Part II of “Methodism, Hymnals, and the Common People” continues the discussion of how Methodism, a revivalist sect imported from Great Britain to America, was a major force in what we might call modern evangelicalism, a new religious culture identified with America’s Western Revival of the early 1800s, and how hymnody played a major role in this development.
Methodism’s best hope for a promising future lies in the inclusion of the poor, the dispossessed, and that the music that grew out of revival culture is one of the better ways to make this happen.
In the fall of 1820 a 26-year old young man, Eli Farmer, who had served in the War of 1812 and had a reputation for fist fights (he had his ribs broken by Sam Houston) was converted at a Methodist camp meeting near Louisville, KY. At the same meeting he began exhorting others and “worked” the altar. It may take Catholic priests 12 years of training to be qualified to minister at the altar. It took Eli Farmer about 10 minutes. But, of course, in frontier religion, it was the filling of the Spirit that prepared one for ministry, not so much education.
When Farmer’s friends and neighbors were not responding to his Christian zeal, he moved to Indiana. He was sanctified at another camp meeting and entered Greene County to “form a new circuit” for the Methodists. Unlike other Methodist preachers he was not appointed by the bishop; he simply went on his own. When he had established a number of churches he presented his circuit to the annual conference. The conference received the churches and then licensed him to preach.
He was appointed to the Vermillion Circuit in Illinois. A 17-year-old young man affixed himself to Farmer, wanting to preach. Methodist preachers had a great deal of freedom in those days and Farmer took him on as a junior preacher for the circuit. In the spirit of the times, the younger preacher soon was into snake handling (which is usually associated with Pentecostals and the Appalachians some years later). It was a lawless area and Farmer, besides preaching at some established points on the circuit, was drawn to an area of outlaws and horse thieves and rough people identified as “the Creek Nation.” He proposed to enter the area to proclaim the gospel but was warned by friends and by the presiding elder not to, since he would probably lose his horse, if not his life. Farmer felt compelled to go anyway but with an interesting strategy. He would not be escorted by guards and ministerial cohorts. All he asked for was six women from the circuit to accompany him who could pray and were good at singing. The point was he would fight lawlessness not with guns and muscle but with the Spirit as expressed by women, who were becoming more and more an integral part of the revival subculture. According to Farmer’s own account Farmer preached, the women prayed and sang, and revival broke out, and a church was established. It would be interesting to know what songs the women sang, but Farmer does not tell us.
So the stories of Methodism and the west. Shortly after Farmer was appointed to the White Lick Circuit in Indiana and the following year to the Franklin Circuit south of Indianapolis. At White Lick he took in 350 new members (rounded numbers suggest preacher’s figures). The following year at Franklin Circuit he took in 550 new members. I do not believe I know of any churches, even megachurches, that can speak of 900 new members in two years.
But despite a number of successes Farmer is not recognized as one of the great figures of western Methodism. He had run-ins with “the authorities.” When he might have been preaching he ran for political office (and lost); he started and was distracted by a business; he traveled to Chicago to preach to the Indians. He traveled to the South to preach to the slaves. He started a newspaper that became the official organ for a new denomination, the Republican United Brethren. He eventually left Methodism because he believed the Methodists no longer cared about the poor. But his life exemplifies the growing cultural and social divide between many Methodists still on the fringes of society and those moving up the respectability scale.
Many establishment Methodists were not happy with the Eli Farmers of that era, or with their music. For them the gospel was supposed to lead to civilization and respectability and the finer things in life. A statement by Richard Wheatly, editor of the “official” M.E. hymnal of 1878, is revealing:
Lyrically, or hymnically, the Methodist Episcopal Church is demoralized to an extent that would call down the heartiest denunciation of John Wesley, and St. Paul too, could they enter upon a fresh tour of episcopal supervision. (Methodist Quarterly Review, 1879, p. 525).
Wheatly might well have been thinking of the music of a very popular Methodist camp meeting hymnal, The Revivalist (1868), which might be characterized as Methodism’s poor country cousin, reflecting a Methodism of camp meetings, log cabins, Sunday schools, mourner’s benches and homemade pulpits. Its Methodist music was exuberant, creative, crude, outlandish and quite different from anything associated with religious music. Much of it was folk music of unknown origins. Many of the hymns had no credits. Others said, “old tune,” or “western melody.” Methodists in the The Revivalist sang unabashedly about blood-stained banners, the coming Jubilee, gospel ships, gospel trumpets, gospel feasts, and coming chariots, golden harps, Beulah land, Salem’s happy ground and, of course, “troubles and trials.” They also sang Wesley (94 texts), and Isaac Watts (35 texts) but it was Wesley with a different, in frontier garb, with fuguing tunes (a complicated early American style), minor keys, ragged meters and added choruses. But, interestingly, many songs made popular by The Revivalist, would eventually become Methodist staples: “Jesus Loves Me,” Amazing Grace,” “Just As I Am Without One Plea,” “I Love to Tell the Story,” “Come, Every Soul by Sin Oppressed.”
