Description
Book SynopsisOriginally a sect within the Anglican church, Methodism blossomed into a dominant mainstream religion in America during the nineteenth century. At the beginning, though, Methodists constituted a dissenting religious group whose ideas about sexuality, marriage, and family were very different from those of their contemporaries.
Focusing on the Methodist notion of family that cut across biological ties, One Family Under God speaks to historical debates over the meaning of family and how the nuclear family model developed over the eighteenth century. Historian Anna M. Lawrence demonstrates that Methodists adopted flexible definitions of affection and allegiance and emphasized extended communal associations that enabled them to incorporate people outside the traditional boundaries of family. They used the language of romantic, ecstatic love to describe their religious feelings and the language of the nuclear family to describe their bonds to one another. In this way, early Me
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"One Family Under God adds significantly to our understanding of both the rise of Methodism and the modern family." * Marilyn J. Westerkamp, University of California, Santa Cruz *
Table of Contents
Introduction: The Transatlantic Methodist Family
Chapter 1. Transatlantic Methodism: Roots and Revivals
Chapter 2. Loosening the Bonds of Family and Society
Chapter 3. The Best of Bonds: Joining the Methodist Family
Chapter 4. Religious Ecstasy and Methodist Sexuality
Chapter 5. Celibacy in the Methodist Family: The Case Against Marriage
Chapter 6. "The Whole World Is Composed of Families"
Chapter 7. One Family, Two Nations
Conclusion
List of Abbreviations
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments
