Mitch Lewis

For Independence Day, Christianity Today republished two online articles by Mark Noll on Christians in the American Revolution. Noll mentions early Methodist leaders in both articles.

In Tory Believers: Which Higher Loyalty Noll discusses the Wesleys and Mr. Asbury:

It is not surprising that Loyalism existed among Methodists, who at the time of the Revolution were still a fledgling body in America. From England, American Methodists received word of Charles Wesley's openly stated belief in the doctrines of divine right and passive obedience. John Wesley, for his part, expressed public sympathy for the inequities inflicted upon the colonies. But he also criticized American Whigs for their highly exaggerated prattle about the "slavery" resulting from British policies and for their disobedience of the clear scriptural injunction to be subject to the powers that be. In seeking to put British wrongs in their proper light, Wesley reminded his American friends that the true slaves in the colonies were the Negroes. He also cited himself as an example of an Englishman who, because he did not meet the property qualifications, was not able to vote in parliamentary elections and who therefore paid taxes without representation. Because of the wide publicity given to the Wesleys' opinions on the conflict, Methodists in America were suspected of Toryism. Indeed, many of the Methodist missionaries in America probably shared their leaders' political sentiments. Whether they agreed or not, all the English missionaries except Francis Asbury returned to the mother country during the war. Asbury, who shared a patriotic sense of outrage at British imperial policies, did not hide his displeasure over Wesley's comments on the political crisis. Owing at least in part to Asbury's rejection of Wesley's Toryism, Methodists were able to resume their rapid advances in America after the war while other Loyalist bodies, particularly the Anglicans, suffered long under the stigma of Toryism.

In Was the Revolutionary War Justified, Noll revisits the issue of slavery and Methodism:

Only one population in the colonies clearly was justified by classical Christian reasoning in taking up arms to defend itself?the half-million or so enslaved African Americans who were held in bondage as the result of armed attacks upon peaceful noncombatants. When it comes to the British actions toward the colonies in the decade before 1776, almost all historians concede those actions were insensitive, based on lamentable misconceptions of colonial life, and often simply stupid. ... But were the admitted abuses serious enough to warrant an armed revolution? Patriot leaders thought so, but there is a problem with why they thought so. They were troubled less by actual evils (like the tax on tea, which, ironically, had made tea cheaper in the colonies than in England). Rather, they interpreted the bumbling British actions as a conspiracy to exterminate liberty in the colonies.... In short, it was the patriot fear of what Britain intended to do that led them to take up arms. Some British Christians thought this fear ludicrous. John Fletcher, a leading Methodist, wrote sympathetically in 1776 about the plight of American slaves, "whose groans upbraid the hypocritical friends of liberty [in America], who buy, and sell, and whip their fellow men as if they were brutes; and absurdly complain that they are enslaved." But patriot colonists saw things very differently indeed. They thought they were menaced by a comprehensive plot to violate their rights and property, and so they went to war.

My own Revolutionary War ancestor was a Scots-Irish Presbyterian who immigrated to the colonies shortly before the war began. He was in one of hundreds of thousands of Ulster Scots who fled poverty and tyranny in Ireland during the 18th century.

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