About the time The Revivalist was popular, a Methodist Sunday school superintendent, Ira Sankey, became song leader for Dwight L. Moody, and started publishing his own hymn books. Ira Sankey’s Gospel Hymns 1 through 6, and their variations, sold, it is reported, 50 million copies in a period of about 100 years. Since many, probably most, Methodist churches were on circuits, and the appointed minister was present for Sunday worship services only once or twice a month, much of the real outreach of the church took place in love feasts, Sunday schools, and lay-led testimony meetings. It was here that gospel choruses constituted much of the worship.
Methodists learned their theology from their hymns, whether it was Wesley, or the gospel songs. While Presbyterians, Congregationalists and Episcopalians stressed worship and liturgical music, Methodist music emphasized the gospel: human sinfulness, God’s intervention through the blood of Christ, salvation by faith, and coming glory. In the 1890s E. S. Lorenz, head of music and hymnody for the United Brethren Church, in the preface to the Otterbein Hymnal commented that a distinguishing mark of the United Brethren and their music was revivalism. It is no wonder that American dictionaries would associate the word “evangelical” with the atonement, salvation by faith, and Methodism. For a long time a number of American dictionaries would associate the word “evangelical” with doctrines of the atonement, salvation by faith, and Methodism:
Evangelical – Of or having to do with the Protestant churches that emphasize Christ’s atonement and salvation by faith as the most important parts of Christianity, as the Methodists and Baptists. (Thorndike Barnhart Comprehensive Desk Dictionary, 1958)
The influence of the gospel song spread beyond the English-speaking communities. In 1910 some German-speaking churches–Mennonites, the German Reformed Church, and the Evangelical Association–published a hymnal Evangeliums-Gȁnger, which translated American revivalist and gospel songs into German. It is telling that 40% of the hymns were by women (The official Methodist hymnal at the time could count only 7% women). Fannie Crosby alone accounted for 41 of the hymns (she only got five in the Methodist hymnal). The whole hymnal was Methodist writers.
By this time, at the beginning of the 20th century, Methodism still dominated the American religious scene. In 1890, 18% of the American population was connected with some form of Methodism (Baptists only 9.4%) (figures from Finke and Starke, The Churching of America, 1776-1990). This percentage would decline rapidly with the rise of modernism, respectability and the establishment of seminaries in the early part of the 20th century. By 1926 the percentage of Baptists would overtake the percentage of Methodists as a part of American Protestantism.
Methodism was still thriving but it was not nearly as much in lockstep with denominational thinking as one might expect. In 1925 the Sunday School Board of the M.E. Church, South surveyed 2,209 Methodist churches to discover what primary hymnal was being used in Sunday schools. The results were discouraging: 111 different titles were listed. Eleven of the titles had some official Methodist connection, implying approval, but one hundred were gospel books from independent publishers. Only eight percent of the churches (179 of 2,209) used the 1905 Methodist hymnal. Thirty-three percent (737 of 2,209) used the Cokesbury Hymnal. No matter what hymnal was used Methodists understood themselves as marching under the banner of Asbury’s original charge to the American Methodists: You have nothing to do but save souls.
What conclusions might we draw from these discussions on Methodist music? 1) The religious culture of the western frontier and the Second Great Awakening, was largely the result of Methodist revivalism and its music, including the gospel hymn; 2) That religious culture was a bottom-up culture, not top-down, and was associated with poor people and people socially on the fringes of society; 3) As the 19th century progressed Methodism began to divide into two (or more) strands, the institutional or liberal establishment strand, and the revivalist, common people, strand, symbolized by the gospel hymn; 4) This divide exists even today and has been a factor in developments leading to division and reconciliation; 5) Further discussion on Methodist music might help us to heal some of our divisions.
(The next article, Part III of Methodist music and the divide, will address the influence of theological modernism on Methodist music and its divisions.)
Material on Eli Farmer is taken from the book, Faith and Fury Eli Farmer on the Frontier, 1784 – 1881, by Riley B. Case, Indiana Historical Society Press, 2018. For more information contact Riley B. Case
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