early methodists

In the several decades after their arrival in the New England states in the late 1780s, Methodists were the objects of a wide variety of attacks, some of them mutually contradictory. (1) Their preachers were accused of being pickpockets, horse thieves, and sexual predators, while on the other hand some converts were mocked for their excessive moral seriousness. They were suspected alternatively of being agents of the English crown, spies for the French government, and Jeffersonian radicals. Further, to some it seemed that their episcopal form of government and ecclesiastical tribunals functioned as a sort of shadow government undermining the political institutions of the nation. They were attacked for their Arminian theology, in defense of which they vigorously condemned Calvinist doctrine. They were mocked as enthusiasts and fanatics whose preachers, pretending to an immediate divine calling, inflamed the passions of their listeners and whose gatherings degenerated into bedlams of disorder, confusion, and moral scandal. They were disturbers of churches, transgressing parochial boundaries, sowing disorder, and fracturing the covenant relationship between minister and flock, all of which recalled memories of the upheaval accompanying the awakenings of the 1740s. They were unlearned rustics not fit to instruct people in divinity, but they were also sly enough to worm their way into the hearts and minds of people by shrewdly hiding their true intentions and prejudicing their hearers against the standing ministers. In short, it is little exaggeration to say that they were "a sect which was everywhere spoken against." (2)

Words led to actions as opposition occasionally took the form of violence or threats of violence. The itinerant preacher Billy Hibbard reported that he had stones thrown at him and dogs set loose upon him. In addition, he narrowly, and in his view providentially, escaped a mob lying in wait for him in a swamp through which he was about to ride. (3) At Provincetown, Massachusetts, the town meeting denied the young Methodist society permission to build a house of worship. Undaunted, the Methodists proceeded to do so and collected a number of timbers in preparation for building. To prevent them from accomplishing their purpose, a "company of choice spirits" hauled away the timbers under cover of darkness and made a pile of the destroyed timbers, on top of which they placed effigies of the Methodists, tarred and feathered. (4) Abel Stevens, the chronicler of New England Methodism, recounted a story told to him by the preacher Asa Kent concerning resistance to the introduction of Methodism into the area around Lancaster, New Hampshire. After preaching one evening, a couple of local preachers were kidnapped by a mob and taken to a local tavern, where they were held while the mob worked themselves into predictably high spirits. After thus fortifying their courage, the men took one of the Methodist preachers, dragged him on his back across the frozen Connecticut River, and deposited him on the Vermont side, pronouncing good riddance to the Methodists. (5) Examples could be multiplied; the annals of early New England Methodism are filled with tales of incessant theological controversy, persecution, harassment, and mob violence.

Why did Methodists encounter such stiff opposition? What provoked the sort of suspicion and hostility they faced? The roots of the conflict lay in the fact that Methodists brought with them a conception of religion and of its relationship to society that was fundamentally at odds with the prevailing religious culture of New England. Methodists, exemplars of the quintessentially American style of religion characterized by voluntarism, democratic individualism, and an aggressive entrepreneurial sensibility, clashed sharply with a religious culture rooted in a geographical parish structure, framed by the mutual obligations of the covenant relationship between minister and congregation, and supported by state establishments, which persisted in New England well into the nineteenth century. (6) The logic behind establishment is telling: the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, for instance, mandated that the legislature should periodically authorize and require localities to make provision for public worship and for the support of "public Protestant teachers of piety, religion, and morality" because "the happiness of a people and the good order and preservation of civil government depend essentially upon piety, religion and morality," which could only be provided by public worship and public religious instruction. (7) This was no dead letter. While it was true that the Constitution also guaranteed freedom of conscience and provided that taxes paid for the support of public religious instruction could be applied to the minister of the sect or denomination whose teaching one attended, there were obstacles to doing so. One such obstacle was that, at least until 1811, it was necessary for a preacher to be ordained over a single, legally incorporated congregation in order to recover his hearers' taxes, which meant that itinerant preachers such as the Methodists could be denied the ability to do so. (8) Furthermore, in interpreting the Constitution's provisions for religious establishment, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts maintained that it was not a violation of conscience to be required to pay taxes for the support of a public teacher of religion of another sect or denomination than one's own. Because religious instruction tended to the public good and promoted morality, peace, and civil order, everyone could be required to pay for the support of a minister, even if they did not attend his services or derive any direct benefit from religious instruction. On the same grounds, the real estate of a corporation could be taxed to support a religious teacher, despite the fact that the members of the corporation lived in another parish and were members of another denomination and despite the fact that a corporation had no soul to benefit from religious instruction. The corporation did benefit, the court argued, from the protection of its property deriving from the decrease in crime brought about by public religious instruction. At least from the perspective of the commonwealth, religion was a matter of the public good and not merely of individual spiritual benefit; as such, it warranted the financial support of the entire community. (9)

