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Manna and the Manual: Sacramental and Instrumental Constructions of the Victorian Methodist Camp Meeting during the Mid-Nineteenth Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2018

Steven D. Cooley
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Extract

“The character of the place on which one Stands is the fundamental symbolic and social question,” Claims historian of religion Jonathan Z. Smith. From this sense of place, there follows a “whole language of Symbols and social structures.” Studies of Methodist history have also considered sensitivity to Methodism's distinctive sense of place essential to their subject. It is now commonplace to observe that Methodism shattered the geographic bounds of church and parish in order to situate religion for activity across an open, unbounded terrain. This proved one of the most offending characteristics of its ministers, whose itineracy commonly violated civil laws intended to locate spatially religion. Within some traditions, the receipt of a “location” meant a minister received a church and thereby became a minister. Within Methodist discourse, granting a “location” has held quite the opposite meaning: it has meant a departure from the ministry.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religion and American Culture , Volume 6 , Issue 2 , Summer 1996 , pp. 131 - 159
Copyright
Copyright © Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture 1996

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References

Notes

1. Smith, Jonathan Z., Map is not Territory: Studies in the History of Religion (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1978), 129-46.Google ScholarPubMed For discussions of John Wesley's “sense of place,” note Richard P. Heitzenrater, The Elusive Mr. Wesley, vol. 1: John Wesley His Own Biographer (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1984), 104-15; and Rack, Henry D., Reasonable Enthusiast: John Wesley and the Rise of Methodism (Philadelphia: Trinity Press, 1989), 189-93, 254, 279, 287, 309, 525-26, 528, 535.Google Scholar

Recent studies of American Methodism's sense of place include the following works: Richey, Russell E., Early American Methodism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991)Google Scholar; Schneider, A. Gregory, The Way of the Cross Leads Home: The Domestication of American Methodism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993)Google Scholar; Norwood, Frederick A., The Story of American Methodism (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1974), 133-44Google Scholar; Dunlap, E. Dale, “The United Methodist System of Itinerant Ministry,” in Perspectives on American Methodism, ed. Richey, Russell E., Rowe, Kenneth, and Schmidt, Jean Miller (Nashville: Kingswood Books, 1993), 415-30Google Scholar; and Hatch, Nathan O., The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 81–93, 193-204.Google Scholar

2. Richey, , Early American Methodism, 5, 14-15, 25-28, 36-42, 47-64, 70, 82-97.Google Scholar Richey's discussion of the Methodist orientation to space seems to support a growing body of interpretation that softens or modifies the polarity exhibited by both Eliadian categories of sacred and profane space and Jonathan Z. Smith's categories of locative and utopian orientations. See esp. Bolle, Kees W., “Speaking of a Place,” in Myths and Symbols: Studies in Honor of Mircea Eliade, ed. Kitagawa, Joseph M. and Long, Charles H. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), esp. 128-29Google Scholar; Lane, Beiden C., Landscapes of the Sacred: Geography and Narrative in American Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1988), 184-92Google Scholar; Lane, Beiden C., “The Spirituality of the Evangelical Revival,” Theology Today 43, no. 2 (July 1986): 169-77CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Shiner, Larry, “Sacred Space, Profane Space, Human Space,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 40, no. 4 (December 1972): 425-36CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Walsh, James P., “Holy Time and Sacred Space in Puritan New England,” American Quarterly 32, no. 1 (Spring 1980): 79–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The more recent work by Jonathan Z. Smith may also soften the polarity of his earlier categories. For this, see Smith, Jonathan Z., To Take Place (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), esp. 1–23.Google Scholar

See also Durkheim, Emile, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1915; repr., Glencoe, 111.: Free Press, 1947), 36–41 Google Scholar; Eliade, Mircea, Patterns in Comparative Religion (New York: Meridian, 1958), 367-87Google Scholar; Eliade, Mircea, The Sacred and the Profane (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1957), 20–65 Google Scholar; and Smith, , Map is not Territory, 88–207.Google Scholar Also note van der Leeuw, G., Religion in Essence and Manifestation (1938; repr., Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986), 393–402.Google Scholar

3. Gilbert Haven's statement is found in Hughes, George, Days of Power in the Forest Temple (Boston: John Best, 1873), 3–6.Google Scholar

