Whither Wesleyan Evangelicalism

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Reading books and essays dedicated to the crisis of evangelical identity during the past two years has prompted me to wonder whether we should still talk about Wesleyan evangelicalism or simply make “Wesleyanism” the noun and forget “evangelicalism” entirely. While it seems almost cliché to repeat the mantra, “It’s time to abandon the term evangelical,” there are two distinct yet interrelated reasons for considering this option. 

The first is the dominance of a certain historiographical perspective among professional historians of evangelicalism, which I shall call the Marsden school of thought. While an oversimplification, it casts the interpretation of evangelicalism almost entirely through a Reformed-Baptist (RB) lens and stems, at least in part, from the enormous influence Marsden’s work and doctoral students have had on the discipline. In the North American context, the so-called Bebbington quadrilateral (conversionism, Biblicism, activism, crucicentrism) as the defining characteristics of evangelicalism has been subsumed into the RB lens.  

The second is the constant effort to control evangelicalism by specific groups in the extended evangelical family (to borrow Robert Johnston’s metaphor). This control hinges less on numbers and more on cultural capital and influence through the major organizations that comprise the movement. Given that modern evangelicalism is perpetually in crisis-management mode (because there is always a crisis to be managed in the evangelical mind), organizations that control cultural capital need not be old. In fact, many emerge precisely in response to some crisis normally having to do with the loss of biblical witness in which “biblical” usually involves a narrow understanding of the Reformation (e.g., gospel = forensic justification or male leadership over the church). 

Two Lenses for Understanding Evangelicalism

The challenge for those of us in Wesleyanism is that the RB lens has become so dominant that it is virtually the exclusive lens through which debates and struggles over cultural engagement and cultural capital within evangelicalism are being waged. Even more disconcerting is that some parts of the Wesleyan world are losing their distinctive Wesleyan identity in order to join forces with certain evangelical leaders to forge a new cultural consensus. 

As Doug Strong noted in his introduction to the second edition of Don Dayton’s Rediscovering an Evangelical Heritage, there are fundamental differences between the RB lens of the Marsden school and the Wesleyan-Holiness-Pentecostal (WHP) lens of what I shall call the Dayton school.  The former begins with the Puritans, moves into debates between Old School and New School Presbyterianism, places a high water mark in Higher Life holiness advocates like Moody, Gordon, and Torrey, and then sees a resurgence out of fundamentalism in the form of Carl Henry’s and Billy Graham’s neo-evangelicalism. Central to this paradigm is the defense of confessional evangelicalism by two prominent Reformed seminaries that were anti-revivalist and cessationist. Under Archibald Alexander, Charles Hodge, and B. B. Warfield, Princeton Seminary in the nineteenth century advanced a form of Enlightenment rationalism that produced Warfield’s inerrancy model and his polemic against miracles. After the conservatives lost the battle for Princeton, J. Gresham Machen led an exodus to form Westminster Theological Seminary, which became the perceived successor of Old Princeton. The Dayton school begins in the womb of Protestant pietism (Anabaptism, Zinzendorf, Wesley, Whitefield, et al.), moves into the rise of Methodism and New School Presbyterianism, sees a high water mark in the holiness movement that fractured Methodism, and finds its twentieth century push in the holiness and Pentecostal denominations formed between 1880 and 1920. The defense of holiness theology by Methodists like Daniel Steele (the first acting chancellor of Syracuse University) and holiness advocates like Catherine Booth (co-founder of the Salvation Army) are key to the latter.

Recent Works on Evangelicalism

The first step in reasserting the distinctive Wesleyan approach is to remind professional historians that the RB lens is not the only game in town. This approach summarizes Don Dayton’s entire scholarly agenda. Let me illustrate the problem when the Marsden school dominates through three recently published works on evangelicalism. All of these books offer a basic definition of the movement in an effort to probe its viability in light of the societal turns of the twenty-first century. Yet, each also relies heavily on the basic historical narrative of the Marsden school in a way that leaves out most of the WHP stream. 

