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Sacred Capital: Methodism and Settler Colonialism in the Empire of Liberty
How Methodist settlers in the American West acted as agents of empire

In the early years of American independence, Methodism emerged as the new republic’s fastest growing religious movement and its largest voluntary association. Following the contours of settler expansion, the Methodist Episcopal Church also quickly became the largest denomination in the early American West. With Sacred Capital, Hunter Price resituates the Methodist Episcopal Church as a settler-colonial institution at the convergence of “the Methodist Age” and Jefferson’s “Empire of Liberty.”

Price offers a novel interpretation of the Methodist Episcopal Church as a network through which mostly white settlers exchanged news of land and jobs and facilitated financial transactions. Benefiting from Indigenous dispossession and removal policies, settlers made selective, strategic use of the sacred and the secular in their day-to-day interactions to advance themselves and their interests. By analyzing how Methodists acted as settlers while identifying as pilgrims, Price illuminates the ways that ordinary white Americans fulfilled Jefferson’s vision of an Empire of Liberty while reinforcing the inequalities at its core.
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Sacred Capital: Methodism and Settler Colonialism in the Empire of Liberty
How Methodist settlers in the American West acted as agents of empire

In the early years of American independence, Methodism emerged as the new republic’s fastest growing religious movement and its largest voluntary association. Following the contours of settler expansion, the Methodist Episcopal Church also quickly became the largest denomination in the early American West. With Sacred Capital, Hunter Price resituates the Methodist Episcopal Church as a settler-colonial institution at the convergence of “the Methodist Age” and Jefferson’s “Empire of Liberty.”

Price offers a novel interpretation of the Methodist Episcopal Church as a network through which mostly white settlers exchanged news of land and jobs and facilitated financial transactions. Benefiting from Indigenous dispossession and removal policies, settlers made selective, strategic use of the sacred and the secular in their day-to-day interactions to advance themselves and their interests. By analyzing how Methodists acted as settlers while identifying as pilgrims, Price illuminates the ways that ordinary white Americans fulfilled Jefferson’s vision of an Empire of Liberty while reinforcing the inequalities at its core.
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Sacred Capital: Methodism and Settler Colonialism in the Empire of Liberty

Sacred Capital: Methodism and Settler Colonialism in the Empire of Liberty

by Hunter Price
Sacred Capital: Methodism and Settler Colonialism in the Empire of Liberty

Sacred Capital: Methodism and Settler Colonialism in the Empire of Liberty

by Hunter Price

Overview

How Methodist settlers in the American West acted as agents of empire

In the early years of American independence, Methodism emerged as the new republic’s fastest growing religious movement and its largest voluntary association. Following the contours of settler expansion, the Methodist Episcopal Church also quickly became the largest denomination in the early American West. With Sacred Capital, Hunter Price resituates the Methodist Episcopal Church as a settler-colonial institution at the convergence of “the Methodist Age” and Jefferson’s “Empire of Liberty.”

Price offers a novel interpretation of the Methodist Episcopal Church as a network through which mostly white settlers exchanged news of land and jobs and facilitated financial transactions. Benefiting from Indigenous dispossession and removal policies, settlers made selective, strategic use of the sacred and the secular in their day-to-day interactions to advance themselves and their interests. By analyzing how Methodists acted as settlers while identifying as pilgrims, Price illuminates the ways that ordinary white Americans fulfilled Jefferson’s vision of an Empire of Liberty while reinforcing the inequalities at its core.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780813951331
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Publication date: 07/12/2024
Series: Jeffersonian America
Pages: 280
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.25(d)
Age Range: 18 Years

About the Author

Hunter Price is Associate Professor of History at Western Washington University.

What People are Saying About This

Tisa Wenger

Accessibly written, with an eye for colorful details. Speaking back to the standard works on Methodism in the early republic, Price provides a more textured view of the itinerant ministry. He shows how early Methodists, seeing themselves as both pilgrims and settlers, built new settler networks across the expanding western borderlands of the United States.

Randolph Scully

Sacred Capital provides a powerful and perceptive reframing of the story of Methodism in the early national U.S. West. Hunter Price convincingly demonstrates how Methodism’s “social principle” cut both ways. Even as it mobilized communal and familial networks to help spread the influence of a burgeoning evangelical faith to the far reaches of an expansionist settler republic, converts could use Methodism’s network to pursue their own personal, communal, and familial goals. This melding of spiritual and social uses was essential to Methodism’s success in the new republic, but it also built the tensions of that republic into the denomination itself. Price tells this story with subtlety, insight, and an eye for revealing detail, making Sacred Capital essential reading for historians of American religion and of the early republic.

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