Category: History of Christianity

The Methodist Church in Missouri, 1798-1939

Three different Methodist denominations

The spring academic term at Trinity is over. We were able to hold two in-person commencement ceremonies in a local minor-league ballpark for our 2020 and 2021 graduates. Though it was cold, it didn’t rain. My daughter was a 2020 graduate and got to walk across the stage with her friends.

That was two weeks ago. Last week we had a variety of end-of-year meetings. This week my schedule opened up a bit, so I have been able to return to work on the book. Trinity has provided funding for me to travel next week to the State Historical Society of Missouri and look at newspapers from Mansfield, Missouri, where Laura and Almanzo Wilder lived from 1894 to the end of their lives. I will be looking for information about the churches in that town, particularly the Methodist Church, where the Wilders worshipped.

In preparation for the trip, this week I read Frank Tucker’s The Methodist Church in Missouri, 1798-1939: A Brief History. The book was published in 1966. It is an institutional church history, describing the origins and growth of what eventually became the three different Methodist denominations in Missouri during the early twentieth century: The Methodist Episcopal Church (MEC), the Methodist Episcopal Church, South (MECS), and the Methodist Protestant Church (MPC). Tucker places the growth and development of these churches in two contexts: 1) events in Missouri, including early growth of white population in the state, the Civil War, and reforms during the early 20th century, and 2) developments in the denominations nationally. The book ends with the merger of the three denominations to become The Methodist Church in 1939.

Tucker’s book does not mention Mansfield, and it only briefly refers to the spread of Methodism in the Ozarks more generally. But reading the book taught me a lot about Methodism and reminded me of a lot I had previously learned about Missouri’s history. Some particular things:

  • Terminology: Methodist denominations are governed by a General Conference which meets every four years. Smaller geographic areas are governed by an Annual Conference, and still smaller areas have a Quarterly Conference. Ministers are appointed annually to particular churches by the Bishop of the area.
  • Divisions: The MPC left he MEC in the 1830s because of disagreements about governance: how leaders of Quarterly Conferences were chosen and whether lay leaders could be members of Annual and General Conferences. The greater disruption to Missouri Methodism came when the MECS split from the MEC in the 1840s because of disagreements about slavery. Annual Conferences were allowed to choose whether to stay with the MEC or leave with the MECS; the Missouri Annual Conference voted to join the MECS. However, some churches in Missouri then voted to remain in the MEC. As a result, for almost 100 years, churches in Missouri belonged to one of three different Methodist denominations. Since Missouri was a border state, it had much more diversity among the three groups than, say, Minnesota, where most Methodists were MEC, or Alabama, where nearly all Methodists were MECS.
  • The Border War, Bleeding Kansas, and the Civil War: The 1850s and 1860s were terrible years for Missourians. The MEC and MECS both founded churches in Kansas, and there were Methodists among both the Bushwhackers and the Jayhawkers, both before and during the war. Some MECS churches were occupied by pastors from the MEC. The MPC also divided over slavery.
  • Ministries: After the Civil War, as Missouri’s population grew and experienced more prosperity, Methodist churches initiated additional ministries. Sunday Schools became more widespread and organized. Epworth Leagues were started to provide young people in their teens and twenties with leisure activities and opportunities for spiritual growth. Methodist denominations founded colleges, hospitals, and training schools for nurses. Methodists also participated in the late-nineteenth century explosion of world missions.
  • Race: Before the Civil war, there were African-American members in all three denominations. After the war, Black Methodists left the MECS after the Civil War to form the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, which later was renamed the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church. In the MEC, blacks had their own churches, pastors, districts, and annual conferences.
  • Reunion: During the decades surrounding the Civil War, there was competition and even conflict among churches in the MEC, MECS, and MPC. By the late 1800s, however, animosity had cooled. The three denominations collaborated on a hymnal in 1904, and there were calls from the Annual Conferences in Missouri for the denominations to merge. The merger was finalized in a uniting General Conference in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1939.

