Owen, The Sacred Flame of Love

ISSN: 1094-902X
Volume 2, Number 1 (Fall 1998)

The Sacred Flame of Love: Methodism and Society in Nineteenth-Century Georgia. By Christopher H. Owen. University of Georgia Press, 1998. 290 pp. $50.00.

Christopher Owen's work adds to the rapidly expanding body of volumes that attempt to address "southern religion" in its white and black manifestations. From the peregrinations of Francis Asbury and other lonely itinerant exhorters in the late eighteenth century, Methodism made slow headway in an area that remained largely a frontier outpost as late as 1820. The great camp meeting revivals of the first decade of the nineteenth century, centered in the Upper South, bore some fruit among whites (and a few blacks) moving into Georgia, yet Methodists in the state numbered less than 10,000 even into the 1810s. Gradually, the appeal of Methodism-a faith that emphasized free will and God's love for everyone-attracted citizens of the early Republic, who created the explosion of democratic Christianity described in great detail in Nathan Hatch's work. The Second Great Awakening-more urban, moderate, and decorous than the camp meetings-brought Methodism into Georgia's urban areas. The spread of the benevolent empire convinced Georgia Methodists to support institutions of education such as Emory College. Early Georgia Methodism made slow headway among African-Americans, but as more slaveholders came to class meetings and joined churches, enslaved people followed. But, according to Owen, "Methodist church membership in these years was not an equal exchange of cultures, but rather the socialization of a minority by a majority, dominant in status as well as numbers" (25). By the Civil War, Methodism had become an established church but was far from dominant: "In a society prickly over rights, southern evangelicals spoke of reciprocal, binding obligations. In society where dominant planters prided themselves as masters, southern clergymen were glad to be called servants" (90). During the Civil War, white Georgia Methodists certainly provided the expected moral and theological support for the Confederacy, but only in a circumscribed sense, for they had never really sacralized slavery or section in any deep sense. Owen makes a convincing case that white southern Methodists were less politicized than white northern Methodists.

Defeat in the Civil War was a victory for enslaved Methodists, who could now pick from a variety of competing Methodist institutions vying for their support. Owen details the interesting alliance of the African Methodist Episcopal Church and the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, both of which had an interest in institutionalizing segregation in southern religion, against the northern Methodist church, which confidently moved into the region but gained only a few adherents. Defeat in the war may have been a victory for white southern evangelicals, who closed ranks and became increasingly dominant in the post-war South. White and black Methodism in Georgia came into its own in the 1870s and 1880s. Black Methodists, whether in the Colored Methodist Episcopal denomination (an offshoot of the MEC,S) or joining the rapidly expanding AME empire led by the stalwart Henry Turner, continued to find in religion a solace and support from the racism of post-Reconstruction America. White Methodist institutions, meanwhile, flourished. Its bishops, including the liberal Atticus Haygood and the "neoconservative" Warren Candler, were well-known and respected nationwide. Yet the appeal of old-time Methodism remained strong among the people who were southern evangelicalism's original base of support, farmers and plain folks in the upcountry. They increasingly turned to Holiness associations to provide the emotional warmth and "old-time religion" that established town churches had forsaken in favor of civic religion and social benevolence. By the 1890s, the split between the two was particularly bitter precisely because Methodism was so well represented in both places, unlike the overwhelmingly rural Baptists and the predominantly urban Presbyterians and Episcopalians. Methodism's growth began to wane in the latter part of the century. As Owen reminds us, "by embracing the social gospel, even in limited fashion, modernizing Methodists alienated many ordinary members" (185).

Even African-American Methodists experienced a similar division between progressives and traditionalists, not to mention between the relatively more conservative Colored Methodist Episcopal bishop Lucius Holsey and more outspoken AME bishops such as Henry McNeal Turner. The segregation of southern churches after the Civil War meant that Methodist bishops of the late nineteenth century lacked the daily cultural contact that had brought many black Methodist leaders into close relationships with whites earlier in the century. Lucius Holsey's lifelong effort to personify racial accommodation and goodwill ended in failure, as he himself recognized; Turner's turn to emigrationism was not notably more successful.

Owen's work is one of many recent books that move beyond old shibboleths of "cultural captivity" for white churches and the graying "Herskovits versus Frazier" argumentative paradigm for African-American religion. Together with the recently published works of Gregory Wills on Baptist church discipline and Daniel Stowell's study of the religious reconstruction of the South after the Civil War, Owen provides another finely drawn portrait of Methodism, white and black, in nineteenth-century Georgia. Because of the lavish attention given to Christine Leigh Heyrman's Southern Cross, scholars may neglect Owen's work. This would be unfortunate. While Heyrman provides a wonderfully entertaining story of the rise of "southern evangelicalism" as a singular thing (drawn mostly from studies of Methodist itinerants, in fact), Owen issues a necessary scholarly corrective, eschewing generalization in favor of an emphasis on internal tensions, contradictions, and ambiguities within the dominant regional religious tradition. Heyrman is more "fun" to read, but her generalizations stand in need of close analysis, and this is the job of Owen and other scholars who have dug deeply into the archives and produced smaller and carefully delineated studies of topics addressed in a more macro-way by Samuel Hill and his descendants. The "lumper" tradition in this field has been well represented by the older works of Samuel Hill, Donald Mathews, et al.; Owen fits into a more recent "splitter" tradition which separates the "lumps" of rocks and finds individually interesting pebbles that seem to contrast with the larger formation.

Inevitably, if predictably, Owen draws on the Troeltschian "despised sect to established church" paradigm as the framework for his analysis. But within that model he finds interesting tensions, complexities, and ironies that lend grace and strength to his analysis. He succeeds admirably in drawing a richer and more complex portrait of white Methodism than much previous scholarship. Unfortunately, he fares considerably less well with African-American Methodists, to whom he devotes less original and extended attention. Indeed, the work is really about white Methodism, with the stories of black Methodism sprinkled in for purposes of comparison and contrast. This is the major weakness of the work, one that might have been avoided with a bit more truth-in-advertising on the dust jacket cover and in the opening pages of the introduction.

A number of scholars (present reviewer included) have attempted studies that present southern religion as the product of mutual interactions, hostilities, and influence between whites and blacks. No one, really, has succeeded fully in that venture yet. Even Heyrman's work, terrific as it is, largely ignores African-Americans altogether. Works by Owen and others, which focus on the rise of denominational institutions, inevitably emphasize biracialism in antebellum religion but provide little extended or close analysis of what makes African-American religious history distinctive. Other studies of African-American religious culture have treated African-American religion as an entity that operates almost completely outside of white America, an exaggeration of a different sort. Southern religious history waits for the definitive synthetic work that brings together all of the explosion of contemporary scholarship on southern religious culture in all its complexity, pain, and possibilities.

Paul Harvey, University of Colorado at Colorado Springs