Such religious establishments, and the principles underlying them, were under assault in the decades following the American Revolution. Commentators on American religion from de Tocqueville forward have noted that the fifty years after the Revolution saw the triumph of the "voluntary principle" as a defining characteristic of American religious life. American religion, predicated on religious freedom and characterized by democratic, individualistic, and competitive impulses, had taken on a new form and style by the middle third of the nineteenth century. Resistance to Methodism in New England reveals that this transition did not take place without a good deal of friction and supports the conclusion that "the religious history of the early republic is anything but evolutionary and consensual." (10) In the minds of many New Englanders, Methodism, along with the voluntary principle it represented, was a fundamental threat to social order and community cohesion, lacking the ability to promote the moral virtue in the populace necessary to secure the new republic. The irony, of course, is that evangelical religion, expressed in the revivals and reform efforts of the era of the Second Great Awakening, provided just the kind of religious and moral energy that opponents of Methodism feared would be sorely lacking if disestablishment and voluntarism destroyed the established religious culture.

Nathan Hatch has argued that debates surrounding the principles of voluntarism and disestablishment were only one aspect of a larger story that was taking place in religious history of the early republic. Such controversies "paled before [the] fundamental debate about religious authority" roiling American Christianity between 1790 and 1820. This fundamental debate was itself part of a larger crisis of authority gripping the nation in the age of democratic revolutions and provided a major source of religious conflict. (11) Hatch has demonstrated that populist religious leaders echoed cries for popular sovereignty in the political realm and employed the art of persuasion to establish their own claims to leadership based upon appeals to the common man, thereby undermining the authority of traditional religious leaders. The question of who had the right to exercise religious leadership was hotly contested as democratic religious leaders possessing neither social status nor education pressed their claims in the religious marketplace of the early republic. The conflict between the Methodist exemplars of democratization and the established clergy of New England certainly fits this reading of the religious history of the period. Opposition to Methodism in New England provides us with a clear example of the struggle over religious authority, as established ministers resisted the Methodist itinerants' claims to religious leadership, deriding them as unlearned and unfit to be ministers. Methodists responded that a college education and extensive theological training were no substitute for the call of the Spirit and the demonstrated ability to reach the hearts of a congregation and move them to repentance and faith.

The Methodist presence represented, therefore, a fundamental challenge to New England's churches and ministers. At one level the settled clergy's opposition to Methodism was a matter of religious competition; it is doubtless the case that orthodox ministers were eager to defend their prestige and status against a rival religious movement. Like eighteenth-century English parish clergyman, New England's established ministers were the ones who were most directly challenged by the emergence of the Methodists, who threatened division and set up "pulpit against pulpit, pastor against pastor." (12) The conflicts between Methodists and the established order of New England went beyond simple competition, however. More was at stake than questions of clerical loss of status and income or of challenges to established authority, for questions surrounding the nature of religious authority and who could properly exercise it were bound up with larger questions concerning the relationship between religion and the wider society. Religion, which was supposed to promote order, community stability, and the common good, threatened to become a social solvent if Methodism succeeded in drawing significant numbers away from the existing churches. Thus, opposition to Methodism reveals the presence of deep-seated fears of social disorder and community fragmentation. Such concerns were given greater force by the generalized fears of civil disorder present in New England in the decades after the Revolution as well as by the memories of the church schisms and upheaval that had accompanied the awakenings of the 1740s. As we will see, the centrifugal forces operating in the early republic rendered the introduction of increased religious competition and fragmentation into the religious realm particularly unwelcome. Thus, the Methodist incursion threatened a repeat of the disorders associated with the Great Awakening at just the time when the need for social order and social stability seemed to be more urgent than ever....