The Missouri United Methodist Archives (MUMA) is located in the library at Central Methodist University in Fayette, in north central Missouri. Central Methodist is the sole remaining institution of higher education founded by Methodists in the 1800s. John Finley, the Archivist at MUMA, has been very helpful in sending me information from the Archives about the Methodist Church in Mansfield. Apparently it was part of the MEC. Finley suggests that this would have been more congenial to Laura and Almanzo since the MEC was dominant in the upper Midwest where they were from. So perhaps there were similarities as well as regional and cultural differences between the Methodist Church in Mansfield and the one in Walnut Grove, Minnesota that Laura attended for at least a year as a child.

Tucker’s book provided me with state-level and denominational context for Methodist churches in Missouri. As a work of church history that focuses on church leaders and institutional activities, however, it doesn’t ask or answer questions that a social historian might ask, like: What was it like to be a member or pastor in a church that was part of the MEC in a state that was dominated by the MECS? In a small town like Mansfield during the early 1900s, where a pastor came to preach just once a month, did members feel connected to the Methodist practice of circuit riding in the late 1700s and early 1800s? Or was it just a fact of life, since all churches in Mansfield at the time—Baptist, Christian, Methodist, and Presbyterian—only had preaching once a month? As is often the case, historical work is about struggling with the questions, not finding the answer.

I’m looking forward to being back in Missouri for research next week. Thanks for reading.

Picture credit: I scanned the front of the dust jacket of the book.

Links:

Trinity Christian College

Trinity Christian College Commencement

The State Historical Society of Missouri

The Methodist Church in Missouri, 1798-1939: A Brief History

The Missouri United Methodist Archives

The Last Puritans

During the last several weeks, I have been able to read historian Margaret Bendroth’s The Last Puritans: Mainline Protestants and the Power of the Past. Bendroth is the director of the Congregational Library and Archives in Boston. I have heard her speak at events sponsored by the Conference on Faith and History. She is a careful historian and an eloquent speaker. The Last Puritans is a history of Congregational Churches in the U. S. A. during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I wanted to read it because Laura Ingalls Wilder attended Congregational Churches in Walnut Grove, Minnesota and De Smet, South Dakota. Her parents, Charles and Caroline Ingalls, were also lifelong members of Congregational Churches.

I am a member and a Ruling Elder in a small Presbyterian denomination, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (OPC). The OPC is a confessional church, holding to the Westminster Confession of Faith and Catechisms as doctrinal statements that accurately explain what the Bible says on most questions of faith and life. I also see myself as an Evangelical, sharing characteristics with many other contemporary Christians who believe that the Bible is God’s inspired word, that Jesus Christ is God come to earth to die for the sins of His people, and that Christians’ responsibility in the world is to preach the gospel and lead a life in accordance with God’s word. As a result, I admit that it is difficult for me to understand the approach of most liberal, mainline Protestant churches, including the Presbyterian Church, U. S. A., the United Methodist Church, the Episcopal Church, and the United Church of Christ (UCC). Since 1957, the UCC is one of the successor denominations to the Congregational Church associations described in Bendroth’s book; the UCC is the subject of its last chapter. It seems to me that these churches downplay Biblical doctrines and historic confessions in order to pursue progressive social causes. I see them as rejecting the historic Christian faith. This means that it can be difficult for me to appreciate the decisions made by the leaders and members of those churches in the past, and it can be hard for me to understand the Christianity experienced by people in those churches today. Bendroth’s book is a help in this area.

