 49:1 (October 2010)

Methodist Heretic: Thomas Altizer and the Death of God at Emory University

Christopher Demuth Rodkey

The cover of the April 8, 1966, issue of Time featured the trademark red trim border of the magazine, but was otherwise all black, with large red block letters: “Is God Dead?” The cover is not only one of the most remem- bered in Time’s history and became a symbol of the 1960s, but the cover also cemented the public face of a movement that called itself “death of God theology” or “radical theology.” While death of God theology has largely been on the sidelines of academic theology for the last forty years, its influence on contemporary evangelical Christian culture is unquestionable. For example, the July, 2008, issue of Christianity Today ran a parody cover of the iconic Time cover, promoting a rather dishonest look at the so-called “New Atheist” movement; and a recent cover of Philosophy Now offered tribute to the cover, reading, “Is God really Dead?” In the last few years, journalist Ray Waddle wrote an op-ed in The Tennessean that death of God theology is one of the beginning points of the rise of evangelical mega-churches in the 1970s; and Nathan Schneider of The Guardian recently speculated that the death of God perspective may be the only Christian answer to contemporary atheism. The fact is that laypeople are still responding to the death of God theology, even if they never read any of it or understood it. This “movement” was not so much an organized group of scholars but a loose association of young theologians connected and introduced to each other by Langdon Gilkey. The young radicals were a motley, unlikely group. Gabriel Vahanian, a French Princeton Theological Seminary gradu-

“Toward a Hidden God,” Time (April 8, 1966), accessed online. http://www.time.com/time/ magazine/article/0,9171,835309,00.html. The cover may be seen online at http://www.time. com/time/covers/0,16641,1101660408,00.html. Cover, “God is Not Dead,” Christianity Today (July 2008); cover, “Is God really Dead?” Philosophy Now 78 (2010). Also worth mentioning is a bizarre personal situation where a resident of my own neighborhood gave me a copy of his self-published book, which he claims to have written for “apostate preachers” like myself; the book is also an intentional play on the classic Time cover (Willie Marshall, God Is [Lebanon, PA: Willie Marshall, 2009]). My point is that the influence of radical theology continues to penetrate the evangelical culture wars of the current day. Ray Waddle, “Megachurches arise from Death-of-God Theology’s Ashes,” The Tennessean (April 2, 2005) 2B; Nathan Schneider, “Could God Die Again?”, The Guardian (October 4, 2009), online. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2009/oct/04/death-god-theology-elson. 37 38 Methodist History ate, wrote a book titled The Death of God in 1961, and later would be cen- trally involved in a faculty schism at Drew University’s Theological School. William Hamilton, a Baptist minister, wrote an early death of God theology manifesto, The New Essence of Christianity, while working at Colgate Rochester Divinity School. Paul M. Van Buren, an Episcopal priest, was a student of Karl Barth and was heavily influenced by analytic philosophy. Rabbi Richard Rubenstein, then a campus minister in Pittsburgh, published the now-classic After Auschwitz, which spoke of the “death of God” in the Nazi Shoah. Rubenstein would later become the President of the University of Bridgeport. It was, however, Thomas J. J. Altizer who would become the “star” of this loose association. Altizer spoke to the press; he was interviewed for television, radio, and magazines; and he even made an appearance on The Merv Griffin Show. Altizer, a descendent of Stonewall Jackson (that’s the “J. J” in his name), spoke with the vivacity and exuberance of a Southern preacher, dressed in outlandish suits, and loved to say “God is Dead.” Altizer is a precarious figure in Christian theology. Although he gradu- ated with both the M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago’s Divinity School, his doctorate was in the history of religions, not in theology. Raised in a nominally religious Episcopal home, Altizer was denied candidacy for ordination by the Episcopal Church on the grounds of failing the psychological exams for the priesthood, while serving as a lay minister at a multi-racial Episcopal mission on the south side of Chicago. After graduating from the University of Chicago, Altizer first worked at Wabash College and then continued to work at Emory University, a Methodist-related undergraduate college. There he began writing and lec- turing on “the death of God.” The death of God was not just a Nietzschean sign of the times or a call for atheism—as it was for the other death of God theologians—but for Altizer the death of God is a central theological concept which operates as the primary religious motif for the rest of his systematic theology. The concept works on several levels. To be brief: the contemporary “orthodox” Christian worships a God that has long died when the Christian speaks of a totality of being outside of space and time. That God once was, but no longer is: this God who has died is the primordial Godhead which existed before Genesis 1, and has debased and negated Godself in the act of creation and in the incarnation of Christ. The death of God in Christ on the cross is a continuation of a coincidentia oppositorum (coincidence of opposites), further culminating in the descent into Hell. The resurrection indicates the “total presence” and final death of transcendence into a radical immanence into human flesh. Altizer’s theology is complex; his earliest work explores the religious logic of the coincidentia oppositorum and turns to the kenosis of the incarnation of Christ as the primary Biblical example of this logic. The base heresy upon which his work rests is a denial of the immutability of Godhead, who for Altizer is continuously negating Godself and perpetually kenoting in the present through the Holy Spirit residing in human flesh. The Christological Methodist Heretic: Thomas Altizer 39 innovation is rooted in Luther’s doctrine of the communicatio idiomantum; the kenotic incarnation of Christ discloses a tremendous change for God. As such a kenotic understanding of God in history for Altizer is a God who pours Godself out completely into Christ, who is “fully God.” This is to say that God diachronally moves in history; history itself is an apocalyptic pour- ing out of God; and God dies throughout history, with a particular emptying out of transcendence into the person of Christ. All of this was enough to confuse, baffle, and offend the members of The Methodist Church, who were financially supporting Emory University. In the middle of a major ($25 million) capital drive, a young theologian being called a “heretic” from outside brought a mixture of publicity for Emory. On one hand, to defend academic freedom would raise Emory’s profile as a church-related institution committed to the highest academic standards. On the other, Emory was, at the time, largely dependent upon denominational and alumni support—and many of Emory’s graduates filled pulpits throughout the southern U.S. Beyond this, the painful dissociation of Vanderbilt University from The Methodist Episcopal Church was also in recent memory; Emory had since become the one of the premier Methodist institutions of higher learning in the southeast. There is some evidence that Emory ulti- mately gained more financial support by supporting Altizer. Earl Alluisi, a Professor of Psychology at the University of Louisville, wrote in 1965 that given Emory’s refusal to fire Altizer, “Emory University cannot help but remain a great university.” First Wave of Criticism: Fall 1965 All of the correspondence from angry Methodists and others is archived in the Special Collections of Syracuse University. Altizer’s profile gained attention when a short article on the Death of God theologians ran in the October 22, 1965, issue of Time, which introduced the death of God theologians to a national audience. H. J. Burkett, the District Superintendent of the Jackson District in Jackson, Tennessee, wrote in a letter in an immediate response, “If God is dead, as you state, are we to continue to ask people to join a church that requires people . . . to support a seminary where one of the professors is teaching that ‘God is dead?’” In the same month David Clyburn, Pastor of Epworth Memorial Church, Rock Hill, South Carolina, wrote to Altizer, “So far as I am concerned, I don’t know who I am going to

Norman Smith, Memo, Nov. 15, 1965; George Page, Letter to Sanford Atwood, Nov. 19, 1965. Thomas Altizer Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library. Earl Alluisi, Letter to Thomas Altizer, Nov. 17, 1965. Thomas Altizer Papers, Special Collec- tions Research Center, Syracuse University Library. “The ‘God is Dead’ Movement,” Time (Oct.22, 1965), accessed online. http://www.time. com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,941410-2,00.html. H. J. Burkett, Letter to Thomas Altizer, Nov. 5, 1965. Thomas Altizer Papers, Special Collec- tions Research Center, Syracuse University Library. 40 Methodist History miss more, God or Paul Tillich.” The following month, in December, 1965, Harold Steinbach, Pastor of First Methodist Church in Goodland, Kansas, wrote:

Please give me some pointers on how to make your systematic theology relevant during the Advent Season. For some reason your “God is Dead” movement seems somewhat lifeless amidst the singing of Christmas Carols, the story of a manger, the shepherds, the angels, and a Baby.

