Liberty and Loyalty: John Wesley's Political World (original) (raw)

This paper was presented at the Manchester Wesley Research Centre session on ‘New Research on John Wesley and Methodism in the 18th and 19th Century,’ at the Meeting of the American Academy of Religion, Denver, 19 November 2018. It is a broad overview of themes in a monograph I have recently completed with the provisional title of Liberty and Loyalty: John Wesley’s Political World presently under peer review. It draws on material in the introductory and concluding sections of the book in order to highlight a number of findings in the work and therefore does not deal closely with the close examination of texts as the larger work does and has a minimum of footnotes. It argues that liberty and loyalty are the twin themes that help crystalize John Wesley’s political outlook. Liberty was a divinely given capacity to which every person had as much right as breathing. While the origin of political power lay with God, human governments had the responsibility to provide both civil and religious liberty. The surest guarantee of such liberty was through the ‘ancient constitution’ given its purest embodiment in the constitutional arrangements of the Glorious Revolution of 1688. A devout Protestant king would rule over a grateful people, while being held accountable to God and to the Parliament for his actions as a check on tyranny. This was a form of social contract and loyalty to that contract would check seditious and rebellious grabs for power. Sentiments expressed by republican voices in America masked more sinister ambitions – an overthrow of the ancient constitution of Britain to be replaced by a democracy of ‘the people.’ In the end, however, the hand of an all-wise Providence guided historical forces and the best response to political fluctuations was a personal one – to make God one’s friend through repentance and faith. John Wesley was not a politician or an economist or a military strategist. He was a priest and an evangelist, so that his political world ultimately existed as a subset of a world bounded by the cosmic drama of salvation.