4. See McLoughlin, William, Modern Revivalism: Front Charles Grandison Finney to Billy Graham (New York: Ronald Press, 1959), 55–56, 239-44Google Scholar; Weddle, David L., The Law as Gospel: Revival and Reform in the Theology of Charles G. Finney (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1985)Google Scholar; and Findlay, James F., Dwight L. Moody: American Evangelist, 1837-1899 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 223-26.Google Scholar

5. See Cooley, Steven D., “Applying the Vagueness of Language: Poetic Strategies and Campmeeting Piety in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” Church History 63, no. 4 (December 1994): 570-86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6. In chronological order, the main texts of the camp-meeting genre are: Mead, A. P., Manna in the Wilderness; or the Grove and its Altar (Philadelphia: Perkinpine and Higgins, 1860)Google Scholar; McLean, Alexander and Eaton, J. W., eds., Penuel; or, Face to Face with God (New York: W. C. Palmer, Jr., 1869)Google Scholar; Pomeroy, B., Visions from Modern Mounts (Albany, N.Y.: Van Benthuysen, 1871)Google Scholar; Harvey, Ellen T. H., Wilderness and Mount; A Poem of Tabernacles (Boston: John Bent, 1872)Google Scholar; Hughes, Days of Power; and Wallace, Adam, A Modern Pentecost (Philadelphia: Methodist Home Journal, 1873).Google Scholar

In addition to these book-length works, several religious periodicals engaged the form in serial publications, and there are also other book-length works that resemble, but do not strictly fit, the camp-meeting genre. A similar line of publications also appeared in the 1890's.

7. This interpretation has been influenced by Mircea Eliade's insistence that all human religious life will involve a theoretical aspect and by Jonathan Z. Smith's insistence that religious thinking will always engage the discrepancy between their ideal and their historical Situation. See Eliade, , Patterns in Comparative Religion, esp. 32–33 Google Scholar; Smith, , Map is not Territory, esp. 297–301 Google Scholar; and Smith, Jonathan Z., Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).Google Scholar

8. Three works that variously consider the sacramental character of the Methodist camp meeting are Richey, Early American Methodism; Bruce, Dickson Jr., And They All Sang Hallelujah: Plain-Folk Camp-Meeting Religion, 1800-1845 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1974)Google Scholar; and Jackson, J. B., “The Sacred Grove in America,” in The Necessity for Ruins (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), 77–88.Google Scholar More Standard treatments of the camp meeting as an instrument of modern revivalism are found in Johnson, Charles A., The Frontier Camp Meeting: Religion's Harvest Time (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1955)Google Scholar; Conklin, Paul K., Cane Ridge: America's Pentecost (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990)Google Scholar; Boles, John B., The Great Revival, 1787-1805: The Origins of the Southern Evangelical Mind (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1972)Google Scholar; and Brown, Kenneth O., Holy Ground: A Study of the American Camp Meeting (New York: Garland Publishing, 1992).Google Scholar

9. Whitehead, Alfred North, Science and the Modern World (New York: Free Press, 1925), 96–97.Google Scholar

10. This interpretation builds on William McLoughlin's seminal study, Modern Revivalism. The most clear and influential Statement of the technological spirit of modern revivalism occurs in Finney, Charles G., Lectures on Revivals of Religion (Oberlin, Ohio: E. J. Goodrich, 1868), 1–21, 238-39.Google Scholar This is not to deny the pragmatic streak of the Wesley and Whitefield revivals or other antecedents, but these do not quite yet exemplify, in practice or theory, Finney's modern technological outlook. For another view of ritual as work, see Smith, Imagining Religion, esp. 36-89.

11. Gorham, B. W., Camp Meeting Manual (Boston: H. V. Degen, 1854).Google Scholar

12. Mead, , Manna in the Wilderness, 48, 50.Google Scholar

13. Anderson, Galusha, When Neighbors Were Neighbors (Boston: Lothrop, Lee and Shepard Company, 1911), 105-6.Google Scholar Although not belonging to the genre, this passage aptly portrays the camp meeting's temple language. For instance, see Mead, , Manna in the Wilderness, ix–x Google Scholar; and Wallace, , A Modern Pentecost, 17.Google Scholar

14. Mead, , Manna in the Wilderness, 50.Google Scholar

15. Wallace, , A Modern Pentecost, 26.Google Scholar

16. Harvey, , Wilderness and Mount, 28, 27.Google Scholar

17. Harvey, , Wilderness and Mount, 16 Google Scholar; Mead, , Manna in the Wilderness, 50 Google Scholar; L. H. K., “My First Experience at a National Camp-Meeting,” Advocate of Christian Holiness 4, no. 2 (August 1873): 28.