I seem to have a problem knowing what to do with the Son of a dead God. If you can get us through Christmas with this theology I will need some further help in order to make Easter meaningful for my congregation. Please give me some words of hope which I can share with the parishioners who face death, bereavement, illness, loneli- ness and unfaithfulness on the part of a husband or wife. While this response may be as honest as it is flippant, Steinbach suggests not only a misunderstanding of Altizer’s theology (especially since the Incarnation of Christ is a primary emphasis of the death of God for Altizer) but also a need to have a practical aspect to theology. John Leonard, who identified himself as the “President of the Disciples Class of First Methodist Church in Pasadena, Texas,” wrote to Altizer, asking for more information, and specifically whether “you see this idea as one which will be or can bee [sic] accepted by Christians of the Methodist church.”10 Feeling powerless and publicly embarrassed that their flagship southern university had become a hotbed of religious radicalism, many Methodists wrote to tell Altizer, accusing him of hypocrisy for working at a Methodist- related institution. William Sprinks of Thomasville Methodist Church in Thomasville, Alabama, wrote to John Stephens, the Dean of Emory College, not only asking for a plain-English explanation of Altizer’s theology, but also:

Be assured we are for academic freedom, and we are not opposed to challenging young people with new ideas and to develope [sic] a faith of their own, but along with it we would stress academic responsibility toward our youth relative to the Christian faith in a Methodist-related institution. We also feel the necessity of a clarification in layman’s terminology as to what Dr. Altizer means by this “philosophy” that “God is dead.”11 Conversely, Altizer received numerous invitations to speak at Methodist churches, both to explain himself and also in honor and interest of his theological work. Gerald Harris, pastor of Centenary Methodist Church in Elmira, New York, wrote to Altizer that “So much of what you believe is absolute fact if not yet confessed by most Christians,” concluding, “[k]eep

David Clyburn, Letter to Thomas Altizer, Nov. 11, 1965. Thomas Altizer Papers, Special Col- lections Research Center, Syracuse University Library. Harold Steinbach, Letter to Thomas Altizer, Dec. 9, 1965. Thomas Altizer Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library. 10 John Leonard, Letter to Thomas Altizer, Nov. 17, 1965. Thomas Altizer Papers, Special Col- lections Research Center, Syracuse University Library. 11 William Sprinks, Letter to John Stephens, Nov. 21, 1965. Thomas Altizer Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library. Methodist Heretic: Thomas Altizer 41 up the good work.”12 J. Spurgeon McCart of Washington Pike Methodist Church in Knoxville, Tennessee, even wrote to Altizer that his ideas do not go far enough and are not radical enough.13 About the same time as the first Time story broke, Altizer wrote a short article in the pages of The Christian Advocate, which put forward the basic tenets of his theology.14 Methodists responded in large numbers to the editors. J. L. Hartz of the Methodist Church in Clinton, MO, wrote that if he accepted Altizer’s new theological ideas “there wouldn’t be any church here where I am pastor,” and that in the pastoral appointment listings for the year his name would be read by his Bishop as “without appointment.”15 Robert Crenshaw of Melrose Methodist Church in Oakland, California, wrote that what the church needs is not a new theology, but one that rejects theology in place of a church that does not “equate the voice of the churches with the voice of God.”16 In its November 18, 1965, issue, the editors of the Christian Advocate came out in support of Altizer. More letters followed. “I find it in poor taste for a publication of The Methodist Church to imply agreement with a view that pictures the basis of our faith to be invalid or dead,” wrote John Pappas of Camp Springs, Maryland, who chastised the editors for taking seriously “the ‘off beat’ or ‘tiny’ far left.”17 Claude Thompson, a professor at Emory University wrote:

I’m a bit puzzled over all this fuss about The Death of God . . . for these reasons:

1. It is not new. This old idea has been tried and found wanting in religious dialogue in the past.

2. It is not intelligible. Anyone can contrive his own view of God and cry “dead”— without ever coming to grips with the Christian God at all.

3. It is not theology. It may be philosophy, but by definition it is only speculation—a negative, meaningless assertion.

4. It is not Christian. Within Christendom God is variously understood. To say “God is dead” is to repudiate the total Christian revelation and history.

5. It is not surprising. Since Altizer has publicly confessed that he is an atheist (in the writer’s presence), it would be surprising if he believed in God at all, let alone God alive. Doesn’t he mean that for him God is dead.

6. It is not the view at Emory. Lest anyone panic, Emory is not a nesting ground for atheism. We have our share of unbelievers, but their noise is entirely out of proportion to their number or significance . . . . I strongly dissent fromAltizer. 18

12 Gerald Harris, Letter to Thomas Altizer, Nov. 19, 1965. Thomas Altizer Papers, Special Col- lections Research Center, Syracuse University Library. 13 Spurgeon McCart, Letter to Thomas Altizer, Nov. 18, 1965. Thomas Altizer Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library. 14 Thomas Altizer, “The Death of God,” Christian Advocate (Oct. 7, 1965), 9. 15 J. Hartz, Letter to the Editor, Christian Advocate (Dec. 2, 1965), 13. 16 Robert Crenshaw, Letter to the Editor, Christian Advocate (Dec. 2, 1965), 13. 17 John Pappas, Letter to the Editor, Christian Advocate (Jan. 13, 1966), 5. 18 Claude Thompson, Letter to the Editor, Christian Advocate (Jan. 13, 1966), 5-6. 42 Methodist History

Thompson also cited a letter of dissent from Altizer signed by 25 faculty members at Emory. Clearly irritated and misunderstanding Altizer—whose theology is anything but atheistic in the sense of a denial of God’s exis- tence—Thompson’s letter indicated a looming sense of crisis among Emory’s religious (and financial) support. The following week’s Christian Advocate ran a letter by G. Paul Phillips, Associate Minister of Fairmont Methodist Church in Raleigh, North Carolina, saying that “[t]he reaction to Dr. Altizer witnesses, in many instances, to a decline of [a] responsible, reflective community among both the clergy and the laity.”19 Thompson’s letter in The Christian Advocate was reprinted and quoted widely as an authoritative response to Altizer. In the Syracuse Altizer archive is a church bulletin from an unknown “First Methodist Church” quoting Thompson’s letter, sent to Altizer by the Atlanta attorney T. Emory Daniel, with a handwritten note from Daniel: “Thought you would be interested in this. These people surely do get nervous.”20 Thompson was clearly offended by Altizer’s ideas, having also written a letter to the editor of Time, calling Altizer’s theology “a theological oddity,” “a perversion,” “a repudiation of the Gospel,” and “adrift in a sea of speculative atheistic confusion.”21 The same month, Emory trustee William Bowdoin was quoted in the Palo Alto Times saying that Altizer is “an irresponsible individual” and “I wish he’d leave promptly.”22 Second Wave of Criticism: Winter 1966 In early 1966, the College of Bishops of the Southeastern Jurisdiction of the of The Methodist Church passed a statement against Altizer’s theology in frustration that they had lost control of their influence on Emory; the statement was published on February 2, 1966, in The Mississippi Methodist Advocate. In response to the notion that “God is dead,” the Bishops wrote that “[s]uch declarations are pure fantasy, unsupported by any responsible, scientific or theological knowledge, and contradicted by the long experience of man on the earth and by the unnumbered millions who in the present know the Almighty as the living God.” While upholding the principle of academic freedom, the Bishops also invoked the clichéd “[f]reedom requires responsibility” and questioned the morality of a professor who disagrees with church doctrine and voluntarily remains employed by a church institution. The statement concluded with general support of Emory’s administration and its

19 G. Phillips, Letter to the Editor, Christian Advocate (Jan. 27, 1966), 6. 20 T. Daniel, Handwritten note on Church bulletin, 1966, Thomas Altizer Papers, Special Collec- tions Research Center, Syracuse University Library. 21 Claude Thompson, Letter to the Editor, Time (Nov. 19, 1965), accessed online. http://www. time.com/time/printout/0,8816,834609,00.html. 22 William Bowdoin, in Palo Alto Times (Jan. 8, 1966), Thomas Altizer Papers, Special Collec- tions Research Center, Syracuse University Library. Methodist Heretic: Thomas Altizer 43 ties to the Church.23 The Bishops’ statement did not take seriously Altizer’s theology but made clear that anything that sounded like it was contrary doctrine to The Methodist Church. The statement itself resembles a document composed to appease its constituents: the Bishops had to make a uniform statement about Altizer. By February, it may have appeared to the public that it was time to move on from the Altizer issue. But by declaring heretical Altizer’s theology, Altizer was again newsworthy. Consequently, the death of God theology once again found itself on a national platform in a news story for the CBS evening news just a few days later, on February 7, 1966. Letters from Methodists were immediately sent to Altizer. Several letters were again flippant or sarcastic, including a greeting card, “With sympathy in the Loss of your Father.”24 Thomas Osborn of Centralia, Illinois, wrote:

One of the most outstanding preachers in the Methodist Church today, Dr. John R. Church, said in an article that he was not surprised your God was dead—the kind of a God you have been proclaiming has been sick a long time. The bible says (of course I realize you don’t believe the bible so it does little good to quote it), however the bible says “Try the spirits and see whether they be of God” and I had a good chance to do that last night on television during the interview the newsman had with you. You could tell by your expression and even the look on your face and in your eyes there was something amiss—I believe it was demon possession.