The Last Puritans describes the leaders and members of American Congregational Churches during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as being extremely interested in their history. Congregationalists trace their roots to the Pilgrims and Puritans who migrated to New England during the early 1600s. However, the way that they remembered their Pilgrim ancestors changed over time. By the 1800s, they mainly remembered the independent, liberty-loving side of the Pilgrims, and their establishment of churches where local autonomy was fiercely defended. Nineteenth Century Congregationalists also told stories about the Pilgrims and Puritans that emphasized their toleration of other Christians. The result was that for many, their vision of their history led to downplaying of doctrinal distinctives, including the Calvinism that animated their Pilgrim and Puritan forebears. At the turn of the twentieth century, Congregationalists also began to historicize their ancestors, viewing them not as kindred spirits but as strikingly different. Twentieth century churchgoers emphasized the spirit of their forebears while rejecting many of their beliefs. This led them to support union with other churches and an embrace of the Social Gospel and Progressivism.

Bendroth concludes that while Congregationalists came to doubt many stories in the Bible were factually true, they decided to remain in the church anyway. “Protestant Liberalism is… about people who learned to live with ambiguities, who chose to believe without demanding certainties.” (194) She gives examples from both church leaders and ordinary church members who exemplify this willingness to let go of the factual nature of the Bible but remain in the church. This would not be the choice that I would make, but I think that I understand a little better why they made it.

Does this understanding of the history of Congregationalism contribute to a better understanding of Laura Ingalls Wilder? Perhaps. Perhaps Wilder’s upbringing in Congregational Churches shaped her understanding of what church should be. Assuming that a Methodist Church in the border south was more Evangelical than a Congregational Church in the upper Midwest, perhaps that is why she never joined the Methodist Church in Mansfield, Missouri, even though she attended there for over sixty years. There also may be some connections between Congregationalists’ memory of the Pilgrims’ love of liberty and Wilder’s devotion to liberty, as well as that of her father and her daughter Rose Wilder Lane. I’m going to continue to ruminate on this as I start writing soon.

Thanks for reading.

(Quote is from The Last Puritans: Mainline Protestants and the Power of the Past [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015].)

Links:

The Last Puritans

Congregational Library and Archives

The Conference on Faith and History

 

 

Religion and American Culture

During the last several weeks I had the opportunity to read Religion and American Culture by George M. Marsden. This will be the third time that I’ve read the book. I read it while I was in graduate school, and then I read it again in cooperation with my department at Trinity Christian College during the summer of 2005. I have found it incredibly insightful every time that I have read it.

Along with Mark Noll, Marsden is a historian of American Christianity and has led the late twentieth century revival of interest in the history of American religion. This is a textbook drawn from secondary sources and his own research, especially in the development of Christian fundamentalism and evangelicalism during the 1900s. However, instead just being a history of American Religion or American Christianity, Marsden’s book tries to answer two questions:  1) What does American religion tell us about American culture? and 2) What does American culture tell us about American religion?  If there is a thesis to the book, I think that it is that the United States is both incredibly religious and incredibly secular at the same time. Marsden finds this an incredibly powerful way of engaging the influence that religion has had on American culture and vice versa. He also finds that this reality has caused American history to be different from the history of modern Europe, and that it has created a multitude of ironies in American history itself.

I appreciate Marsden’s emphasis on the dual character of American culture itself, not just Americans. It is easier to admit that some Americans have been more Christian than others. For instance, some Europeans came to America during the 1600s for economic reasons, such as to get land and grow cash crops, while others came for religious reasons, for religious freedom or to set up an ideal Christian community. But Marsden argues that American culture is simultaneously very religious and very secular at just about every point in American history. Some examples:

  • The Constitution is based on a Christian understanding of human nature – that people are sinful and need government, but that since sinners will be the ones governing that government should have built-in limitations. Federalist 51 discusses this at length. But the Constitution itself does not mention God at all, unless one counts the date at the end which includes “in the Year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighty seven.”
  • The development of European transatlantic slavery between the 1400s and 1700s was driven by economic considerations. The emancipation of slaves in northern states after the American Revolution was eased by the fact that their economies were not built on slavery the way that southern states’ economies were. But many Europeans and Americans used Christian arguments for the perpetuation of slavery. Southern culture before the Civil War was deeply Christian and deeply tied to slavery. Abolitionists also used Christian arguments for the elimination of slavery.
  • During the industrialization of the late 1800s, business leaders created and greatly expanded corporations. American jurisprudence treated corporations as persons before the law. But those corporations acted at times in ways that their Christian founders and directors would have found morally unacceptable for an individual.
  • American participation in both World War I and World War II had widespread support from Christians for moral reasons. But during World War II, the United States participated in the firebombing of both German and Japanese population centers, killing tens of thousands of civilian men, women, and children, and then dropped atomic weapons on two Japanese cities.
  • Finally, during the late twentieth century, religious Americans faced a reality where “many Americans are strongly committed to traditional or semitraditional religious and moral values; yet in an era of the vast expansion of government control and regulation, the necessities of public neutrality toward religion seem increasingly to limit areas where distinctive religious views can be freely exercised… Probably the key issue is whether governmental neutrality toward religion will be essentially hostile to all religion by attempting to exclude as much of it as possible from the public sphere, or whether the neutrality will take the form of truly encouraging religious pluralism whenever that is compatible with equity.” (276) Even though Marsden wrote this in 1990, I think that it is incredibly appropriate for today.

I think that Marsden’s formulation – that American culture is simultaneously very Christian and very secular – could be a possible way of viewing aspects of the faith of Laura Ingalls Wilder. As I wrote in my entries on the Little House books almost two years ago (whoa), the profile of Christianity in the Little House books seems low for a person who was a lifelong church attender. It may help to explain why religious worship is not mentioned in Little House books until Chapter 21 of On the Banks of Plum Creek, the third book of the chronicle of the Ingalls family life. I have wondered if it is because Laura or Rose were thinking about what their audience might want or whether it was how they viewed the world. As readers of this blog know, I’m still working through all of this.

Thanks for listening.

(The page number reference is from George M. Marsden, Religion and American Culture [San Diego: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1990].)

Links:

Religion and American Culture

Amazon’s George Marsden Page

 

 

American Protestantism

Classes here at Trinity Christian College are in full swing. But I did get to read a short book this week: American Protestantism by Winthrop Hudson. The book is one of three topical books in the series “The Chicago History of American Civilization,” edited by Daniel Boorstin and published by the University of Chicago Press during the 1950s and 1960s. The other two topical books are American Catholicism and American Judaism. American Protestantism was published in 1961.

Hudson’s book is divided into three parts. The first is devoted to Protestantism in the British American Colonies and during the American Revolution. The second covers “Protestant America” from 1787 to 1914. The last is on “Post-Protestant America,” from 1914 to when the book was published. Hudson’s argument is similar to Mark Noll’s—that society and culture in the United States were dominated by Protestantism during the early nineteenth century, but Protestantism fell from that place of dominance during the late 1800s and early 1900s. The twentieth century has seen greater diversity and pluralism among Christian groups and religious groups overall.

I believe that I learned two important ideas from American Protestantism. The first is a detailed definition of “denominationalism” given in the first chapter. Hudson argues that the many divisions in Protestantism did not develop into sects where each does not believe that any of the others have the truth. Instead, they became denominations, where most believe that while there may be significant differences between different bodies, there are true Christians in other churches. He outlines the principles of denominationalism as follows: 1) people have differences in opinion; 2) they are not matters of indifference; 3) they can lead to fruitful discussions; 4) multiple churches can exist; 5) separation does not necessarily mean schism. (40-43) Hudson traces these impulses especially to the Westminster Assembly of the mid-1600s, which produced the documents that serve as the secondary standards of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, which I am a part of. Throughout his treatment of the idea, Hudson refers to Jeremiah Burroughs, a Puritan and Congregationalist who was a member of the Assembly. Hudson concludes:

When it is remembered that, although Christians may be divided at many points, they are nonetheless united in Christ, it then becomes possible, Burroughes [sic] insisted, for them to work together for the common ends of “godliness.” What is required of the Christian is to “join with all our might in all we know, and with peaceable, quiet, humble spirits seek to know more, and in the meantime carry ourselves humbly and peaceably toward those we differ from, and Christ will not charge us at the Great Day for retarding his cause.” (44)