The first is a collection of essays edited by Mark Noll, David Bebbington, and George Marsden under the title, Evangelicals: Who They Have Been, Are Now, and Could Be (Eerdmans, 2019). Even though the volume republishes past essays deemed significant, there is nothing by Dayton. The essay that comes closest to articulating Dayton’s perspective is the republication of Doug Sweeney’s article on the debate between Marsden and Dayton in the late 70s and 80s. As one reads through the chapters, the absence of the WHP lens is palpable. Even Jemar Tisby’s otherwise excellent chapter on black evangelicals feels  like a fight from within the Reformed camp complete with appeals to John Frame’s epistemology (no doubt from Tisby’s RTS days). There is nothing about the fact that two wings of the Black Church (Methodist and Pentecostal) flow in and out of the WHP narrative, or any effort by Tisby to resource his own thought from the WHP. To plow through RB sources as Tisby does is like fighting for black evangelicals while blind-folded with one hand tied behind his back. 

Turning to Thomas Kidd’s Who is an Evangelical? (Yale, 2019), one finds a more sympathetic effort to expand the RB lens. This is no doubt because crucial to Kidd’s argument that evangelicalism has always been multi-ethnic and multicultural is global Pentecostalism. Indeed, unless Kidd can count global Pentecostalism as part of evangelicalism (which he admits is controversial), he would have a difficult time substantiating his claim historically. Yet, the historical narrative Kidd sets forth is so thoroughly indebted to the RB paradigm that he ends up consigning the Methodist preacher Amanda Berry Smith and the early Pentecostal Charles H. Mason to the Higher Life stream of the holiness movement when neither belong there. Both were deeply informed by the Wesleyan holiness movement.  

Smith testified to entire sanctification while attending John Inskip’s church in New York and preached in the U.S. and England, eventually building an orphanage on the south side of Chicago that W. E. B. DuBois mentioned in the 1915 edition of Crisis. Referred to as “God’s image carved in ebony,” Smith remained a Methodist her entire life, moving in and out of the African Methodist Episcopal Church and the Methodist Episcopal Church. For his part, Charles Mason left the National Baptist Association with Charles Price Jones after both had an experience of entire sanctification. Embracing the Wesleyan holiness message, they both sought to combine Wesleyanism with slave religion becoming leaders of the Sanctified churches even though they eventually split over the Pentecostal understanding of baptism in the Spirit. Classifying Smith and Mason as Higher Life advocates washes out their Wesleyan voice with its commitment to spreading scriptural holiness throughout the land, including social holiness. 

The final work is Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s Jesus and John Wayne (Liveright, 2020). Using insights from culture studies, Du Mez attempts to unearth the militant masculinity within evangelical culture as a way of explaining the turn to Trump. Her fundamental argument is that evangelicalism should be understood in terms of popular culture and that it is the dominant motifs and ideas communicated through evangelical popular culture that define the movement more than any theological or historical definition. In essence, Du Mez follows Matthew Hedstrom’s lead and argues that evangelicals (like mainline Protestants) had their own middlebrow culture that they cultivated. By examining this middlebrow culture through its dominant representatives and the images/motifs embodied in their ideas, Du Mez argues that toxic masculinity infiltrated the movement (the major symbol for which is John Wayne). In doing so, she pushes back against Kidd’s claims about a multicultural and multiethnic reality by asserting that the dominant images and figures permeating evangelical culture are white and male. 

While I am highly sympathetic both to Du Mez’s approach and the argument she constructs, it became clear to me that the historical narrative undergirding her analysis of evangelical middlebrow culture is the RB paradigm. It is no mistake that Du Mez begins with Billy Sunday, moves into fundamentalism, catalogues the neo-evangelical emergence, and then follows it into the rise of the religious right. Throughout her historical narrative, she deals almost exclusively with Baptist and Reformed leaders. There are some exceptions like James Dobson and Jim and Tammy Bakker, but the exceptions simply prove the rule that the RB paradigm is being deployed to excavate evangelical middlebrow culture. Her analysis of Ted Haggard breezes into Pentecostal subculture a little, but does not adequately account for the megachurch phenomenon and how megachurches usually grow by minimizing most theological and denominational distinctives. 