Again, I say, I am so sorry that someone so high up in the Methodist Church has any thing to do with such an ungodly and damning doctrine. As the newsman said, it gives comfort to those who are trying to avoid God, which of course is impossible, and will do much harm for the short time—and I do believe that it will be a short time that this nonsense is being carried on.25 Clearly, the emotion being conveyed by this letter is an abject offense, that Altizer’s theology is anathema to any sense of traditional Christian thinking. Other letters sent to Altizer during this time indicate that some Methodists understood Altizer to be speaking on behalf of Methodists and to Methodists about Methodism.26 The “Circle No. 1” of Methodist women at Marks Methodist Church, Marks, Mississippi, wrote to Altizer, in all italics:

God is not dead. Your faith is dead. You are like the noisy, alarmist, little hen in the familiar old nursery story, Henny-Penny, who went about cackling that the world was falling because she felt a little piece of it fall on her tail. It’s a question of point-of-view. In twentieth-century idom, “THINK BIG!” When you cry to the

23 “Statement of the College of Bishops, Southeastern Jurisdiction,” The Mississippi Methodist Advocate ns 19.17 (Feb. 2, 1966), 6. 24 A. B. Currier, card to Thomas Altizer, February 8, 1966. Thomas Altizer Papers, Special Col- lections Research Center, Syracuse University Library. 25 Thomas Osborn, letter to Thomas Altizer, February 8, 1966. Thomas Altizer Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library. 26 For example: Douglas Byrd, letter to Thomas Altizer, December 19, 1966; Richard McCabe, letter to Thomas Altizer, Feb. 9, 1966. Thomas Altizer Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library. 44 Methodist History

newspapers that, “God is dead,” you should cry instead, “I do not believe!” One more noisy man has lost his faith or never had any. Nothing more has happened: Do not sound the alarm. Suddenly the ladies’ Circle’s tone of the letter changes:

We feel that you are very unrealistic to try to take twentieth-century atheistic philosophy and convert it into theology. Would it not be more realistic for you to move to the Philosophy Department? And would it not be more realistic, too, for you to proclaim, “Paul Tillich is dead, and I am going to attempt to replace him and God with myself?”27 This letter is interesting for a few reasons. Not only is it clear that Altizer did not communicate well that his theology is not an atheism but a new way of thinking about God, even if it is a rejection of the traditional models of God. Beyond this, Altizer’s thinking might be tolerable if it were taught from the philosophy department, that there should be something uniquely Methodist about teaching religion at a Methodist college. Jim Waits, a young Methodist minister serving as an associate pastor at the newly-merged Grace United Methodist in Blue Island, Illinois, while pur- suing doctoral work at the University of Chicago, published a sermon during the same week on the death of God theology in The Mississippi Methodist Advocate. Waits clearly understood Altizer’s theology, even if he disagreed with it, but used Altizer’s ideas as a springboard to ask not whether God is dead but rather which God is dead. Waits concludes with a meditation on apophatic theology as the theology of the “living God,” that “God can die in many ways,” whither God’s death in us, he preached, “is the question.”28 Waits would later become Dean of Emory’s Candler School of Theology from 1978-1991. Dow Kirkpatrick of First Methodist in Evanston, Illinois, would offer a similar sermon: “Whatever the radical theologians mean, I say, the God which is worshiped so broadly these days, especially during Christmas, needs killing. The greatest affirmation faith can make is to declare to our time that he is dead.”29 Third Wave of Criticism: Spring, 1966 The Time cover story of April 8, 1966, continued the Altizer controversy among Methodists, but by now Altizer was famous outside of ecclesiastical circles. Just two weeks before this infamous issue, Time ran a story on the 100th anniversary of the University of Chicago, describing Swift Hall Library as the location of Altizer’s discovery of the death of God, and in the very next sentence mentioned that Methodists are the dominant denomi-

27 Circle No. 1, WSCS, The Marks Methodist Church (Marks, Mississippi), letter to Thomas Altizer, January 17, 1966. Thomas Altizer Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Syra- cuse University Library. 28 Jim Waits, “An Inquiry into the Death of God,” The Mississippi Methodist Advocate ns 19.8 (Feb. 9, 1966): 6-7. 29 Dow Kirkpatrick, “A Sermon on the Death of God,” Christian Advocate ns (Feb. 24, 1966) 12. Methodist Heretic: Thomas Altizer 45 nation represented at the University’s Divinity School.30 Altizer’s personal life became of interest—the May, 1966, issue of The Episcopalian described Altizer baptizing his son, who was born prematurely “as provided for in the Book of Common Prayer.”31 District Superintendants, countless pastors, Chairs of church boards, sent numerous letters and resolutions to Altizer requesting that he leave Emory University. Theosophical Societies even felt the need to respond publicly to Altizer’s ideas.32 James Bales, an evangelical professor at Harding College (Searcy, Arkansas) wrote to Altizer numerous letters requesting a public debate, which Altizer initially refused.33 Countless pastors then jointly sent a 40-foot telegram to Altizer demanding a debate, claiming that Bales had not read his books. A debate was eventually scheduled but was then canceled. Altizer would later debate evangelist and apologist John Montgomery at the University of Chicago, published as The Altizer-Montgomery Debate (1967), and was scheduled to debate Billy Graham on national television, but Graham stepped out of the debate at the last minute. Within a year, however, the controversy had died down. A friendly letter to Altizer from David Parke, minister at the Unitarian Church in Germantown, Pennsylvania, refers to a “self-imposed ban on preaching”; Altizer had cooled down his rhetoric and less attention came.34 William Cannon, who would later be elected Bishop and an ardent supporter of Altizer at Emory, wrote a letter to Altizer that “there is a great deal more awkwardness about your position in the University than appears on the surface”:

a. There are colleagues here . . . who are not as protected as you.

b. On quite other grounds, the one difficult position for Mr. Atwood as President of Emory is his relation to the Methodist Church. It appears to me that in view of the support you have received from him, it is appropriate to try to present your views in such a way that they will not at this time intensify the pull between him and the church.

c. In this connection, it seems to me that public controversy with extreme conservatives is not likely to be helpful. [This] can and will stir up the church.

d. Quite apart from this specific situation, I do not know whether you realize the extent to which the administrative machinery of the University has been occupied with the “Altizer question.” It is problematical how long this can and, for that matter, ought to continue . . . .

30 “Chicago at 100,” Time (25. March 1966), accessed online. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,842555,00.html 31 “Rumors are Flying,” The Episcopalian (May 1966), 38-39. Thomas Altizer Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library. 32 Richard Sattleberg, “Is God Dead? A Theosophical Reply,” The Canadian Theosophist (May- June 1966): 28-30. Thomas Altizer Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library. 33 James Bales, Letters and telegram to Thomas Altizer, 1965. Thomas Altizer Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library. 34 David Parke, Letter to Thomas Altizer, Jan. 11, 1968. Thomas Altizer Papers, Special Collec- tions Research Center, Syracuse University Library. 46 Methodist History

e. Many people . . . have spoken up for your academic freedom . . . . It is harder for such people to defend you if you move out to a wider public. f. As you can see [from recent publications], you are easy to misinterpret when you appear in the news.

g. Personally I am concerned that when your book appears, this will be regarded as an academic event. The final point referred to Altizer’s following book,The Gospel of Christian Atheism, published later that year. Cannon concludes, “[t]hese remarks are simply a personal reaction.”35 The Gospel of Christian Atheism was an event, but few actually read and understood Altizer’s ideas. The following year, in 1967, Altizer admitted in an interview for a regional magazine: “Today I’m no longer the bad boy of theology. Today I feel like the invisible man.”36 The “death of God” came and went as a national headline; few understood what Altizer was really saying, and now even less people even acknowledged that it had happened. Between semesters of that academic year, another article appeared in Time discussing the new field of religion and literature, Altizer is named as one of the few professors in the U.S. who is teaching this new subject to undergraduate students. In that coming spring semester, the magazine reported that Altizer “will lecture on the artistic expression of nihilism, concentrat- ing on Baudelaire, Kazantzakis and Nietzsche” at “the Methodists’ Emory University”—even Altizer’s syllabi had become newsworthy on a national level.37 At the end of that academic year, however, Altizer announced his departure from Emory for a position in the English department at SUNY-Stony Brook. Altizer left on good terms with the undergraduate college of Emory University, but his presence made divisions among the faculty at Candler School of Theology more acute. W. Paul Jones, a philosophical theologian at Saint Paul School of Theology, wrote in a letter to Altizer that “[y]ou have certainly failed to receive any support from the theological seminary at Emory.” Continuing, “if your change of jobs and vocational positions is the result of pressures on you as a theologian, I am deeply disturbed.”38 At the end of the academic year, in July, 1968, the Southeastern Jurisdictional Conference met at Lake Junaluska, North Carolina, and unani- mously passed a “Petition Regarding Church Literature,” resolving “that all Church-schools and Seminaries be asked to hire only those whose teachings will be (at least) friendly to the theology that is known as Wesleyan.” The document continues, “[t]o be open-minded and tolerant is one thing, but to

