George Whitefield, John Wesley and the Rhetoric of Liberty (original) (raw)
Related papers
Liberty and Loyalty: John Wesley's Political World
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.
This essay revisits John Wesley's A Calm Address to Our American Colonies in an attempt to contribute to the renewed interest in the global and transatlantic dimensions of the American Revolution, particularly its religious aspects. Mapping Methodist responses to the Revolution on both sides of the Atlantic may provide a helpful microcosm of responses in the broader religious world. It cautions against seeing Wesley's political views as extreme Toryism and draws on recent scholarship to demonstrate that Wesley supported a constitutional monarchy since its finely tuned balance of power between king, parliament and people needed only to be preserved in order for genuine liberty to prevail. The myth that Methodists destroyed copies of the Calm Address when they reached America in order to avoid being seen as Loyalists is disproved. Methodist responses to the Revolution were varied, ranging from strong opposition to active support, but Wesley's political views were not unusual in the hotly contested world of eighteenth-century rhetoric on liberty even if Methodists would distance themselves from them in the more politically reformist atmosphere of the nineteenth century.
Religion and the American Revolution
Since at least the time of Alexis de Tocqueville's mid-nineteenth century study of the American system, scholars have been intrigued by the connection between religion -Christianity and its various denominations -and the creation of the United States. One of the foremost subjects that historians have undertaken regarding this relationship is the dynamic between religion in the American colonies and the American Revolution.
‘Global history’ focuses on the cultural and social features of international relations. Themes covered by global history in its attempt to connect the ‘local’ with the ‘global’ have included race relations, colonisation, economic forces, migration, and human rights. Religion is an area of study that lends itself well to a global history approach because religious movements always depend upon transnational networks of piety for their spread and consolidation. W.R. Ward claimed that ‘the first great Protestant awakenings arose from an interweaving of pietism, revivalism, and politics.’ John Wesley’s political writings reflect on the impact of Britain’s global conflicts and provide insights into the political responses of the broader religious world of the eighteenth century. The notion of ‘liberty’ was a significant theme in the mentalities that dominated the Atlantic world of the long eighteenth century (1688-1815) and this paper will investigate the two overarching themes of ‘liberty’ and ‘loyalty’ that dominate Wesley’s political thought in order to provide insights into the political responses of the broader religious world of that period.
The Bible in Revolutionary America: A Guide to Human Nature and Human Government
Starting Points Journal, 2024
Most history textbooks trace American Revolutionary ideology to Enlightenment political philosophers and to republican principles drawn from classical history. This would strike Revolutionary Americans as odd, since hardly any of them could name an Enlightenment thinker or explain the basics of Roman republicanism, let alone explain how these relate to their support for the Patriot cause. Most Revolutionary Americans would point instead to the Bible as the source of their constitutional and political beliefs. Yet one is hard-pressed to find a textbook that identifies the Bible as a meaningful ideological influence on the American Revolution. This means that the most dominant force shaping Revolutionary Americans’ political convictions has become invisible to Revolutionary historians and students.