Thoughts on Independence Day

Here on the Fourth of July (or, see the photo…), thought I’d say a word about John Wesley and his opinion of the colonials.  Wesley of course had a disastrous tour of the American South – Georgia in particular –early in his ministry.  He hurt for American Methodists, feeling they were neglected by the Anglican Church in America.  Wesley was ambivalent about the looming revolution in America at first but ended up a Tory.  He gave these reasons:

Wesley was passionately anti-slavery.  His efforts were of tremendous influence in ridding Britain of the practice.  Wesley suggested the irony of proclaiming American freedom as Americans themselves perpetrated slavery. In 1774, as political rhetoric for liberty accelerated in the colonies, he sought to appropriate the same logic on behalf of African slaves. “Are they men as well as we,” Wesley wrote, “and have they not the same sensibility?”

He believed that the colonists held the same liberties as other constituent parts of the British empire.

Wesley judged that the Revolution allowed “no liberty of conscience.” Not only were American patriots “mad with party-zeal” against King George, they also fomented against neighbors who disagreed. “None dare print a page, or a line, unless it be exactly conformable to the sentiments of our lords, the people.” What were the allowable sentiments? “None must dare to utter one word, either in favour of King George, or in disfavor of the idol they have set up—the new, illegal, unconstitutional government, utterly unknown to us and to our forefathers.” Public sentiment, he worried, did not allow freedom of speech or conscience on matters of the Revolution.

Wesley opposed the partisan fervor of the American patriots. As ministers preached sermons that stoked the fires of war, Wesley cautioned about the consequences of out-of-control protests. He was not impressed by mobs who were “screaming out for liberty.” Too many patriots were “foaming with rage against their quiet neighbours, ready to tear out one another’s throats, and to plunge their swords into each other’s bowels.” In his 1775 sermon “National Sins and Miseries,” Wesley worried that “reason is lost in rage; its small still voice drowned by popular clamour.”

Politics and religion have always had, at best, an uneasy truce.