This is a great argument for humility or modesty in the presence of difference, a virtue that I believe would greatly improve public discourse in the United States today. It also connects in helpful ways to the concept of “confident pluralism” developed by John Inazu, a Law Professor at Washington University in St. Louis, who will be speaking here at Trinity today. I do believe that there is a tension in some Protestants’ conception of denominationalism. I have known some Protestants who do believe that they have the only truth. While some would disavow that belief, their actions tend in that direction. But I think this is a human tendency, not just a problem for Protestants or Christians.

The other idea that I got from Hudson is the argument that because Protestantism dominated American culture and society for a while, it became influenced by American culture and society. This helps me understand why some Protestant churches have embraced American values and abandoned traditional Christian doctrines. Some call this cultural Christianity.

How useful might these ideas be for understanding the faith of Laura Ingalls Wilder? They are both pretty large ideas, probably too large for a family or a person to exemplify. One way to understand Laura is as fairly wedded to a particular denomination, since she never joined the Methodist church in Mansfield even though attended services there for over sixty years. On the other hand, I’m not completely and totally sure if we have evidence that she actually ever joined the Congregational churches she attended in Minnesota or South Dakota either. One might also argue that the Christianity portrayed in the Little House books might show the influence of American culture and values. On the other hand, at times it is difficult to separate the religious ideas of Laura and those of her daughter Rose Wilder Lane in the book’s depictions of the church. My plan is to keep mulling over questions like these. Lord-willing I’ll be able to make progress on them once I get back to research on the Ingalls and Wilder families.

Thanks for reading.

(Page number references are from Winthrop S. Hudson, American Protestantism [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961].)

Links:

Trinity Christian College

American Protestantism

My blog post on Mark Noll’s A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada

The Orthodox Presbyterian Church and the Westminster Standards

Jeremiah Burroughs

David Brooks on Modesty

John Inazu and Confident Pluralism

Trinity Christian College’s Worldview Series

 

A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada

Welcome to September. I just finished my first full week of classes and am looking forward to the long weekend.

I also just finished reading Mark A. Noll’s A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada. It is a textbook for courses in American Church History, published by Eerdmans Publishers in 1992. It traces an enormous number of churches, Christian leaders, and social movements that have shaped Christianity in the United Sates. Noll includes the history of Christianity in Canada so that he can compare the shape that Christianity has taken in the two countries.

Noll was for many years a history professor at Wheaton College, a Christian liberal arts school in the western suburbs of Chicago. Wheaton is both a highly-regarded academic institution and a place where Evangelical Christianity is respected and believed. At the end of his career, Noll taught at Notre Dame. He retired from the University at the end of this year. I met him at a conference several years ago and have heard him speak several times. I should also note that he is one of the co-editors of the Eerdmans series that I am writing for, the Library of Religious Biography.

Since I am a devout Christian, I have long been interested in the history of the Christian Church. However, during graduate school, I decided to specialize in the history of the American West rather than American Church history. I am pretty sure that I read Noll’s book when I was writing my dissertation, because one chapter addressed the depictions of the rural church in Midwestern farm newspapers. But if I did, I can’t find my notes. Reading it now has strengthened my understanding of American church history in multiple ways, several of which clearly contribute to my project on the faith of Laura Ingalls Wilder.

First, the book provides a concise and helpful definition and description of Puritanism as it was manifested in New England during the 1600s. Noll describes Puritans as believing that 1) God alone saves, 2) the Bible is the authority for faith and practice, 3) society is a unified whole, so church and civil government work together, and 4) God works through covenants. He concludes that Puritan teachings were “constant for over 150 years: individuals are sinners who need divine salvation; God has provided that salvation by grace, from his mercy alone; saved sinners now have the right and privilege to serve God by following his law.” (46) Laura Ingalls Wilder’s ancestors came to Massachusetts as part of the Puritan migration during the 1630s, and the Congregational Churches she was involved with in the upper Midwest were descended from Puritanism. So Noll’s definitions and descriptions provide welcome context.