1801 Methodism continued to grow in upstate New Yor, Vermont and Western Massachusetts in such places as ... Chatham, NY...

Here's a link on the first great awakening and the many view on religion that seemed to explode during the "Great Awakening". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Great_Awakening.

The effects They became passionately and emotionally involved in their religion, rather than passively listening to intellectual discourse in a detached manner. Ministers who used this new style of preaching were sometimes called "new lights," while the preachers who remained unemotional were referred to as "old lights

Historians have debated whether the Awakening had a political impact on the American Revolution, which took place soon after. Heimert (1966) argues that Calvinism and Jonathan Edwards provided pre-Revolutionary America with a radical and democratic social and political ideology and that evangelical religion embodied and inspired a thrust toward American nationalism. Colonial Calvinism was the basis for the American Great Awakening and that in turn lay at the basis of the American Revolution. Heimert thus sees a major impact as the Great Awakening provided the radical American nationalism that prompted the Revolution. Awakening preachers sought to review God's covenant with America and to repudiate the materialistic, acquisitive, corrupt world of an affluent colonial society. The source of this corruption lay in England, and a severance of the ties with the mother country would result in a rededication of America to the making of God's Kingdom. However, Heimert has been criticized for not recognizing the differences between educated and uneducated evangelists, and for not recognizing the significance of Separate-Baptists and Methodists.[2]

The First Great Awakening resulted from powerful preaching that aimed to convince listeners of their personal guilt and of their need of salvation through decisive action that included public repentance. The Great Awakening led people to "experience God in their own way" and taught that they were responsible for their own actions.[citation needed]

Pulling away from ritual and ceremony, the Great Awakening made religion intensely personal to the average person by creating a deep sense of spiritual guilt and redemption, along with introspection and a commitment to a new standard of personal morality.[citation needed] Historian Sydney E. Ahlstrom sees it as part of a "great international Protestant upheaval" that also created Pietism in Germany, the Evangelical Revival and Methodism in England.[3]

The first great awakening

1730-1770

What historians call “the first Great Awakening” can best be described as a revitalization of religious piety that swept through the American colonies between the 1730s and the 1770s. That revival was part of a much broader movement, an evangelical upsurge taking place simultaneously on the other side of the Atlantic

http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/tserve/eighteen/ekeyinfo/grawaken.htm

Religion, especially the dynamics of evangelical Protestantism, played an important role in the tasks of internal expansion and nation-building which occupied Americans in the nineteenth century. At the same time, early in the century American Protestants also took their first steps beyond our shores in the foreign missionary movement.

...Two further internal missionary efforts, both to nonEuropean groups, framed and complemented the foreign missionary thrust. One was the continuation of missions to Native Americans, an effort already nearly three hundred years old. In the first third of the century this focused on the Cherokees of the southern highlands, and the fate of the missionary religious efforts there became a part of the tragic relocation of the Cherokees to the west, with several missionaries standing with the native Americans against the federal government....

Within this context of activist Protestant expansionism and mission efforts within the U.S., and as a direct extension of these home missions, the American foreign missionary movement developed. It began with the establishment in New England in 1810 of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM). Like its British counterpart which preceded it by almost two decades (the London Missionary Society), this was a nondenominational voluntary organization, not under the management of any ecclesiastical body. For nearly half a century the ABCFM directed the bulk of Americans' overseas missionary efforts, which still ranked second in priority to the task of settling and Christianizing the continental U.S. ......Finally, late in the century there was a visible rise in American national self-confidence and an assumption that American values and institutions were as valid as the Christian gospel. This was the age of European empire-building around the world, and the U.S. was not immune to the trend; American national power also expanded by the end of the century, resulting in acquisition of an empire in the 1890s (Hawaii and the Philippines). In this context it was easy for American missionaries to conflate the Protestant responsibility to evangelize the world and the assumption that the U.S. was a special model of civic virtue and republican civilization.

http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/tserve/nineteen/nkeyinfo/fmmovement.htm

Although the early records of Catholics in Fairfield County are incomplete, it is known that the first Catholic Center was in Bridgeport, with the first recorded Mass in 1830, leading to the building of St. James Church in 1840-41. then followed Norwalk and Stamford(1847 and 1848). Danbury followed in 1851, with Newtown in 1859. Ridgefield, Bethel, Georgetown and Redding Ridge came later.

