“From Abolitionists to Fundamentalists: The Transformation of the Wesleyan Methodists in the 19th and 20th Centuries,” American Nineteenth Century History (October 2015). (original) (raw)
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An important aspect of John Wesley's ministry was his emphasis on education and its use as a tool for social reform. For example, eighteenthcentury Methodists established the Sunday School movement and expanded their educational mission by creating common schools when the need for children's general education became an English social concern. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the American Methodist Episcopal Church believed equal higher education for women was foundational to its evangelical mission and progressive social philosophy. As a result, American Methodists answered the need for collegiate and college preparatory education by establishing educational institutions designed to create a literate body of rational, evangelical Christian men and women who would provide moral and spiritual leadership in American society. Like many things Methodist, the mission was enthusiastic; one historian notes more than 200 Methodist schools named in denominational publications between 1835 and 1860, including more than thirty colleges, universities and theological seminaries (including a half dozen female colleges) granting students a four-year's collegiate course. 1 With notable exceptions in New England and the South, the Methodist project of higher education focused on settlements along the emerging western frontier, where the need for colleges was greater and class mobility more rapid. This was done self-consciously in light of an evangelical project that focused on bringing religion, morality, and literacy to the disorder of the frontier and a population ripe for evangelizing. Reflecting on the denomination's presence on the frontier,
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