Broken Hearts, Broken Minds, Closed Doors: A Review of Russell E. Richey’s A Church's Broken Heart: Mason-Dixon Methodism

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In May of 2000, the General Conference of the United Methodist Church issued an apology for its past sins of racism. In a three-hour long service of worship and lament, the Church apologized for two hundred years of racial discrimination, as well as for ongoing experiences of racial prejudice in Methodism. One bishop used a particularly unsettling metaphor to describe the injustice of the church’s history: “Racism,” he said, “has lived like a malignancy in the bone marrow of the church for years.”

Cancer. Poison. Blight. Disease. These are apt metaphors for Methodism’s history with race. Those present at that 2000 service of lament remember the burden that settled upon the General Conference in that moment, and it was not at all entirely clear that it was lifted once the service ended. Repentance often takes time. The General Conference had embarked upon a mission of truth-telling, and things do not always resolve simply by speaking the realities out loud.

The United States of America has been thrust into a disorienting confrontation with its racial sins in recent years. The severity of the situation can be summed up in the names of the towns and cities where it has publicly manifested: Minneapolis, Charleston, Kenosha, Baltimore, Ferguson. But it also exists in places that remain unnamed; a “malignancy in the bone marrow” of every community where it exists. It seems that now, more than ever, the truth needs once again to be named, and the church must continue to reckon and repent of her sins.

Russell E. Richey, former Dean of Candler School of Theology and one of American Methodism’s finest historians, had his own moment of reckoning with the nation's racial sins as a young man. As a seminary student in 1964, Richey served as an intern with Student Interracial Ministry, a program that placed student pastors in interracial appointments for a summer. Richey was placed in a black congregation in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. That summer, he and some friends attended a nearby Ku Klux Klan rally on a reconnaissance mission, trying to uncover any threats the group was planning to carry out in the area. Several Klan members became suspicious of their intentions and chased Richey and his friends out of town. That experience, as well as the threats that the Klan perpetrated against him and those that worked with him at that black congregation that summer, was a turning point in his life. According to Richey, those experiences oriented him towards “recognizing race relations as something of a calling” (168). For those familiar with Richey’s distinguished career, we know that he chose to express this calling through the academy. How, then, can historians effect change in these difficult issues of race? How can Methodists speak into the racial tension still present in contemporary life? In the case of Richey’s latest book, he simply tells the truth.

A Church’s Broken Heart: Mason-Dixon Methodism (Nashville: GBHEM, 2021) is Richey’s truth-telling project. It centers on nineteenth-century American Methodist race relations, but it illuminates a much broader history. Be forewarned, there are few heroes in this study. One of American Methodism’s lesser sins has been its sense of cultural triumphalism, and Richey lays bare these false idols with respect to how the church has evangelized and discipled minority groups. Racism, he shows, was not simply an unfortunate cultural dynamic accidentally allowed by otherwise well-meaning Christian men and women. Instead, racism was woven into the very fabric of American Methodism. 

And neither was this attitude confined to the church’s Southern branch after the 1844 split of the Methodist Episcopal Church (MEC). Northern Methodists were, in some respects, even less interested in evangelizing and discipling minority communities than were their Southern counterparts. This is one of the book’s most illuminating points: the cultural boundaries between the two churches, the MEC and the Methodist Episcopal Church, South (MECS), were far more complex than can be revealed in a cartographer’s line. By locating his history in a specific time and a specific place–Northern Kentucky and Southern Ohio in the nineteenth century–Richey shows just how arbitrary our conceptions of geography really are. 

The early chapters of A Church’s Broken Heart argue that while attitudes toward race differed between North and South, both sections of the church were guilty of treating African Americans as less than God’s beloved sons and daughters. Here, Richey builds upon other important recent studies to show that Northern Methodism was willing and complicit in building a segregated denomination. An alternative book title Richey offers succinctly describes the situation. He suggests his book could have been titled, “Mason Dixon Methodism: Black Lives Didn’t Matter in Ohio; Mattered for Field Hands and House Servants in Kentucky; but Prospered for Whites in Both States” (emphasis in original). 

As he has done in previous books, Richey structures his chapters around a typology of “Methodism’s way of being church” to compare the nineteenth-century Methodist church across the Mason-Dixon line. After introducing the structure in chapter one, chapter two begins with documenting Methodism’s modes of “Outreach.” Both the MEC and MECS used similar methods to reach those inside and outside the Methodist fold, but attitudes towards African Americans could be strikingly different. The MEC in the Midwest gave lip service to supporting African Americans Methodists but offered little in actual material support. When the MEC did establish a missionary conference in Kentucky (MECS territory), the results were mixed. The Northern conference “behaved Yankee on some matters, Rebel on others” (64, emphasis in original). When anti-slavery resolutions came before that MEC annual conference, for example, the preachers voted non-concurrence by a wide margin. Outreach was key to Methodist expansion, but Richey shows nineteenth-century Methodists distinguished between those who were worthy to be in the Methodist fold and those they preferred to leave out.

