644 - The Way of the Cross Leads Home: The Domestication of American Methodism

The Way of the Cross Leads Home: The Domestication of American Methodism
By A. Gregory Schneider
Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN, Indiana University Press, 1993. 257 pp. $29.95.

This is a book about the links between Methodist piety and American families in nineteenth-century America. Schneider, who teaches in the Department of Behavioral Sciences at Pacific Union College, argues that the piety and practices of early Methodist congregations and class meetings inclined their participants to accept the ideal of domesticity-the image of the home as a separated sphere defined in terms of mutual affection-that was beginning to pervade white middle-class America in the nineteenth century.

The argument proceeds in clear stages. The background is what Schneider calls a "culture of honor," which defined the family in terms of patriarchal sovereignty, maintained porous boundaries between domestic and public life, and judged human worth through external appearance and performance. When the American Revolution and the westward migration created dissatisfaction with this cultural ideal, the Methodists were there with an alternative. Their class meetings, especially, taught people to follow "the way of the cross" by mortifying their affections and weaning themselves from the world. As the classes became increasingly like families-groups of brothers and sisters, fathers and mothers in Christ, bound together in mutual discipline and affection-the Methodists began to redefine their biological families as nurseries of piety and affection. Eventually, Schneider believes, the family became the main agency for teaching Methodists to follow the way of the cross, while the denomination itself became a nascent bureaucracy made up of specialized agencies and programs. The change began in the 1820s; it was almost complete by the 1870s; and it transformed both the Methodist denomination and the ideal of the home among Methodist laity.

At one level, the book attempts to gauge the social and cultural influence of Methodism on American culture, but, once he has described the culture of honor, Schneider devotes little energy to tracing the changes in the American family and assessing the various influences that led Americans to adopt a Victorian domestic ideology. Schneider's deeper interest lies in describing how the Methodists transformed their class meetings, their piety, their ideal of the family, and their understanding of their denomination. This is a book about the interactions between churches and families and about how changes in the one can affect the other.

In arguing that the home became the "main agency" in late-nineteenth century Methodism for the salvation of souls, while the

646 - The Way of the Cross Leads Home: The Domestication of American Methodism

church became an activist bureaucracy of specialized agencies intent on programs and causes, Schneider overstates his case. The denominational bureaucrats did not define Methodism. Most of the defining went on at the congregational level, and Methodism remained a rural denomination formed mainly of small congregations that maintained an ethos only vaguely affected by the bureaucratic changes. But this is a minor point. Schneider has written a fine book about the subtle relationships between the ethos of a denomination and the family lives of its members. Adept in employing the general categories of the social sciences, he also stays close to the texture and feel of the everyday experiences of Methodist men and women. He is especially insightful about the paradoxes of women's experience within the Methodist family. He has made a rich contribution to the history of Methodism in America.

E. Brooks Holifield

Candler School of Theology
Emory University
Atlanta, GA