Second, Noll characterizes the early nineteenth century as an age where Evangelical Protestant Christianity dominated American culture, society, and politics. Revivals in the early 1800s (the Second Great Awakening) caused hundreds of thousands of Americans to become Christians or to become more serious Christians. Reform movements such as abolition, temperance, and the women’s movement were national in scope. During the Civil War, leaders in both the North and South saw their causes as fully supported by the Bible. However, during the period between 1865 and 1920, a great transition occurred in American church history. Challenges from new intellectual movements, immigration, industrialization, urbanization, and commercialization led to a loss of Evangelical Protestant dominance. The Christian church since roughly the 1920s has existed in both a pluralistic and a secularizing context. Laura Ingalls Wilder’s long life (from 1867 to 1957) witnessed these upheavals.

Finally, Noll’s book provides several interesting specific observations about Christian Churches in the American West both before and after the Civil War. Noll describes how during the early nineteenth century, “earnest clergymen, Sunday School workers, and organizers of voluntary agencies (many of them women) cooperated with the settlers to impart the institutions and practices of Christian civilization” to new areas of the west. (223) Later, he provides a more melancholy meditation on life in rural areas:

Whatever their formal religious beliefs, ordinary Americans seemed to retain a generally sober, even Calvinistic, view of humanity, concerned much more with human limitations than with human potential. Ordinary people, in a life made difficult by unexpected death, families separated by vast distances, and the unpredictability of weather and crops, tended toward personal resignation. They were earnest, wary of pretension, and above all pessimistic about human nature. They were less concerned with controlling other people for their own ends than with controlling themselves and their immediate environments. Common people had a vital interest in order and a deep-seated fear of disorder. They dealt with these inner needs, it seems, with efforts to control the self, respond to God’s particular call for salvation, and accept the more general designs of Providence. Most common people worried about controlling themselves in the face of personal guilt, anxieties due to the vicissitudes of love and marriage, the uncertainties of birth, the unknown possibilities of the West, and the ever-present reality of death. These are generalizations that did not apply to many antebellum Americans, but for many others—perhaps even a majority—this vision of life shaped the daily round. (229)

Certain parts of this description seem to fit the mindset of Laura and the Ingalls family well. They certainly confronted their share of family separation, crop unpredictability, and anxieties about life passages. A tone of resignation or stoicism can be seen particularly in The First Four Years, but also in some of her correspondence, and at times in the Little House books themselves.

Finally, the book notes that churches in the West in the late nineteenth century confronted realities that made it impossible for Protestant churches to have the central role they did in the east or in earlier decades. Churches faced religious pluralism from the start, had no government support, and dealt with communities made up of many men without families and with little education. Noll argues that “These conditions… ensured that the role of the churches remained auxiliary rather than central to the new societies.” (328) He concludes:

The Civil War, in other words, marked a fresh opportunity for opening the West to settlement and for introducing Christianity. But conditions in the region combined with the instant pluralism of postbellum faiths to shape a context in which religion never meant the same thing, or perhaps as much, as its most earnest adherents had hoped when they contemplated the chance to fill the West with churches as well as settlers. (328)

These descriptions are applied to the years when Laura was growing up in Minnesota and South Dakota. I’m not sure how well they describe the situation in those states, being closer to the settled Midwest and further from regions characterized by mining booms and busts. But it is a place to start. During the next few months, I plan to read several more academic surveys of American Religious history.

So far this semester I have been successful in leaving my office on Thursday mornings to read and think and write. My wife and I have been reading Cal Newport’s book Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World and it has greatly helped my thinking about how to carve out time for important tasks. I highly recommend it.

I hope that everyone has a great Labor Day break. Thanks for reading.

(Page number references are from Mark A. Noll, A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992].)