Taking Heaven by Storm: Methodism and the Rise of Popular Christianity in America

by John H. Wigger

In 1770 there were fewer than 1,000 Methodists in America. Fifty years later, the church counted more than 250,000 adherents. Identifying Methodism as America's most significant large-scale popular religious movement of the antebellum period, John H. Wigger reveals what made Methodism so attractive to post-revolutionary America.
 
Taking Heaven by Storm shows how Methodism fed into popular religious enthusiasm as well as the social and economic ambitions of the "middling people on the make"--skilled artisans, shopkeepers, small planters, petty merchants--who constituted its core. Wigger describes how the movement expanded its reach and fostered communal intimacy and "intemperate zeal" by means of an efficient system of itinerant and local preachers, class meetings, love feasts, quarterly meetings, and camp meetings. He also examines the important role of African Americans and women in early American Methodism and explains how the movement's willingness to accept impressions, dreams, and visions as evidence of the work and call of God circumvented conventional assumptions about education, social standing, gender, and race.
 
A pivotal text on the role of religion in American life, Taking Heaven by Storm shows how the enthusiastic, egalitarian, entrepreneurial, lay-oriented spirit of early American Methodism continues to shape popular religion today.
 

Genres: History

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

John Wigger is Professor of History at the University of Missouri. His research focuses on American religious and cultural history. He is the author of American Saint (OUP 2009) and Taking Heaven by Storm (OUP 1998).

Reviews

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

An entrancing overview of early American Methodism. Many quotes and descriptions for primary sources, including circuit riders and "common folk," in addition to bishops and other leaders. Illuminating look at the most effective time in Methodist history. Lessons for today!

[Michel Sabbagh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Subject Appeal: 4/5.
Research Depth: 4/5.
Research Breadth: 4/5.
Narrative Flow: 3/5.

Verdict: 4/5. Like the faith's exhorters and preachers, Wigger doesn't mince words in his insightful exploration of Methodism.

[Glen O'Brien · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book, along with Wigger's more recent biography of Francis Asbury, is American Methodist history at its finest. Tracing Methodism's emergence and development until the mid-nineteenth century it provides a thoroughly researched and eminently readable account. It's all here - the circuit riders, the itinerancy, camp meetings and their 'boiling hot religion,' slavery, and an excellent chapter on women in Methodism. The Methodist 'croakers' who decried the decline of the movement from about the 1820s were not concerned about statistical decline (with a few slumps Methodists growth continued to meet or exceed aggregate national population growth until the 1950s) but about decline in spiritual fervour. From the first decade of the nineteenth century Nathan Bangs argued that Methodism was right to enter into the mainstream of American life and laboured to this end, in an ironic twist claiming that his cause came to him in a prophetic dream. But Peter Cartwright and many other aged itinerants mourned in their published memoirs the loss of an earlier frontier experience. One of the great religioous dramas of the modern era, the story of American Methodism continues to fascinate and enthrall. Anyone serious about the study of American Methodism will already have read this book. Those who are yet to discover it are in for a treat.

[Lindsay · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book my sophomore year in college in a History of Religion on the Deep South class. As a lifelong Methodist, it was interesting to see how the denomination has shaped so many aspects of religious, and political, life in the United States,