Methodist Retreat, British & American

The New Statesman, a progressive British magazine, posted a fascinating lament about the closure of a venerable British Methodist church where the author had been shaped spiritually, intellectually, politically and aesthetically by its Boy’s Brigade and Young People’s Fellowship. He wrote:

For the young, Methodism offered safe space and the prospect of each other. For the old, it offered exactly the same. For all its people, it offered a journey of hope. A form of religiosity without a priesthood, politics without politicians, anarchism without anarchists, when this sort of experience has finally gone, the people will have forgotten some of the arts of democracy while the politicians will have forgotten some of the arts of the people.

The author, noting that between 2021 and 2022 another 178 Methodist churches in Britain closed, observes:

In 1906 there were about 800,000 British Methodists. In 1960 there were still about 700,000, plus a lot of “adherents”. So, right into the postwar period that academics were beginning to call “secular”, the movement was holding its own. Now the number is down to about 148,000 (less than in Fiji) and the Brigade is down from 100,000 to 40,000. 

Nostalgically, the author recalls:

The 2021 census reported that Christians are now a minority in England and Wales. Back in the day, everyone knew who the Methodists were or where to find them. At the very least, they could point to a chapel, and nobody was surprised to learn that Nelson Mandela was a Methodist (among other things). Or Rosa Parks. Or Nina Simone. Or Ella Fitzgerald. Or Hillary Clinton. Or Scout Finch, in the novel. Or Clark Kent, in the comics. At home, Keir Hardie was a Methodist, as were four of the Tolpuddle Martyrs. The labour movement enjoyed a long and enduring relationship with Methodism, Primitive Methodism in particular. Margaret Thatcher’s Wesleyan Methodism is another story, but just as strong-minded.

Methodism wasn’t acknowledged by important people in Britain, the author stresses:

Everyday Methodism was unknown to the establishment, including the left, who saw it as a tin-roof organisation prone to pottiness and vulgarity. Yet, as in the trade unions, or the co-ops, mutuals and friendly societies, or the clubs, pubs and welfares, this was a society where men and women could feel more confident in themselves – in ways they would not have felt when dealing with “high-ups”, or bosses, or professional people (all of whose time was money). “Clubs” and “squashes’’, “fellowships” and “sisterhoods”, “packs” and “leagues”, choirs and Sunday schools, communion and “contact” groups – the names said it all in a common round that brought people into regular and informal union. 

But, until recent years, British Methodism was shaping hundreds of thousands of people into citizens:

In other words, the Methodist church was a place where what was high and mighty mixed with the ordinary and the day-to-day. We talked about Jesus Christ almost as if he was a member away at university (long hair, at Oxford, probably). Of course, as it was an intensely social organization, the church could amplify all the usual human obsessions. Which is to say that, although we were no big deal, unimportant by most standards and unwelcome by some, it was the nearest any of us would come to running a bit of that complex thing we went around airily calling “society”.

And Methodism was a key element in British civil society:

Intellectuals talk about “civil society” – but here it was for real, run by people who weren’t intellectuals – far from it – and who belonged to much more than a church. In the context of those other forms of associational life, Methodism and the cooperative movement – as William Waldegrave argued in this journal (4 November 2022) – can be placed alongside non-ideological conservatism as one of Britain’s two great contributions to political theory. (He omitted liberalism.)

The author does not reflect on how all the 20th century Methodist attention to social activism, while high-minded, often overshadowed theological and spiritual distinctives, and so contributed to Methodism’s spiritual and demographic implosion in Britain. Ultimately, activist heat can’t be generated without a strongly fueled furnace of faith. But he’s obviously right about the social tragedy of Methodism’s virtual disappearance from Britain. The various Methodist groups have been replaced by more secular and individualistic online outlets far less likely to generate human cohesion.

In America the impact of Methodist implosion is exponentially greater. British Methodism was always important but a smaller minority. Methodism was America’s biggest church for much of the 19th century and the largest Protestant denomination for most of the 20th century. Methodist groups like Methodist Women and the Epworth League for youth, which later became Methodist Youth Fellowship, not to mention Sunday schools and men’s groups, molded and socialized millions of Americans.

American Methodists were woven into and often orchestrated nearly every important aspect of American civil society: Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, Alcoholics Anonymous, Kiwanis, Civitan, Rotary and Optimist clubs. Methodists were never as prestigious socially as Episcopalians or Presbyterians. But they ran PTAs and garden clubs, served on city councils, birthed and funded endless charitable campaigns, populated nearly every form of political activism. Episcopalians and Presbyterians might predominate on Wall Street and at the country club. But Methodists ran Main Street and the county fair. As the British author noted, Clark Kent, i.e., Superman, was raised by Methodists in Kansas, of course.

With American Methodism’s institutional collapse, there’re no clear successors. It’s unlikely that the religiously unaffiliated will be as civic and community minded. Nondenominational Christianity now prevails in America, whose impact is not yet clear. But these newer churches, for all their entrepreneurial ingenuity, seem less likely to produce builders of broad-based community institutions essential for American civil life.

On Easter Sunday I attended the church of my childhood and young adulthood whose sanctuary was demolished, now replaced with new worship space on the same site within a residential building with controlled rent. The new space is beautiful but does not dominate the neighborhood like the old church with its soaring steeple and half block of sanctuary with Sunday school wing and gymnasium fronted by a green lawn. That church of my childhood and youth included children and teenagers with whom I also attended public school. The congregation’s leaders were often community leaders: the police chief, the bank president, the deputy FBI director, plus schoolteachers and owners of small businesses, all of whom moved seamlessly across the wider civic space. There were no clear boundaries among these arenas. We who were young assumed we would graduate into this space, which would go on indefinitely. The current church is wonderfully still alive, but much smaller, older, and, although admirably involved in homeless ministry and other good works, no longer as societally prominent.

Methodism did not single-handedly build American civil society of course. But it was at the center of it, transcending political, class and, at its best, racial boundaries. As the New Statesman article described about Methodist retreat from Britain: “When this sort of experience has finally gone, the people will have forgotten some of the arts of democracy while the politicians will have forgotten some of the arts of the people.”