18. Hughes, , Days of Power, 271-72.Google Scholar

19. McLean, and Eaton, , eds., Penuel, xvii.Google Scholar

20. See Harvey, , Wilderness and Mount, 60–61, 77-79, 85-92, 131-32, 142-43Google Scholar; McLean, and Eaton, , eds., Penuel, 86 Google Scholar; Henry, G. W., Trials and Triumphs in the Life of G. W. Henry, 2d ed. (Oneida, N.Y.: [by author], 1861), 322.Google Scholar

21. Primitivism has become a key interpretive category in American religious history. A consideration of the Victorian Methodist camp meeting might suggest a distinctive mode of primitivism as a temporary ritual realization of the primitive. It might also reveal the primitivist impulse to operate as a component within a larger constellation of mutually reinforcing structures that included the New Jerusalem, Canaan, Heaven, Pentecost, and the Temple, among others. On primitivism in American religious history, see Bozeman, Theodore Dwight, To Live Ancient Lives: The Primitivist Dimension of Puritanism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988)Google Scholar; Hughes, Richard T., ed., The American Quest for the Primitive Church (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988)Google Scholar; and Hughes, Richard T. and Allen, C. Leonard, eds., Illusions of Innocence: Protestant Primitivism in America, 1630-1875 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).Google Scholar

22. The line opens Bryant's widely anthologized “A Forest Hymn” (1825). For instances of the line's quotation, see Gorham, Camp Meeting Manual, 39; Mead, , Manna in the Wilderness, ix, 36, 51Google Scholar; Hughes, , Days of Power, 3 Google Scholar; and Finley, James B., Autobiography of Rev. James B. Finley: or, Pioneer Life in the West, ed. Strickland, W. P. (Cincinnati: Methodist Book Concern, 1854), 171.Google Scholar

23. For instance, compare Paradise Lost, 4:246-48, with similar lines in Harvey, , Wilderness and Mount, 14.Google Scholar

24. Paradise Lost, 5:455; Gilbert Haven, introduction to Days of Power, by Hughes, 3-6.

25. From an editorial in the Guide to Holiness, in Mead, Manna in the Wilderness, 228, 230.

26. On cosmological heaven in these and other writers, see Tillyard, E. M., The Elizabethan World Picture (London: Chatto and Windus, 1943)Google Scholar; Lovejoy, Arthur O., The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936), esp. 99–143 Google Scholar; and Lewis, C. S., The Discarded Image: An Introduction into Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964).Google Scholar The English hymns seem the most prominent transmitter of the camp meeting's cosmology as evident in such camp-meeting songbooks as Gorham, B. W.'s Choral Echoes (Boston: Degen, 1864).Google Scholar Other sources include theological, devotional, and literary traditions and texts. Immediate influences include George Gilfillan's literary anthologies and such addresses as his “The Christian Bearings of Astronomy” (London, 1864). Gilfillan extended the influence of Thomas Chalmer's discourses on astronomy and of Nichol, John's Views of the Architecture of the Heavens: in a Series of Letters to a Lady (Edinburgh: William Tait, 1837).Google Scholar In America, reflections on cosmology ranged from large sections in Timothy Dwight's systematic work, Theology Explained and Defended in a Series of Sermons, 12th ed., 4 vols. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1846-49), esp. 1:278-316, 4:502, to the anonymously written The Stars and theAngels (Philadelphia: James S. Claxton, 1867).