As noted earlier, the first Catholic families in Redding had all immigrated from Ireland.

Often, the father of a family came first, or unmarried sons and daughters got jobs and sent for the other members of the family. Most were unskilled and had little formal education. All, however, had some knowledge of farming and a willingness to work. In this respect, some learned trades and became stone masons, carpenters, and at least one became a blacksmith.

It all begins in 1776, a year of revolution, that sparked waves of social upheaval beyond those simply tied to the war. One of those waves began with a funeral.

Jemima Wilkinson, a daughter of Quakers and New Light Baptist convert was 25 years old and living in Ledyard, Connecticut the year of the Declaration of Independence. She was known throughout the area for her fascination with religion and tendency to obsessively quote Scripture. Her death by fever, however, was not completely out of the ordinary for the time, though many mourners arrived at the funeral from the community probably because of her youth. During the funeral service, the coffin was opened for a final viewing of the corpse; to everyone's surprise and horror, the body was not cold and lifeless. Jemima's face had color and her chest moved with breath. The young woman suddenly leapt up in the casket and announced that she had died and returned to life; "If she was going to be buried today, Jemima vowed, she alone would preach the interment sermon. But, she intoned, she wasn't about to be buried, this day or any other day soon."[1] She had seen the Light and was brought back to heal the world. Proclaiming to be Christ reborn, she changed her name to the "Publick (sic) Universal Friend" and stated that she would found a new religion, the "Universal Friends."

The speech was so moving and "few who heard her resurrection speech were unimpressed with its sincerity and persuasiveness." [2] Word spread like wildfire of Jemima's return and she quickly became the hottest attraction in southeast Connecticut. Jemima was a "tall and graceful woman with dark hair and dark eyes, she had a magnetic personality and a powerful preaching style that created fervent disciples."[2] She took to preaching in men's clothing and gathered a following. Of course, soon a whispering campaign was instigated against her that forced her, and a small group of her followers, into exile. The "Jemimamites" began a wandering life, first to New Milford (CT) and then to Tioga County (PA). Everywhere they were reviled, but at the same time, her following constantly grew. Jemima's preaching followed Quaker ideals, though she adopted Shaker concepts of communalism and sexual abstinence and Calvinist ideas of a lost and dying world. She fiercely promoted Abolitionism, Pacifism and "Plain" living (including dress) [2].

In Tioga she declared that the Jemimakin (their new name in PA) would leave their tormentors and travel to the frontier where they would construct a community based on love, a new Jerusalem. They travelled close to 100 miles, deep in the wilderness to Keuka Lake. "In order to show their respect for their leader and also to reduce the wear and tear on her person from what promised to be a difficult journey -- the Jemimakins constructed for her traveling comfort a magnificent sedan chair complete with well-padded seats, a garish paint job and the initials 'P.U.F.' emblazoned on each side." [1]

In 1787, the Universal Friends founded the settlement of Jerusalem, NY. Today this name lives on in the Town of Jerusalem, located on the same spot, in Yates County. The settlement they founded on the northern shores of Keuka Lake grew and prospered with Jemima at its head. In 1790, it reportedly had 260 inhabitants; however it did not grow in numbers beyond this and life soon settled into a routine at Jerusalem, slowly losing its early fervour.

Jemima died in 1819 and her faith began to quietly break up afterwards. Reportedly, Jemima's followers so deeply believed in her first resurrection that her body remained unburied in a public spot for decades after her death to await her return. Finally, she was buried in an unmarked grave somewhere on her property where she rests today.

The town of Jerusalem did not disappear though and continued to prosper. "In later years, long after Jemima's passing, when the first post office was pending for the City of Jerusalem, the federal government asked the residents if they would be willing to rename their settlement: something shorter, perhaps, with a less biblical ring to it, but appropriate, of course. Since everyone in town had originally followed Jemima Wilkinson from Pennsylvania or Yankee Connecticut, they agreed to call their town 'Penn Yan.' Thus Penn Yan, New York, was born and officially registered in Washington, D.C." [1]

Joe and I visited Penn Yan and the Town of Jerusalem today and took a pilgrimmage to Jemima's/The Friend's house, which is still standing. The tall, white farmhouse is private property and only a tiny plaque bearing this bland inscription: "Built around 1790. Friend's Home. Here lived Jemimah Wilkinson known as the Universal Friend."

http://yorkstaters.blogspot.com/2006/02/whats-in-name-3-penn-yan.html

PEOPLE: The Universal Friend

Jemima Wilkinson, the first American-born woman to found a religious movement, was born in Rhode Island in about 1765, of Quaker parents. In 1776 she fell ill of a fever. She awoke from a coma and told those standing by that Jemima had died and a spirit from heaven now inhabited her body. She never again used her birth name and until her death in 1819 was always referred to as the Public Universal Friend. 

