From abolitionists to fundamentalists: the transformation of the Wesleyan Methodists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
Year: 2015
Type: article
Abstract: This article analyzes the cultural trajectory of a small, but influential denomination that formed in 1843. Wesleyan Methodism first emerged as an abolitionist protest against the Methodist compromise with slavery. The new church drew in members who championed a range of antebellum social reforms, including abolitionism, pacifism, women's rights, and temperance. By the early twentieth century, Wesleyans would become closely identified with fundamentalism, waging war against modernism, championing personal holiness, and maintaining a militant brand of protestant orthodoxy. This article places Wesleyans within a larger religious and cultural context of the Civil War era and the late nineteenth-century disenchantment of the Gilded Age and Progressive Eras. It also traces the reasons for the Wesleyans shifting focus away from social reform and toward matters of personal holiness.
Author: Randall J. Stephens
Institution: Northumbria University
Language: English
Subfield: Religious studies
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Funder: University of Notre Dame
OpenAlex ID: W2195694339