35 William Cannon, Letter to Thomas Altizer, Feb. 28, 1966. Thomas Altizer Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library. Cf. Frederick Mills, “William Rags- dale Cannon,” New Georgia Encyclopedia, accessed online. http://www.georgiaencyclopedia. org/nge/Article.jsp?id=h-1602&hl=y. 36 Betsy Fancher, “Altizer: Two Years after the Death of God,” Atlanta 7.7 (Nov. 1967), 51. 37 “Literature in the Divinity School,” Time (Dec. 22, 1967), accessed online. http://www.time. com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,899931,00.html. 38 W. Jones, Letter to Thomas Altizer, Sep. 6, 1968. Thomas Altizer Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library. Methodist Heretic: Thomas Altizer 47 hire persons to destroy what we profess to believe, under the guise of scholarship is heresy.” Finally, it states: “Our people are tired of scholarship. They would now like to hear something about the Word of the Lord.”39 Conclusions The controversy launched Emory into the national spotlight, even if the attention was not always welcome by the Methodists. Emory’s defense of Altizer as a case of academic freedom made Emory an example of a respectable church-related national university during a time when many universi- ties were abandoning their church connections for academic prestige and stature.40 Today Emory’s alumni publications concede the Altizer ‘incident’ a key moment in the university’s history.41 The controversy also launched a national public debate and forum on Christian theology in the electronic media that would not return until the Jeremiah Wright-Barack Obama controversy in 2008. That said, Altizer’s failure to communicate his ideas to a popular audience, using the hyperbolic scholarly language of Nietzsche and Hegel, would alienate both the popular and church audiences from academic theology. Most stunning of these is the democratic empowerment of the laity in theological conversation. The fact that local women’s groups and church boards felt that they had a voice in personnel matters at the Methodist college speaks volumes about the democratic understanding of church membership. Perhaps the most significant missed opportunity was the engagement of theology with young people in the Methodist churches; instead of dialogue, declarations of heresy ended the discussion. That being said, it is surprising how influential Altizer was on young Methodists. Motive magazine covered the “death of God” theologians in the manner which popular magazines cover rock stars, and the Methodist-related magazine received national attention for its humorous obituary for God.42 Numerous colleges and Wesley Foundations—including Otterbein College,

39 Journal of the Eighth Session of the Southeastern Jurisdictional Conference of The United Methodist Church, ed. W. Wilson (Baltimore: Methodist Publishing House, 1968), 259. 40 See, for example, the profile of Emory’s President Atwood in “On the Move inthe South,” Time (Dec. 17, 1965), accessed online. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,834819,00.html. 41 Paige Parvin, “The Revolutionary,” Emory Magazine (Autumn 2006), 16-17; Gary Hauk’s discussion of Altizer from A Legacy of Heart and Mind (Atlanta: Emory, 1999) is featured on Emory University’s history website (http://emoryhistory.emory.edu/enigmas/GodIsDead.htm). See also Patrick Gray, “‘God is Dead’ Controversy,” The New Georgia Encyclopedia, accessed online. http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/Article.jsp?id=h-861. 42 Anthony Towne, “God is Dead in Georgia,” Motive 26.5 (1966), 74. Some articles on the death of God in Motive: Fred Hudson, “Four Meanings of the Death of God,” Motive 26.7 (1966): 20-33; Steve Weissman, “New Left Man Meets the Dead God,” Motive 27.4 (1967): 20- 30; Ray Karras, Reviews of The Gospel of Christian Atheism and The New Apocalypse, Motive (Nov. 1967): 52-54; Thomas Oden, “Radical Theology,” Motive 28.3 (1967): 14-17; Anthony Towne, “Excerpts from the Diaries of the Late God,” Motive 28.7 (1968): 46-48. Cf. “A Jester for Wesleyans,” Time (Oct. 21, 1966), accessed online. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/ article/0,9171,836518,00.html. 48 Methodist History

Indiana University, Southwestern College (Kansas), the University of Denver, Nebraska Wesleyan University, University of Delaware, Auburn University, and the Oxford Institute on Methodist Theological Studies—invited Altizer to speak.43 Numerous letters came to Altizer from teenagers and college students asking for more information or in praise of his ideas. The Association of College and University Ministers of The Methodist Church passed a resolution (submitted by John Jordan, Edward Mack, and Sidney Tate) at their late November to early December meeting in Lincoln, Nebraska, stating that “[w]e commend those institutions which have sustained” academic freedom, calling for its “active defense by presidents, deans, trustees, and faculties as the responsibility of the church-related college or university.”44 The resolution was sent to Emory President Sanford Atwood by Eugene Ranson.45 The “members of the Thirteenth Annual Undergraduate Philosophy Conference” at the University of Chattanooga passed a resolution with 27 signatures “in defense of academic freedom in the case of Dr. T. J. J. Altizer,” that “Emory’s actions in defense of Dr. Altizer’s right to express his views reveal a sound understanding of the purposes of a university.”46 Emory students wrote letters to Time; Richard Fife wrote:

We students of Emory who deeply admire and respect Dr. Thomas Altizer are ap- palled at the righteous indignation provoked by your article. Throughout the South, churches have preached against this theology and condemned this man as a heretic. Those of us who know Dr. Altizer consider him a sincere Christian. The statement “God is Dead” is no longer atheistic. It implies that God once lived, and if he is no longer available to man, it is because man long ago chose to forsake God. This departure is evident in the widespread lack of morality. Those who denounce Dr. Altizer the loudest are generally those for whom God has been long dead.47 The Board of Education of The Methodist Church’s 1965 Annual Report was perhaps the first official ecclesiastical recognition of the “death of God” movement. Instead of declaring it heretical, the Board’s response was to take the theologians seriously as a renewed call for mission to understand the changing spiritual location of teenagers and young people in American society.48 In an invitation for Altizer to speak, Robert Scheiler, Chaplain at

43 Letters to Thomas Altizer from Max Hale (Nov. 18, 1965), Otterbein College (1966), the Wesley Foundation, Indiana University (May 25, 1966), Douglas Moore (April 12, 1966), Bar- bara Junceau (22. July 1966), Frederick Blumer (Sep. 24, 1966), Leland Hall (Jan. 16, 1967), Dow Kirpatrick (May 20, 1969). Thomas Altizer Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library. 44 “Minutes of the Biennial Seminar of the Association of College and University Ministers of The Methodist Church, November 29-December 2, 1965,” GHAC/UMC Collection, Drew U. 45 A copy of this is in the Thomas Altizer Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library. 46 The Thirteenth Annual Undergraduate Philosophy Conference, University of Chattanooga, Letter to Sanford Atwood. Thomas Altizer Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Syra- cuse University Library. 47 Richard Fife, Letter to the Editor, Time (Nov. 12, 1965), accessed online. http://www.time. com/time/printout/0,8816,834535,00.html. 48 Annual Report, Board of Education, The Methodist Church, 1965 (The Methodist Church, 1965) 9. Methodist Heretic: Thomas Altizer 49

Elmhurst College wrote to Altizer that “[w]e think one of the tasks of the church-related college in our day is to confront the students, faculty, and administrative members with the best contemporary theological thought and its relation to life.”49 The inability of the church-related college to speak, or even theologically respond, to the death of God controversy demonstrates the generational divide that emerged in the late 1960s. The death of God theology at once coincided with this generational divide and was perhaps indicative of it. Patrick Green, campus minister at the University of Texas’ Wesley Foundation wrote to Altizer in a letter of support, “Don’t let the bastards grind you down!”50 When Altizer left Emory for Stony Brook, philosophical theology largely disappeared from church-related divinity schools: interest declined and it proved to be too controversial. Even Time reported in a fol- low-up report of the death of God theology that the discussion of philosophical theology and ontology had disappeared from the popular landscape while “Thomas Altizer . . . is quietly teaching English on Long Island.”51 Altizer spent the rest of his career teaching in an English department and continued to publish. The Altizer “incident” also became part of the ideological divide between “liberals” and “conservatives” in 1970s United Methodism, as it was portrayed as a key episode in Methodist seminaries’ inability to effectively educate clergy in Edmund Robb’s famous 1975 address to the sixth annual Good News Convocation in Lake Junaluska, North Carolina, titled “The Crisis of Theological Education in the United Methodist Church.”52 Alitzer wrote of his time at Emory in his 2006 memoir, Living the Death of God, a revealing look behind the scenes at Emory in the 1960s. While discussing his first book,Mircea Eliade and the Dialectic of the Sacred (1963), Altizer describes:

It was written while I was teaching at Emory University in Atlanta, where I came under the impact of Walter Strauss, Gergor Sebba, and John Cobb, and also under the impact of the New Testament scholars William Beardslee, James Robinson, Robert Funk, Norman Perrin, and Hendrik Boers, all of whom became progressively radical while at Emory. It was as though Emory was a truly radical center, or surely it was so theologically. Such an environment would be impossible to imagine today, but that was a time of breakthrough theologically, and above all so in America, that new America which at that very time was becoming the dominant power in the world. If America was now the new Rome, we sensed that a deep destiny had been thrust upon us. Most concretely, theology had to be liberated from its deeply European ground, and this surely occurred in a uniquely American Bultmannianism, one dissolving if