27. See Weiss, Ellen, City in the Woods: The Life and Design of an American Camp Meeting on Martha's Vineyard (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), xii, 10, 31, 36Google Scholar; Mead, , Manna in the Wilderness, 160, 353-55Google Scholar; Hughes, , Days of Power, 433-34.Google Scholar The phrase “St. Peter's of campgrounds” is from Hughes, , Days of Power, 433.Google Scholar

Other references and speculations concerning the camp-meeting cosmology can be found in McLean, and Eaton, , eds., Penuel, 203-4Google Scholar; Hughes, , Days of Power, 272 Google Scholar; Pomeroy, , Visions front Modern Mounts, 72–73, 178-79Google Scholar; and Knapp, Martin Wells, Out of Egypt Mo Canaan; or Lessons in Spiritual Geography (Cincinnati: Cranston and Stowe, 1888), 176.Google Scholar

Prominent exceptions to this radial plan would include the grid pattern of Ocean Grove, New Jersey, and the rectangular plan of the camp meeting described in A. P. Mead's Manna in the Wilderness. Even so, both nonradial sites were encountered through the symbolic System of the camp meeting's religious culture so that these sites, too, were described as circles. Moreover, Mead explained that the rectangular layout of his camp meeting also followed a model of heaven. See Mead, , Manna in the Wilderness, 48–50, 410.Google Scholar

28. For this and other experiential declarations of the camp meeting/heaven formula, see the following: Hughes, , Days of Power, 219 Google Scholar; Pomeroy, , Visions from Modern Mounts, 122 Google Scholar; McLean, and Eaton, , eds., Penuel, 213-25, 299, 316Google Scholar; James, John J., “Praying Towards the Temple,” Advocate of Christian Holiness 3, no. 3 (September 1872): 64.Google Scholar

29. Mead, , Manna in the Wilderness, 362 Google Scholar; see also 353-55, 361-62; Weiss, , City in the Woods, xi–xii, 30-38, 70-75.Google Scholar Mead's Statement quoted Congregationalist Timothy Dwight. This suggests an association between that passage of Dwight's systematic theology and the delightful cottages of the Victorian camp meeting. Dwight, Theology Explained and Defended, 12th ed., 4:511.

30. Harvey, , Wilderness and Mount, 15–16.Google Scholar

31. Jones, Charles E., Perfectionist Persuasion: The Holiness Movement in American Methodism, 1867-1936 (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1974), 35–46.Google Scholar

32. Some have argued that the theological root for modern Pentecostalism originated in the Pentecost terminology of Methodist revivalism. See especially Dayton, Donald W., Theological Roots of Pentecostalism (Grand Rapids: Francis Asbury, 1987).Google Scholar However, this Pentecost terminology was only part of the richer experiential vocabulary of the Methodist vernacular. This realization provides a different context for understanding the origins of Pentecostalism. If Pentecostalism emerged from the Methodist vernacular, this cannot be seen, as some have seen it, as the emergence of a more experiential religious culture. Instead, Pentecostalism prioritized among Methodist experiences, thereby rationalizing its lush vernacular language. Pentecostalism restricted the full range of Methodist experience to one of its elements, taming the playful improvisational possibilities of camp-meeting language and experience. Thus, Pentecostalism cannot be seen as moving further into the Dionysian but rather as rationalizing, limiting, and taming the experiential vocabulary of the Methodist vernacular. For an Interpretation that differs from both Dayton and the Suggestion made here, see Jones, Charles E., “Reading the Text in Methodist-Holiness and Pentecostal Spirituality,” Wesleyan Theological Journal 30, no. 2 (Fall 1995): 164-81.Google Scholar

33. For one discussion of the relationship between “first order” and “second order” religious thinking, see McFague, Sallie, Metaphorical Theology: Models of God in Religious Language (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982), esp. 22–29, 111-31.Google Scholar

34. For some uses of dissociation as an analytic category, note Taves, Ann, “Knowing through the Body: Dissociative Religious Experience in the African- and British-American Methodist Traditions,” The Journal of Religion 73, no. 2 (April 1993): 200–222 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Geertz, Clifford, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 116.Google Scholar

35. The terminology and conceptual framework for what follows is adapted from the following: Smith, , Map is not Territory, 205-7Google Scholar; Smith, , Imagining Religion, 62 Google Scholar; Huizinga, Johan, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), 7–13 Google Scholar; and Marty, Martin E., “Religion: A Private Affair, in Public Affairs,” Religion and American Culture 3, no. 2 (Summer 1993): 115-27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

36. Historian Brenda Parnes has similarly described the Victorian camp meeting as an extension of the city. Parnes analyzed the camp meeting as an object of local-social-urban history. The present article seeks to understand the religious character of these camp meetings. See Parnes, , “Ocean Grove: A Planned Leisure Environment,” in Planned and Utopian Experiments: Tour New Jersey Towns, ed. by Stellhorn, Paul A. (Trenton: New Jersey Historical Commission, 1980), 28–47.Google Scholar

