La Roy Sunderland: The Alienation of an Abolitionist

1972 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
J. R. Jacob
Keyword(s):  
Methodist Episcopal ◽  
Episcopal Church ◽  
Methodist Church ◽  
Methodist Episcopal Church ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Church ◽  
Do So

In November 1842, La Roy Sunderland, Orange Scott and Jotham Horton, leading abolitionists and ministers, withdrew from the Methodist Episcopal Church. The first issue of the True Wesleyan, Scott's anti-slavery newspaper, published an announcement of their withdrawal and their reasons for deciding to do so. They could no longer serve a church that condoned slavery and that scarcely permitted delegates to its conferences to raise the issue there. The three dissenters saw what they regarded as the high-handed tactics of the bishops in preventing conferences from considering anti-slavery resolutions as resting upon ‘the assumptions of Rome’! This act of withdrawal and the formation of the wesleyan Methodist Church die following May came after a six years' struggle between the radical abolitionists within the Church and their more conservative brethren, principally the bishops, who had stifled discussion of the slavery issue in order to preserve the Church as a national entity. This Wesleyan schism is a token of the change that is the subject of this essay.

Embodying Methodist Theology

2019 ◽  
pp. 229-277
Author(s):  
Kevin M. Watson
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Methodist Episcopal ◽  
Episcopal Church ◽  
Secret Societies ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Personal Wealth ◽  
The Future ◽  
Methodist Episcopal Church ◽  
Church Buildings

This chapter explores the diverging conceptions of holy living in Simpson and Roberts in depth. The chapter argues that Simpson was most concerned with growing and expanding the Methodist Episcopal Church, often compromising on what had been core commitments of Methodism in the hope of gaining a broader audience and expanding the institution. Roberts, on the other hand, believed that these same compromises were leading to a sacrifice of Methodism’s mission to “spread scriptural holiness.” The chapter outlines disagreements about how holiness should be expressed in the lives of Methodists, focusing in particular on differences in church buildings, dress and personal wealth, secret societies, and slavery. The chapter concludes by discussing the different visions for the future of American Methodism that Simpson and Roberts had, as a result of these different understandings of the importance of holiness and how it should be expressed in the lives of Methodists.

Epilogue

2019 ◽  
pp. 111-112
Author(s):  
Travis M. Foster
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York Times ◽  
African Methodist Episcopal ◽  
Methodist Episcopal ◽  
Episcopal Church ◽  
Normal Life ◽  
African Methodist Episcopal Church ◽  
Methodist Episcopal Church ◽  
Liberal Imagination

On June 27, 2015, ten days after the massacre at the Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, Claudia Rankine published an essay on black loss in the New York Times’ Sunday magazine: “the white liberal imagination likes to feel temporarily bad about black suffering,” Rankine writes; yet “[w]e live in a country where Americans assimilate corpses in their daily comings and goings. Dead blacks are a part of normal life here.”...

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