49 Robert Scheiler, Letter to Thomas Altizer, June 6, 1967. Thomas Altizer Papers, Special Col- lections Research Center, Syracuse University Library. 50 Patrick Green, Letter to Thomas Altizer, Jan. 26, 1966. Thomas Altizer Papers, Special Col- lections Research Center, Syracuse University Library. 51 “Is ‘God is Dead’ Dead?” Time (May 2, 1969), accessed online. http://www.time.com/time/ magazine/article/0,9171,900815,00.html. Time would also run a counterpoint to its “Is God Dead” cover on Dec. 26, 1969, with the words “Is God coming back to life?” This cover may be accessed online at http://www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19691226,00.html. 52 Edmund Robb, “The Crisis of Theological Education in the United Methodist Church,” accessed online. http://www.goodnewsmag.org/renewal/robb_speech.htm. 50

not reversing the neo-orthodox ground of modern European theology. Emory was the center of this radical Bultmannianism . . . .53 Altizer wrote in a letter to the editor of Emory Magazine that “I continue to be grateful” for “the deep support which I once received from Emory at a time of public furor,” “but it is important to remember that Emory was then a radical center and I hope that this will never be lost.”54 Yet the legacy remains that no academic theologian since Altizer has commanded national media attention nor been part of a national debate or controversy since. All of the radical theologians kept writing, but even The Christian Century stopped reviewing their books, as if there was an intentional effort to kill the conversation; Mike Grimshaw has powerfully demonstrated how The Christian Century’s historical appraisals of itself have since erased any memory of the death of God debate, as if it never happened.55 Even though many of today’s major contemporary Continental philosophers of religion—Slavoj Žižek, John Caputo, and Richard Kearney—are actively engaging Altizer’s theology, none teach in theological seminaries. The history of Altizer’s tenure at Emory and his reception as a theologian suggests that the Methodists’ response poses a theological problem: Why did so many people react with such deep passion to a theology they clearly could not understand? Could it be that their abject reaction to a theology of the death of God was that Altizer was speaking the unspeakable in the American South as the “last straw” between the established mainline church and the practice of theology, so as to render philosophical theology to be irrelevant to the training of clergy and the proclamation of the faith ever since?

53 Thomas Altizer, Living the Death of God (Albany, NY: SUNY UP, 2006), 11. 54 Altizer, Letter to the Editor, Emory Magazine (Winter 2007), accessed online. http://www. emory.edu/EMORY_MAGAZINE/winter2007/letters.htm. 55 Mike Grimshaw, “Did God Die in The Christian Century?”Journal of Cultural and Religious Theory 6.3 (2005): 7-23. http://www.jcrt.org/archives/06.3/grimshaw.pdf. Methodist History, 49:1 (October 2010)

Mission in Methodist Perspective Some Personal Deliberations

Helmut Nausner Methodism began as a missionary movement in the eighteenth century. John and Charles Wesley, two Anglican priests trained and educated in Ox- ford were the charismatic leaders of this movement. They were brothers, sons of an Anglican priest, Samuel, and his wife Susanna. Both wanted to be missionaries to the Native Americans in America. They spent some time in Georgia but had few opportunities to meeting native people. John Wesley gave a short account in his Journal of a conversation with the Indian chief Tomichichi in Georgia on February 14, 1736. The Journal quotes Tomoch- ichi’s greeting to Wesley:

I am glad you are come. When I was in England I desired that some would speak the Great Word to me. And my nation then desired to hear it. But now we are all in confusion. Yet I am glad you are come. I will go up and speak to the wise men of our nation. And I hope they will hear. But we would not be made Christians as the Spaniards make Christians. We would be taught before we are baptized. For the Wesleys it became clear that in mission no violence should be involved. The key text that supported the Roman Catholic mission in the Americas by the Conquistadors was Luke 14:23 in the story of the great supper where the Master after the many excuses of his invited guest says to his servants: Go out on the streets and bring in whomever you meet and “compel them to come in.” This phrase “compel them to come in” was interpreted as justifying the use of violence to make people disciples of Christ. With this mission concept John Wesley was confronted in meeting the Indian chief Tomichichi. What myriads of blood were shed in the name of our savior, Jesus Christ! John Wesley comments in his Explanatory Notes Upon the New Testament on Luke 14:23: “With all the violence of love, and the force of God’s Word. Such compulsion, and such only, in matters of religion, was used by Christ and His apostles.” In his sermon on enthusiasm he follows this line by saying:

Do not imagine that God has called you . . . to destroy men’s lives, and not to save them. Never dream of forcing men into the ways of God. Think yourself and let think. Use no constraint in matters of religion. Even those who are farthest out of the way never “compel to come in” by any other means than reason, truth, and

The Works of John Wesley, vol. 18, Journals and Diaries (1735-1738),W. Reginald Ward and Richard Heitzenrater, eds. (Nashville: Abingdon, 1988), 149. John Wesley, Explanatory Notes Upon the New Testament (London: Epworth Press [Frank H. Cumbers], 258); henceforth cited as Notes. 51 52 Methodist History

love. These insights are still valid. Who ever is engaged in mission, this person should know and take to heart that the only means in trying to win people for God‘s kingdom are reason, truth, and love. The second point is the way Wesley related his missionary enterprise to the established church in England and to later Methodists to other churches. According to Dr. Albert C. Outler’s brilliant address, “Do Methodists Have a Doctrine of the Church?”, John Wesley’s conversion experience at Alders- gate was just one important step in his spiritual development. He discovered his true vocation in Bristol, almost a year later, when he reluctantly accepted the invitation of George Whitefield to take over his mission of preaching in the open air. Wesley preached at several places around Bristol where thousands of people gathered eagerly listening and apparently hearing the gospel in his preaching. Lives were changed. The revival has begun. John Wesley himself was changed through this experience. Professor Outler sums this up by saying:

Up to this point the story is full of anxiety, insecurity, [and] futility. Hereafter, the instances of spiritual disturbances drop off sharply and rarely recur, even in the full records of a very candid man . . . . At Aldersgate he had passed from virtual to real faith, from hoping to having. Edwards and Whitefield had shown him that the word rightly preached bears visible fruit. And now, before his eyes, was a harvest of such fruit. What happened was that he had preached faith until others had it, and now his own was confirmed by theirs! For the next half-century, in failure and triumph, tumult and peace, obloquy and fame, the picture rarely varies: a man with an over- mastering mission, acutely self-aware but rarely ruffled, often in stress but always secure on a rock-steady foundation.

Before Wesley began his preaching in the open air he wrote a letter to a former Oxford Methodist colleague, the Rev. John Clayton, who has criticized him for “intermeddling in another’s office” and “assembling Christians who are none of [your] charge to sing psalms and pray and hear the Scrip- tures expounded thinking it hard to justify doing this in other men’s parishes, upon catholic principles.” Wesley answered:

Permit me to speak plainly. If by catholic principles you mean any other than scriptural, they weigh nothing with me. I allow no other rule, whether of faith or practice, than the Holy Scriptures. But on scriptural principles I do not think it hard to justify whatever I do. God in Scripture commands me, according to my power, to instruct the ignorant, reform the wicked, confirm the virtuous. Men forbid me to do this in another’s parish; that is, in effect, to do it at all. Whom then shall I hear? God or man? “If it be just to obey man rather than God, judge you.” (Acts 5:29) “A dispen- sation of the gospel is committed to me, and woe is me if I preach not the gospel.” (1 Cor. 9:16-19) But where shall I preach it upon the principles you mention? Why, not in Europe, Asia, Africa, or America; not in any of the Christian parts, at least, of the habitable earth. For all these are, after a sort, divided into parishes. If it be said, “Go back then to the heathens from whence you came,” nay, but neither could

The Works of John Wesley, vol. 2, Sermons II, Albert Outler, ed. (Nashville: Abingdon, 1985), 59. Albert Outler, John Wesley, Albert Outler, ed. (New York: Oxford UP, 1964), 17-18. Mission in Methodist Perspective 53

I now (on your principles) preach to them; for all the heathens in Georgia belong to the parish either of Savannah or Fredricia. Suffer me now to tell you my principles in this matter. I look upon all the world as my parish; thus far I mean, that in whatever part of it I am, I judge it meet, right, and my bounden duty to declare unto all that are willing to hear the glad tidings of salvation. This is the work which I know God has called me to. And sure I am that his blessing attends it. Great encouragement have I therefore to be faithful in fulfilling the work he hath given me to do. His servant I am, and as such am employed (glory be to him) day and night in his service. Wesley shows the universality of the gospel. The gospel is meant to be shared with everybody, “for God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son . . .” (John 3,16). But at the same time the respect of the freedom of the individual person is expressed: “. . . all that are willing to hear the glad tidings of salvation.” No attempt to manipulate or overrun the listener. Wesley had to defend this position against critics almost all his life, but his position was clear. He argued in support of his lay assistants’ and his role: we are “. . . messengers of God to those who are Christians in name but heathens in heart and life, to call them back to that from which they are fallen, to real, genuine Christianity.” He could answer clerical protests that this involved the invasion of other men’s parishes by pointing to his own collegiate ordination in Oxford which has given him an extra parochial license. This license he extended to his lay preachers—for preaching and teaching only, not for the administration of the sacraments. Methodist preachers in all European countries were not believed that they just wanted to call people from a state of unbelief to “real, genuine Christi- anity.” In all European countries, church territories have been defined and divided into parishes so the approach of Methodist preachers was considered more or less as invasion. But Methodism was never interested in expanding church territories, it never owned such. Methodism existed and lived by the love of many individual persons who have experienced the joy of being saved by God’s love and grace and having received new life in forgiveness of sins and then were living to God in holiness and righteousness all the days of their life. By preaching the gospel regardless of church territories or parishes they reminded the established or national churches that having defined church territories and parishes this doesn’t say anything about the need of the people or the spiritual quality of their lives. The thousands of miners who flocked to hear John Wesley preach didn’t care about parishes. They never were in church before and were totally estranged from the church. There is another important aspect I want to mention. It was never a tendency in Methodism to condemn or judge other religious groups or churches.

