Buch, Englisch, Band 33, 316 Seiten, Print PDF, Format (B × H): 167 mm x 241 mm, Gewicht: 743 g
Buch, Englisch, Band 33, 316 Seiten, Print PDF, Format (B × H): 167 mm x 241 mm, Gewicht: 743 g
Reihe: Studies in Modern British Religious History
ISBN: 978-1-78327-081-1
Verlag: Boydell & Brewer
The Primitive Methodist Connexion's mature social character may have been working-class, but this did not reflect its social origins.
This book shows that while the Primitive Methodist Connexion's mature social character was working-class, this did not reflect its social origins. It was never the church of the working class, the great majority of whose churchgoers went elsewhere: rather it was the church whose commitment to its emotional witness was increasingly incompatible with middle-class pretensions. Sandy Calder shows that the Primitive Methodist Connexion was a religious movementled by a fairly prosperous elite of middle-class preachers and lay officials appealing to a respectable working-class constituency. This reality has been obscured by the movement's self-image as a persecuted community of humble Christians, an image crafted by Hugh Bourne, and accepted by later historians, whether Methodists with a denominational agenda to promote or scholars in search of working-class radicals. Primitive Methodists exaggerated their hardships and deliberately under-played their social status and financial success. Primitive Methodism in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries became the victim of its own founding mythology, because the legend of a community of persecuted outcasts, concealing its actual respectability, deterred potential recruits.
SANDY CALDER graduated with a PhD in Religious Studies from the Open University and has previously worked in the private sector.
Autoren/Hrsg.
Fachgebiete
Weitere Infos & Material
Introduction
The Historiography Problem
The Sources Problem
The Bourne Problem
A Third-Party View of Early Primitive Methodism
The Baptismal Registers
The 1851 Religious Census
The PM Chapel
The Character of the Leadership
Conclusions and a Reinterpretation
Appendix A
Bibliography