Chapter three deals with “Formation,” another key aspect of Methodism in the nineteenth century. Methodists carried on John Wesley’s zeal for publication and proclamation, and education became important business across the Mason-Dixon line. Children and adults were formed through a variety of means including newsletters, pamphlets, curricula, programs, liturgies, and much more. Even money-losing, low-subscription periodicals were continually propped up to support the cause of forming Christians. In the South, these publications were divided according to race. Publications for black Methodists were often paternalistic and written to reinforce the prevailing white nationalist political powers. Other materials were written to instruct white slave owners in how to form their slaves in Christian discipleship. Holland McTyeire, a future Methodist bishop and founder of Vanderbilt University, wrote in Duties of Christian Masters to their Servants that Southern Methodists “honored slave codes in detail.” The Christian faith, he argued, “embraced, if it did not enhance and encourage, slavery” (71). Thus, Methodist modes of formation perpetuated systems of slavery and racism.

Richey’s fourth chapter deals with that most Wesleyan of ecclesiologies, “Connection.” While early American Methodism connected through circuits and conferences, in the years after the Civil War, denominational lay and clergy in both North and South altered the denomination from a “ground-up, conference-out, connectionally resourced denomination” into the top-heavy, bureaucratically oriented church we still have today. A large part of this story is schism. Richey documents over a dozen schisms that happened in the first one-hundred years of American Methodism. These breaks happened over issues of race, yes, but they also involved competing modes of evangelism, formation, and structure. American Methodists, Richey writes, “recognized and claimed John Wesley’s renewal within-and-without the church but simplified and radically altered it. Almost from the beginning and across colony then state lines, the preachers recognized there was no viable ‘within’--no Church of England ruling cradle-to-grave, over all the people, across the entire seaboard, and overseen by crown and cross” (121). This allowed Methodists to create their own understanding of church unity. “Although a creedal violation and theological impossibility, schism became a Methodist way of being church” (121). 

These reinterpreted versions of Methodist connection had ramifications across the color line. Here is where Richey’s book makes a key implicit claim (that this reviewer wishes had been made a bit more directly): while denominational structures such as jurisdictions were created in the twentieth century to perpetuate Methodist segregation, the structural processes of racism were at work long before 1939 in both the Northern and Southern church through the reinterpretation of the notion of connection. Racism was baked into Methodism’s connection after 1844 in both branches of the church and those structures remain operative today in ways we often fail to appreciate. When the question of the creation of racially separate jurisdictions came before the church in the twentieth century, North and South could find agreement to exclude black churches from denominational structures precisely because outreach, formation, and connection had long seen black Methodists as other and less-than.

There is much more nuance in Richey’s account than one review can summarize, and thorough readers are rewarded by his careful analysis. The book’s arguments are bold and his evidence is overwhelming, though the book can sometimes take a “kitchen sink” approach. Richey has had a lifetime to study the complex problems of Episcopal Methodism and knows the movement deeply. At times this can lead the narrative down rabbit trails that, while important, seem tangentially connected to the deep concerns over racism and injustice that many readers will bring to the text. For example, an aside early in the book spends almost two pages on modern Methodism’s confusion over the threefold Christological pattern of ministry (prophet, priest, and king). This is an astute point that the church should spend time discussing and studying, but the issue's connection to the book’s animating arguments is a bit unclear and may be distracting to some readers.

Such asides should not overshadow the book’s larger point. Perhaps the book’s most rewarding section is its postscript, a long personal narrative of Richey’s own journey (in which the Klan story reference above is featured). Richey’s early life in the Deep South, and his long tenure at some of Methodism's best schools and universities, has given him unique insight into the denomination’s evolution on matters of race. He is honest about his own successes and failures, just as he tells the truth about the church to which he has committed his life and ministry. The postscript humanizes the scholar and his scholarship in a way that few historical texts can pull off.

In short, Richey’s book is a bold attempt to tell the truth about Methodism’s impoverished history of race relations in America. One official apology twenty years ago, no matter how monumental it was at the time, will not suffice. Why? Because the work of reconciliation is an ongoing work of sanctification. Reconciliation does not happen because one General Conference decided that it should. It must happen step-by-step as brothers and sisters in Christ acknowledge and repent of their sins and seek Christ and his kingdom together. This work requires a deep understanding of our history, not so that we can look back and know whom to blame, but so that we might understand the scope of the obstacles that remain in front of us. A Church's Broken Heart points us towards that path. It is a faithful, truth-telling resource and we should thank Richey for this important contribution to Methodism’s ongoing work of reconciliation.

Lane E. Davis is an Instructor of Religion at Huntingdon College in Montgomery, Alabama, and an elder in the Tennessee Conference of the United Methodist Church.