The Works of John Wesley, vol. 25, Letters I, 1721-1739, Frank Baker, ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 615-616. John Wesley, A Preservative Against Unsettled Notions in Religion (1758), quoted by Albert Outler in John Wesley, Albert Outler, ed. (New York: Oxford UP, 1964), 20. Outler observed, “Wesley seems to have held the view that his Oxford ordinantion conferred on him the ius ubique praedicandi, the right of preaching everywhere” (Outler, John Wesley, 21). See Luke 1:75. 54 Methodist History

In the Large Minutes the question was raised: Are we not Dissenters? And the answer was:

No: although we call sinners to repentance in all places of God‘s dominion: and although we frequently use extemporary prayer, and unite together in a religious society; yet we are not Dissenters in the only sense which our law acknowledges, namely, those who renounce the service of the Church. We do not, we dare not, separate from it. We are not Seceders, nor do we bear any resemblance to them. We set out upon quite opposite principles. The Seceders laid the very foundation of their work in judging and condemning others; we laid the foundation of our work in judging and condemning ourselves. They begin every where with showing their hearers how fallen the Church and ministers are: we begin every where with showing our hearers how fallen they are themselves. In this spirit Wesley wrote and talked about the Church, the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church. In his sermon “Of the Church” (1785) he says: “The catholic or universal church is all the persons in the universe whom God has so called out of the world as to entitle them to the preceding character; as to be ‘one body,’ united by ‘one spirit’; having ‘one faith, one hope, one baptism; one God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in them all.’”10 In his understanding of the church believers in dissenting churches and even in the Roman-catholic church were not excluded. Wesley lived and showed an ecumenical attitude and spirit long before the ecumenical movement began. My third point is Wesley’s relation to the world. In the memorial service after the death of John Wesley which the Rev. Dr. Thomas Coke held in Bal- timore on May 1, 1791, and in Philadelphia on May 8, 1791, he summed up his detailed description of the immense work and contribution to the church universal Wesley has made with the Latin phrase Wesley contra mundum Wesley against the World.11 Wesley was not interested to bring individual parishes to new life (church growth programs would not have been supported by him because too much self centered) but saw his task to bring the gospel to the world. It makes a big difference if one looks at the world as his or her area of work or if your congregation and your church is your world. In the Large Minutes the question was raised, “What may we reasonably believe to be God’s design in raising up the preachers called Methodists?” And the answer given was: “Not to form any new sect; but to reform the nation,

“Minutes of Several Conversations between the Rev. Mr. Wesley and others; from the year 1744 to the year 1789,” The Works of the Rev. John Wesley, A.M., Third American Complete and Standard Edition from the latest London Edition with the last corrections of the Author by John Emory, vol. V (New York: Carlton & Phillips, 1853), 227. 10 The Works of John Wesley, vol. 3, Sermons III, Albert Outler, ed. (Nashville: Abingdon, 1986), 50. 11 Quoted by Martin Schmidt, John Wesley, Band II, Das Lebenswerk John Wesleys (Zürich: Gotthelf-Verlag, 1966), 413. This phrase was used in the old church to describe the role of bishop Athanasius. John Wesley himself uses this phrase in one of his last letters (February 24, 1791) to Wilberforce encouraging him to go on in his fight against slavery. Mission in Methodist Perspective 55 particularly the Church; and to spread scriptural holiness over the land.”12 The bishops Thomas Coke and Francis Asbury who published the Discipline of 1798 with explanatory notes used this phrase from the Large Minutes in their preface with a slight change. They wrote: “We humbly believe that God‘s design in raising up the preachers called Methodists, in America, was to reform the continent, and spread scripture-holiness over these lands.”13 They changed “nation” into “continent” and dropped the words “particularly the Church” because there was no church anymore, no established church in the new republic, but holiness was still at stake. Both clearly understood what they were called to and what their task was. The General Rules can be seen as an example how Wesley helped his people to live in this world a holy life:

First: By doing no harm, by avoiding evil of every kind, especially that which is most generally practiced . . . . Secondly: By doing good; by being in every kind mer- ciful after their power; as they have opportunity, doing good of every possible sort, and as far as possible, to all men . . . . Thirdly: By attending upon all the ordinances of God; such are: The public worship of God. The ministry of the Word, either read or expounded, The Supper of the Lord. Family and private prayer. Searching the Scriptures. Fasting or abstinence.14 All three rules belong essentially together, none can be lived and practiced without the other. There is always a tendency in human beings to pick out one of the rules and push the others in the background thus avoiding the tension that exists between these rules. But this tension is the heartbeat of Christian life. An eighty year old John Wesley wrote a sermon in 1783 on Isaiah 11:9: “The earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.” Later the sermon was given the title “The General Spread of the Gospel.” In this sermon Wesley expresses the hope that what God has done to individuals; he can do to nations also. “Now in the same manner as God has converted so many to himself without destroying their liberty, he can undoubtedly convert whole nations or the whole world.”15 John Wesley was convinced that “the holy lives of the Christians will be an argument they [the Muslims and other non-Christians] will not know how to resist; seeing the Christians steadily and uniformly practice what is agreeable to the law written in their own hearts, their prejudices will quickly die away, and they will gladly receive “the truth as it is in Jesus” (cf. Eph. 4:21).16 Whatever

12 “Minutes of Several Conversations between the Rev. Mr. Wesley and others; from the year 1744 to the year 1789,” The Works of the Rev. John Wesley, A.M., Third American Complete and Standard Edition from the latest London Edition with the last corrections of the Author by John Emory, vol. V (New York: Carlton & Phillips, 1853), 212. 13 The Methodist Discipline of 1798 including the Annotations of Thomas Coke and Francis Asbury, facsimile ed. Frederick Norwood, ed. (Rutland, VT: Academy Books, 1979), III. 14 The Book of Discipline of the United Methodist Church 2008 (Nashville: The United Metho- dist Publishing House, 2008), 72-74. 15 The Works of John Wesley, vol. 2, Sermons II, Albert Outler, ed. (Nashville: Abingdon, 1985), 490. 16 The Works of John Wesley, 496. 56 Methodist History we might think about Wesley’s vision no one will deny that the world and each nation in it needs people whose lives are determined by “experimental knowledge and love of God, by inward and outward holiness.”17 At least John Wesley had great expectations toward God, and he taught his people to expect much from God. The General Rules are misunderstood if they are not seen in the light of one sentence in the opening paragraph defining Methodist societies as “a company of men having the form and seeking the power of godliness.”18 Still, every person on the way to ordained ministry who wants to become a member of an Annual Conference will be asked the question: “Do you expect to be made perfect in love in this life?”19 It is a kind of tragedy that this question was inaccurately translated in the German translation of the Discipline. Almost until the end of the twentieth century the question, translated back into English, read “Do you expect to become perfect in love in this life?” The biblical supported expectation toward God was omitted. How much of such expectation toward God is still alive in our church? Do you expect anything from God? Or do you consider yourself a selfmade person in every aspect? Since General Conference 1996 the phrase of “making disciples” is used in defining the role of the local church and the whole church as such. Here again translation is misleading. “Making disciples” communicates an understanding as if it is our doing; as we make money and make cars so we make disciples. In 1999, I wrote a little study on “making disciples.” I quote from that work:

Scripture is clear that this change is accomplished by God. In John 3:3, Jesus speaks about being born again. John Wesley comments: “In this solemn discourse, our Lord shows that no external profession, no ceremonial ordinances, or privileges of birth, could entitle any to the blessings of the Messiah‘s kingdom: that an entire change of heart, as well as of life, was necessary for that purpose; that this could only be wrought in man by the almighty power of God.” And in 2 Corinthians 5:17, where Paul speaks about the new creation that happens within those who are in Christ Jesus, Wesley comments: “There is a new creation—only the Power that makes a world can make a Christian.” John Wesley could clearly distinguish between what only God can do and what we as believers and followers of Jesus are called to do. In the preface of his Explanatory Notes Upon the New Testament he informs the reader on what principles he has translated and which other theologians he has consulted and quoted, he also mentions how scripture was used to “inflame the hearts of Christians against each other.” And then he describes a touching ecumenical vision, “Would to God that all the party names and unscriptural phrases and forms which have divided the Christian world were forgot, and that we all agree to sit down together, as humble, loving disciples, at the feet of our common Master, to hear His word, to imbibe His spirit, and to tran-

17 The Works of John Wesley, 493. 18 The Book of Discipline of the United Methodist Church 2008 (Nashville: The United Method- ist Publishing House, 2008), 72. 19 The Book of Discipline of the United Methodist Church 2008, 235. Mission in Methodist Perspective 57 scribe His life in our own!”20 I think that we still can learn much from our father in faith, John Wes- ley.