To take two examples, the spiritual warfare motif has been central to Pentecostalism from the beginning of the movement. It remains central for most, if not all, global Pentecostals. The questions are how spiritual warfare functions within an overarching Pentecostal subculture and how it changes when it moves into the megachurch and larger evangelical arena. Another example is how prominent Pentecostal-Charismatic women like Kathryn Kuhlman and Joyce Meyer impacted that subculture. Du Mez mentions Joyce Meyer in a throw-away line and then never asks how the theology of a survivor of sexual abuse deals with masculinity or femininity. My takeaway from Du Mez’s account was that she is fighting a largely intramural battle within the RB world in which there are almost no women ministers. At the same time, Du Mez helps those in the WHP stream see how much the RB world has infiltrated the Wesleyan ethos through the religious right and other late twentieth-century movements. For the WHP stream, women have always been ministers and evangelists and yet there remains a host of issues surrounding women, pastoring, and governance of the church.

Reclaiming Our Own Heritage and Identity

If we flipped the script and utilized the WHP lens by which to view the twentieth century, we might ask why at least some Wesleyans and Pentecostals have sold their birthright for the morsels of cultural capital they have received from the evangelical table. However, before we could entertain that question, it would be crucial to establish that the fundamental Wesleyan desire to renew church and society by spreading scriptural holiness throughout the land led to the advancement of women ministers, pro-abolition advocacy and speaking out on behalf of African-Americans, and mission to the poor. 

To borrow from Dayton, what evangelical heritage would we rediscover if we noted how many women ministers were part of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union led by Frances Willard and supported by the holiness movement? These women were all part of first-wave feminism and they nurtured a culture that gave rise to Aimee Semple McPherson, Maria Woodworth Etter, Ida B. Wells, and Mother Rosa Horn. Did they traffic in the muscular Christianity of a Billy Sunday? No, they represent a subculture that emerged alongside of and even outside of fundamentalism and neo-evangelicalism at least until the late 1940s. In some parts of the WHP stream, women have been ordained from the beginning and have both contributed to the movement and led entire denominations. And yet, women in the WHP stream still must contend with toxic masculinity in their midst. This toxic masculinity represents, in part, an invasive species not simply from the larger culture, but also from the views of male and female perpetuated by writers in the RB stream. What if we noted how Wesleyan holiness camp meetings became places of racial integration that allowed black preachers and evangelists to speak alongside of white evangelists. We could then explore the various ways Wesleyans have wrestled with John Wesley’s adamant stance against slavery and how it worked itself out in holiness and Pentecostal groups that sought to integrate in the face of Jim Crow (even if they ultimately succumbed to the broader culture). We could take more seriously the heritage of black Methodism (as found in Frederick Douglass, Jarena Lee, and Amanda Berry Smith) and the Sanctified churches (as found in William Seymour, Charles Mason, and Ida Bell Robinson). We would see that Mother Rosa Horn, Robert C. Lawson, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe were all present in Harlem during the Harlem Renaissance with Tharpe leading worship on Sunday and singing in The Cotton Club during the week. This is the Harlem that shaped a James Baldwin.

I still wrestle with an evangelical identity. I am happy to use it as long as I get to define it in terms of my own Wesleyan Pentecostal heritage. It is a heritage not without its own struggles and failures. Yet, I see the promise of a biblical vision of holiness in that heritage that can still speak to today’s problems. I suppose the answer to “whither Wesleyan evangelicalism” is simply to follow Dayton and rediscover the heritage. This answer requires that Wesleyans resist the dominance of the Marsden paradigm even as we resist efforts to redefine us away from our mission to spread scriptural holiness. The truth is that Wesleyans are gospel-centered, biblical people. We are a people of the book, as Wesley once said. And yet, we have understood fidelity to scripture as requiring women in ministry, mission to the poor, and lifting up the voices of all of God’s people. This is what holy love demands. We cannot recover this evangelical identity as long as we allow certain paradigms to dominate.

Dr. Dale M. Coulter is Professor of Historical Theology at Pentecostal Theological Seminary. He also serves on the Editorial Board for Firebrand.