1900s
A01=Sandy Calder
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anthropology
Author_Sandy Calder
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Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=HRCC2
Category=HRCC95
Category=QRAX
Category=QRM
Category=QRMB35
Christianity
church
COP=United Kingdom
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Language_English
methodism
methodist church
middle class
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Price_€50 to €100
Primitive Methodist Connexion
PS=Active
religion
socioeconomic status
sociology
softlaunch
twentieth century
working class
Product details
- ISBN 9781783270811
- Weight: 756g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 17 Mar 2016
- Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
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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.