20 Notes, 8. Methodist History, 49:1 (October 2010)

BOOK REVIEWS

Jeffrey Williams, Religion and Violence in Early American Methodism: Taking the Kingdom by Force. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 2010. 228 pp. $34.95.

Jeffrey Williams’s study is an engaging and in some ways a brave book, one that may be easily misunderstood. Like many of the other volumes in the elegant monograph series, Religion in North America (edited by Catherine L. Albanese and Stephen J. Stein and including subjects ranging from colonial religious diversity, the Shakers, Mary Baker Eddy, and nineteenth-century spiritualism to Hopi and other Native American religious systems and modern American Buddhism), Religion and Violence in Early American Methodism is stylishly written and gets to its points quickly. In brief, Williams aims to show that studies of Wesleyan theology and early Methodist spirituality have consistently underestimated the place of violence in Methodist theological and cultural discourse, and the degree to which violence to the body as much as to the soul formed a key aspect of early Methodist experience on both sides of the Atlantic. This aspect, furthermore, was gradually abandoned in the nineteenth century as American Methodists rejected bodily religious struggles as an outdated ingredient of their now respectable faith, replacing it with a new faith in worldly vengeance culminating in the “social violence” of the American Civil War. In six succinct chapters, Religion and Violence in Early American Methodism traces Methodist concepts of violence over the long Methodist century from John Wesley’s early religious texts to the Civil War, that is from Methodism’s earliest beginnings to its triumphant dominance of the American religious scene in the mid-nineteenth century. For the purposes of his study, Williams defines “violence” asthe “ use of force in order to cause injury or harm to someone or something” (10, italics in original): including not only attacks on religious seekers by Satan and his minions, but also, in what will probably be the most controversial part of his argument, aggression by God to bring religious seekers to grace. In the first two chapters of the book, Williams explores Wesley’s employment of this traditional eschatology (religious violence) in his views on God’s interven- tions in ecstatic experience; Wesley’s attitudes toward war (social violence); his shifting responses to the American Revolution (sympathetic, neutral, and finally predicting the triumph of godliness over the evils of American disobe- dience); and American Methodist responses to the American Revolution and the preachers’ independence from their spiritual leader. In chapters three, four, and five, Williams argues that American Methodists moved away from 58 Book Reviews 59 an understanding of God’s aggression on the struggling Christian to favor a more muted interpretation of spiritual experience, especially camp meetings. At the same time, Methodist theology assimilated to American national ideals of a unique, religiously inspired destiny which tolerated and even relished social violence against Indians on the frontier and vengeance against the enemy—southern or northern, depending on the perspective—in Lincoln’s war. Along the way, Methodists rejected Wesleyan notions of cosmic spiritual battles in favor of cosmic national battles against the evils of native paganism and the collapse of the union. In chapter six, Williams concludes his study with a thoughtful examination of the problem of religious violence, based on the work of Christian anthropologist Rene Girard and of sociologist Mark Juergensmeyer, author of Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (2000). Williams takes up especially Girard’s proposal that a belief in cosmic battles between good and evil—a substantial part of many world religious cosmolo- gies, including Christianity’s—may ironically serve to soften or replace violent worldly struggles conceived in much the same way, with resolution occurring on a supernatural rather than a natural plane. “Could religious adherents successfully preserve a belief in cosmic warfare between good and evil,” Williams asks at the end of the study, “while refusing to apply the battle’s absolutes to the temporal world? Only time and the significant efforts of those seeking to counteract religious violence will tell. For the sake of a world torn by violence, let us hope these efforts will inspire meaningful strategies to avoid following a very old tradition sacralizing violence” (177). Throughout his study, Williams provides nuanced discussions of key primary works—especially by John Wesley and later prominent Methodists, and he has consulted key secondary authorities, including: Russell Richey, Donald Mathews, Susan Juster, Richard Carwardine, Mark Noll, Gregory Schneider, Ann Taves, among others. At the same time, as is often the case in revisionist works, Williams uses his sources selectively. Almost all his quoted primary material comes from mainstream Methodist figures, rather than outliers like Peggy and Lorenzo Dow. Among secondary sources, A. Gregory Schneider’s The Way of the Cross Leads Home: The Domestication of American Methodism (1993) comes in for some heavy hitting, but Schneider’s study supports rather than differs from Williams’ regarding American Methodist theology’s retreat into domesticity after 1820. At the same time, Williams ignores other sources that would bolster his points or would be useful foils. Aaron Spencer Fogleman’s Jesus is Female: Moravians and the Challenge of Radical Religion in Early America (2007), a subject highly relevant to the Methodists, which concludes with several chapters on religious violence, is missing from Williams’s study. Christine Leigh Heyrman’s compelling and well known thesis, set out in Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt (1997), regarding the transformation of the physically wan, self-punishing evangelical itinerants of the Revolutionary era into conventional southern masters 60 Methodist History of the antebellum era, is unexplored. My own close study of Methodist spirituality in The Methodists and Revolutionary America, 1760-1800: The Shaping of an Evangelical Culture (2000)—including the role of religious eroticism in revivals and the distinctions among public rituals, private conversions, and social meetings—is overlooked in favor of some fairly minor points regarding Methodist combatants in the Revolution. My overall thesis, that Methodism provided a parallel route to happiness for many Americans in the Revolutionary era in competition with the largely masculine and often violent world of political republicanism until a more muscular evangelical culture replaced it, is also uncited, although Williams draws some of the same conclusions. But Religion and Violence in Early American Methodism raises directly or indirectly key questions that scholars of religion often avoid: and here’s where a careful rather than casual reading of Williams’s book is essential. Among these questions: What is the place of struggle and aggression in religious traditions, especially Christianity? How has the matter of bodily sac- rifice, at the center of the Christian story, played out among worshippers’ spirituality? Does it help or hurt for religions to have explicitly aggressive theologies regarding good and evil, or to believe in a punishing God, as well as a tempting Satan? When religions move away from a frank acceptance of physical and psychological pain, deriving from teaching on human depravity and the consequences of resisting God’s grace, do these common human concerns get displaced onto other secular struggles? And most difficult of all, can some understanding of American religious traditions help Americans come to terms with the sources of religious terrorism in the world today?

Dee E. Andrews, Ph.D. Professor California State University, East Bay Hayward, CA

William Kostlevy, Holy Jumpers: Evangelicals and Radicals in Progressive Era America. Oxford/New York: Oxford UP, 2010. 240 pp. $65.00.