Her teachings were influenced both by the somewhat mystical version of Quakerism current at the time, by the Shaker movement founded a few years earlier by Mother Anne Lee, and by the New Light Methodists, whose meetings she had attended. She wore androgynous clothing, rode horseback, let her hair hang loose on her shoulders and wore a man's broad-brimmed hat; and she preached in public, a tremendous novelty for a woman in the 1770s. She preached all over southern New England and beginning in 1782, in the Philadelphia area. Sometime about the middle 1780s she determined to remove her followers from the persecution and distractions attendant on living among people not of her faith. 

Beginning in 1785 or 1786 some of her followers began to enter the Genesee Country for the purpose of finding a site for their settlement. Western New York had before the Revolution been off bounds for American settlers, the British choosing to leave the nations of the Iroquois Confederacy unmolested. Both New York and Massachusetts were still locked in a dispute over which state should have sovereignty over the area, since the natives had been driven out by General John Sullivan's expedition in 1779. 

In the summer of 1787, a party of three scouts from the Universal Friend's society travelled from New Milford CT to Philadelphia. They were Thomas Hathaway, Richard Smith and Abraham Dayton. They went on horseback into the Wyoming Valley of western Pennsylvania. There they met a man named Spalding who gave them directions on how to find Seneca Lake. The scouts found Sullivan's path and followed it up the east side of the lake to the site of Geneva, and thence some miles down the west side to a place called Kashong, where a Seneca village had been destroyed and where a pair of French traders and their Cayuga wives now resided. The traders, named Dominic DeBartzch and Joseph Poudre, told the scouts they had travelled all over Canada and the West, and this was the finest land to be had anywhere. The no-doubt travel-weary scouts were willing to be persuaded and explored a little. They returned to the Universal Friend with a favorable report.

Early the following summer a party of 25 of the Friend's pioneers met at Schenectady and embarked on batteaux. They followed the water route up the Mohawk, and overland into the drainage of the Seneca River. They found only Elark Jenning's rude cabin at the site of Geneva, and went by water up the east side of Seneca Lake to Kendaia or Apple Town, another of the villages that Sullivan had destroyed. They searched there unsuccessfully for a mill site, and attracted by the sound of falling water they crossed the lake and found there the mouth of the Outlet of Keuka Lake. This being a perennial stream with excellent water power capability, they determined to found their settlement nearby, on a knoll now called City Hill, about a mile south of the Outlet and a short distance inland, on the ancient Indian path from the Susquehanna country up into Canada. This was the first permanent white settlement in western New York. 

The Friend herself joined her followers in the early spring of 1790; by that time nearly all of her people who ever did come to the then-wilderness had already arrived, perhaps 300 persons in all. Of course, they never enjoyed the isolation they originally sought, being the unwitting vanguard of one of the first (and greatest) of many surges of westward migration in American history. Furthermore, the land many of them settled turned out to be in the limbo between the two Pre-Emption Lines, and a good title was in some cases very hard to come by. This and other problems led in 1794 to the Friend and some of her people moving a few miles west into the present town of Jerusalem. She died there in 1819, in an impressive and elegant house which still stands high on the hill overlooking the valley of Sugar Creek. 

The Society of Universal Friends did not long survive its charismatic founder. Her portrait, her Bible, many of her papers and other belongings may be seen at the Oliver House Museum in Penn Yan. Her lasting influence is still a subject of study, whether she was a forerunner of the religious and other reform movements that periodically swept western and central New York in the 19th century, and whether she had any influence on the emerging rights of women (one of those movements). Certainly she drew a group of tough and high-minded people to this area right at its very beginning; they dominated the development of Yates County during the first century after its settlement, and even now some of their descendants still live and work here. 

http://www.yatescounty.org/upload/12/historian/friend.html