Hearing God and Debating Liberty: Sound and Methodism in England during the Age of the French Revolution

Abstract

This essay examines the role of sound in accounts of Methodism in England during the era of the French Revolution. Drawing on religious writings and political tracts, it explores how the conflict between loyalism and radicalism in the 1790s shaped perceptions of the sonic aspects of Methodist piety among both supporters and opponents of the movement. By analysing loyalist sermons, in particular, the essay shows that the conservative Anglican interpretation of Methodism as a stimulus to Jacobinism derived from an elite anxiety about the subversive effects of noisy behaviour. It also reveals that disagreement about the proper use of sound in both religious and political contexts contributed to the escalating conflict within the Methodist Connexion during the revolutionary decade, following the death of John Wesley. As the essay demonstrates, the acoustic dimensions of religion became thoroughly politicised in the 1790s in a development which radicalised some plebeian evangelical Dissenters, while hardening the division between popular and institutional Methodism.