In Holy Jumpers: Evangelicals and Radicals in Progressive Era Amer- ica, William Kostlevy engagingly traces the history and explores the inter- play of the “radicals” within the American Holiness Movement at the turn of the twentieth century. Ostensibly focusing on the Metropolitan Church Association (MCA) and its leaders Chicago businessmen-evangelists Edwin L. Harvey and Marmaduke “Duke” Farson, Kostlevy illuminates the fluidity and complexity of the Holiness Movement during this period. Kostlevy completed his dissertation, Nor Silver, Nor Gold: The Burn- ing Bush Movement and the Communitarian Holiness Vision (Department of History, Notre Dame), in 1996 and clearly has maintained an ongoing Book Reviews 61 interest in the subject. The result for the reader is a highly refined, up to date, and well presented argument. Though it helps to know a little about the Holiness Movement and its central characters, in some ways this volume offers an introduction to the subject that is relatively free of the inherent nar- rowness of perspective found in most denominational histories or individual biographies. In many respects there are two stories being told here. First, we find the story of the MCA, which includes their long-term effort at communal living and their highly influential and pace-setting periodical, the Burning Bush, with a circulation at its peak above one hundred thousand (93). Second, Kostlevy recounts the influence of the MCA on a veritable Who’s Who of both the Holiness Movement and early Pentecostalism. As Kostlevy puts it, “Holy Jumpers tells how a small but dedicated community of Christian radicals had a profound impact on the shaping of twentieth-century Ameri- can society . . . [and] helped launch and shape the worldwide Pentecostal Movement” (viii). One example of this impact is the MCA’s interaction with many founders of the Church of the Nazarene including early contact with evangelist Bud Robinson, future leader E. F. Walker, and theologian A. M. Hills; and extended relationships with theologian W. E. Shepard and Frank Messenger. Messenger, who for many years functioned as the manager of the MCA community in Waukesha, Wisconsin, and was editor of the Burn- ing Bush, left the MCA in 1913. In 1919, Messenger was elected chairman of the first General Board of the Church of the Nazarene. Also included in this story of interconnected influence and shifting allegiances are: B. T. Roberts and the Free Methodist Church; A. B. Simpson and the Christian and Missionary Alliance Church; Alma White and the Pil- lar of Fire; the Salvation Army; the National Holiness Association; Chicago Methodism; noted evangelists W. B. Godbey, Beverly Carradine, Seth Rees, L. L. Picket, and D. L. Moody; Martin Wells Knapp, leader of the “come- outer” movement, and H. C. Morrison, leader of the stay-in but proclaim the holiness message movement; Charles and Lettie Burd Cowman, founders of the Oriental Missionary Society; Charles Finney; Phoebe Palmer; Bor- den Parker Bowne; the Industrial Workers of the World; and the “Scripture calendars”—which are still distributed by funeral homes today. Eventually the MCA influence touched E. Stanley Jones and through him Martin Luther King, Jr. Yet the MCA’s most significant long-term ecclesial impact was on Pen- tecostalism via its influence in the lives and theology of Charles Parham, William Seymour, and especially A. G. Garr. Garr had been sent by the MCA to work in their Los Angeles mission. The MCA’s efforts were rather unsuccessful and Garr encouraged the faithful to shift their attendance to the nascent Azusa Street Mission. Garr himself was one of the earliest to speak in tongues at Azusa, and went on to “play a key role in the spread of the Pentecostal message to Asia, the evolution of Pentecostal thought, and the growing prominence of faith healing in Pentecostal life and experience” (127). Kostlevy cogently argues that, “Most elements of the [Pentecostal] 62 Methodist History revival, including demonstrative worship, its inter-racial character, and the Azusa Street Mission’s formulation of the fourfold gospel, coincide with Burning Bush practice and teaching” (133). While the MCA clearly was influential in the life and theology of early Pentecostalism they took issue with the revival’s divergence from their own perspective and were avowedly anti-tongues. Kostlevy identifies three elements of the MCA that set them apart: jump- ing in worship, the adoption of muckraking journalistic techniques in the Burning Bush, and their establishment of communal living (9-10). All three are adroitly examined. Regarding the third, Kostlevy recounts the process through which the MCA established two communities, the first, largest and longest enduring located in the Fountain Spring House in Waukesha, “with more than one thousand members at its height and lasting more than fifty years” (108). In his treatment of life in Waukesha, Kostlevy nicely intermin- gles personal accounts garnered from interviews he conducted with former residents, with the more staid facts regarding finances and leadership, ably fulfilling one of his stated goals of describing “the daily life they created as a foretaste of the coming reign of God on earth” (viii). One minor negative editorial critique is the use of endnotes. Kostlevy provides forty-five pages of excellent notes, many of which contain salient content and are as interesting as the text itself. Had these been footnotes the ease of integration of this material into the narrative would be greatly facilitated. For those who are looking for a readable treatment of the dynamic pro- cesses impacting the Holiness-Pentecostal movement during this critical period, this book will both answer many of your questions and likely force you to re-think what you thought you knew. It is highly recommended.

Kevin D. Newburg, Ph.D. Adjunct Faculty Drew University Madison, NJ

Kenneth Cain Kinghorn, The Heritage of American Methodism, 2nd ed. Lexington, KY: Emeth Press, 2009. 182 pp. $65.80.

It is one of the occupational hazards of regularly teaching the required denominational course on United Methodist history that one picks up every new book on Methodist history and thinks “Could I possibly use this as a text instead of Norwood?” (The “Norwood” being Frederick Norwood’s venerable History of American Methodism, which has left a generation of UM seminary students poised on the crest of a triumphalist Methodist wave, ready to conquer the world of the 1970s.) To my surprise—given its outward “coffee-table book” appearance—my answer regarding Kinghorn is “yes,” and I am currently undertaking the experiment of using the book as a text, in Book Reviews 63 combination with David Hempton’s Methodism: Empire of the Spirit. Kinghorn gives us in this book a relatively straightforward and traditional narrative of Methodist history: one in which Wesley, after Aldersgate, traded a rule-bound Anglicanism for a passionate conversionist Methodism, whose populist and free-form approach turned out to be perfectly suited to conquer the new American nation. While his presentation of the modern United Methodist Church is fairly positive, it strikes a certain note of mourn- fulness as well: “Public worship among earlier generations of Methodists had spontaneous testimonies and shouts of joy. Now, worship services used printed liturgies, and observed periods of silence” (133). The book aims to give an impression of the Methodist “ethos” rather than to be compre- hensive in its details, and includes topical chapters on education, worship, hymnology, evangelism, and missions, as well as separate discussions of the African-American and Evangelical United Brethren traditions (this “separate-but-equal” approach to these narratives plagues most Methodist historical surveys). This republication by Emeth Press is billed as a second edition, though the changes from the 1999 Abingdon publication are minor and mostly consist of substitutions in the artwork. The best feature of the book, and the main reason it makes Methodist history come alive for my students, is the rich collection of images Kinghorn has assembled—everything from photographs of historical sites to docu- ments and coins, to book covers, to pottery, to photographs and portraits of historical figures (one could wish for a few less of these by modern artists). In many cases these images are accompanied by historical sidebars which discuss individual biographies, significant events, and aspects of Methodist material culture—from communion rails to lovefeast cups to saddlebags. Too often Protestant history is narrated without reference to its “stuff,” and this book is a good reminder that we too have saints and holy objects. The images help, too, to immerse the reader in a story many modern United Methodists are not used to hearing—the story that we began as a rau- cous bunch of countercultural recruits on fire for the Gospel. As Kinghorn notes when discussing revivals, “During American Methodism’s early decades, evangelism was a prominent part of almost every public gathering . . . .When a preacher delivered an especially effective evangelistic message, people commonly said, ‘He preaches like a bishop’” (153). While there are details in Kinghorn’s narrative with which I would quibble, I think it is a healthier narrative for seminary students and local church members to hear as they consider the modern issues facing The UMC than the story of mainline respectability that Methodists have been telling ourselves in the last few decades. Reading this book will help begin the conversation of why we no longer praise folks for preaching like a bishop, and how we might start to do so again. Jennifer Woodruff Tait, Ph.D. Adjunct Faculty Asbury Theological Seminary Wilmore, KY Heritage Landmarks of The United Methodist Church

ALABAMA: Asbury Manual Labor School/Mission, Fort Mitchell DELAWARE: Barratt’s Chapel and Museum, Frederica FLORIDA: Bethune-Cookman College/Foundation, Daytona Beach GEORGIA : Town of Oxford, Oxford John Wesley’s American Parish, Savannah St. Simons Island, St. Simons Island Wesleyan College Cluster, Macon ILLINOIS: Peter Cartwright Church, Pleasant Plains Wesley Foundation, University of Illinois, Champaign KENTUCKY: Site of the Organization of the M.E. Church, South, Louisville MAINE: Cox Memorial United Methodist Church, Hallowell MARYLAND: Old Otterbein Church, Baltimore Robert Strawbridge House, New Windsor Cokesbury College Site, Abingdon Lovely Lane Meetinghouse Site, Baltimore United Brethren Founding Sites Cluster, Frederick & Washington Counties MASSACHUSETTS: Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society of the M.E. Church MISSOURI: Old McKendree Chapel, near Jackson NEW YORK: John Street Church, New York City New York Methodist Hospital, Brooklyn NORTH CAROLINA: Green Hill House, Louisburg Whitaker’s Chapel, Enfield OHIO: Bishop John Seybert/Flat Rock Cluster, near Flat Rock Hanby House, Westerville Wyandott Indian Mission, Upper Sandusky OREGON: Willamette Mission Site, near Salem PENNSYLVANIA: Albright Chapel, Kleinfeltersville Boehm’s Chapel, Willow Street First Church Blding & Publishing House, E. Assoc., New Berlin First United Methodist Church, Johnstown Isaac Long’s Barn, Lititz, St. George’s Church, Philadelphia Zoar United Methodist Church, Philadelphia SOUTH DAKOTA: Deadwood Cluster, Deadwood TENNESSEE: Acuff’s Chapel, Blountville Edward Cox House, Bluff City TEXAS: McMahan Chapel, San Augustine Rutersville Cluster, Rutersville VIRGINIA: Keywood Marker, Glade Spring Old Stone Church Site, Leesburg WEST VIRGINIA: Rehoboth Church and Museum, Union

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