37. Histories of the National Camp Meeting Association for the Promotion of Holiness are found in the following works: Dieter, Melvin E., The Holiness Revival of the Nineteenth Century (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1980), 96–155, 204-35Google Scholar; and Jones, , Perfectionist Persuasion, 16–63.Google Scholar

38. Advocate of Christian Holiness 3, no. 2 (August 1872): 28. For descriptions of the above incident, see Wallace, , A Modern Pentecost, 119-20Google Scholar; and Advocate of Christian Holiness 4, no. 3 (September 1873): 56. For the National Camp Meeting Association policy Statements, see Advocate of Christian Holiness 3, no. 3 (September 1872): 70; and Proceedings of the National Holiness Assembly (Chicago: Arnold Press, 1885), 84-85. For other relevant articles, see Advocate of Christian Holiness 4, no. 2 (August 1873): 43; and 4, no. 5 (November 1873): 116.

39. Wallace, , A Modern Pentecost, 119-20Google Scholar; see also Advocate of Christian Holiness 4, no. 3 (September 1873): 56.

40. See Phinney, William R., “The Hunter Camp Meeting” (Rye, N.Y.: New York Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church, Commission on Archives and History, n.d.).Google Scholar

41. See Wells, G. C., “Camp-Meeting Traffic,” Advocate of Christian Holiness 2, no. 4 (October 1871): 76 Google Scholar; Hughes, , Days of Power, 26–27 Google Scholar; and Wallace, , A Modern Pentecost, 22.Google Scholar

42. Parnes, “Ocean Grove,” 40; see also Jones, , Perfectionist Persuasion, 32–34.Google Scholar

43. Osborn, Lucy, In the Beginning God: Pioneer Days at Ocean Grove (New York: Methodist Book Concern, n.d.), 11–12, 15.Google Scholar It may be worth noting that E. H. Stokes had attended the camp meeting that Mead described in Manna in the Wilderness a few years earlier.

44. See Parnes, “Ocean Grove,” 31-32, 36; and Osborn, , In the Beginning God, 25.Google Scholar

45. Osborn, , In the Beginning God, 26, 32, 33.Google Scholar

46. Brown, Kenneth O., Holy Ground: A Study of the American Camp Meeting (New York: Garland Publishing, 1992), 32, 61–62.Google Scholar

47. “Tabernacle Meeting in Baltimore,” Advocate of Christian Holiness 5, no. 1 (July 1874): 21. See also Wallace, , A Modern Pentecost, 203-4Google Scholar; Hughes, , Days of Power, 218 Google Scholar; “Tabernacle Meeting in Baltimore,” Advocate of Christian Holiness 5, no. 1 (July 1874): 20-22.

48. Juanita [pseud.], “Union Seaside Convention,” Advocate of Christian Holiness 4, no. 3 (September 1873): 62; see also “Laying on of Hands,” Advocate of Christian Holiness 5, no. 4 (October 1874): 90-91; and Wallace, , A Modern Pentecost, 26, 160.Google Scholar

49. Advocate of Christian Holiness 3, no. 3 (September 1872): 64.

50. Pomeroy, , Visions from Modern Mounts, 281.Google Scholar

51. Mead, , Manna in the Wilderness, 410 Google Scholar; also excerpted in Norwood, Frederick A., Sourcebook of American Methodism (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1982), 193-95.Google Scholar Other accounts of the camp-meeting procession are found in McLean, and Eaton, , eds., Penuel, 156-57, 482Google Scholar; Hughes, , Days of Power, 261-62Google Scholar; and Advocate of Christian Holiness 3, no. 3 (September 1872): 64. Another kind of procession is described in Advocate of Christian Holiness 6, no. 5 (November 1875), 117.

Mead's experiential description of the camp-meeting procession has striking affinities to Mircea Eliade's analysis of the ritual experience of sacred time and Space. See Eliade, Mircea, The Myth of the Eternal Return; or, Cosmos and History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1954)Google Scholar; Eliade, , The Sacred and the Profane:, 68–113 Google Scholar; and Eliade, , Patterns in Comparative Religion, 388–409.Google Scholar See also van der Leeuw, G., Religion in Essence and Manifestation, 384-92.Google Scholar