Details
- Autor(en) / Beteiligte
- Titel
- Crisis in the Antebellum Methodist Episcopal Church: Abolitionism, Slavery and the Life of Nathan Bangs
- Ort / Verlag
- ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
- Erscheinungsjahr
- 2024
- Link zum Volltext
- Quelle
- ProQuest Dissertations & Theses A&I
- Beschreibungen/Notizen
- This dissertation explores the history of the 1844 schism within the Methodist Episcopal Church, in which its Southern members seceded to form the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. Although the immediate cause of the schism was the deepening disagreement over American slavery, and increasing pro-abolitionist sentiment among Northern Methodists, the dissertation argues that the controversy is better understood by viewing it from the perspective of the evolving Northern Methodist understanding of the role of Methodism within American religion. The dissertation takes as its focal point the figure of Nathan Bangs, who played several highly significant roles within early nineteenth-century American Methodism, including those of theologian, historian and church leader.Although the dissertation is primarily a historical exploration of American Methodism in the early nineteenth century, it poses questions of the cause of religious schism. It explores various sociological models of schism, and explores the relationship between their sociological and ideological rationales, and proposes that the field of historical theology should think more closely about schism as a discrete phenomenon.