One Family Under God: Love, Belonging

Focusing on the Methodist thought of family that cut crosswise over organic ties, One Family Under God addresses verifiable discussions over the importance of family and how the family unit show created over the eighteenth century. Antiquarian Anna M. Lawrence exhibits that Methodists received adaptable meanings of love and loyalty and stressed broadened common affiliations that empowered them to join individuals outside the customary limits of family. They utilized the language of sentimental, euphoric love to depict their religious emotions and the language of the family unit to portray their bonds to each other. Along these lines, early Methodism gives a helpful focal point to investigating eighteenth-century methods of family, love, and specialist, as Methodists pondered the breaking points of familial and social expert in their all-inclusive religious family.

Methodists additionally wedded and shaped matrimonial families inside this bigger profound structure. Outreaching methods of marriage called for watchful, moderate romances, and frequently relational unions happened further down the road and delivered less kids. Religious perspectives on the family offered options in contrast to customary coupling and marriage—through chastity, otherworldly administration, and discovering one’s actual profound match, which both tested the job of parental expert inside marriage-production and quickened the turn inside the bigger society toward sentimental marriage.

By looking at the language and routine with regards to zealous sexuality and family, One Family Under God features how the Methodist development in the eighteenth century was vital to the ascent of sentimental marriage and the arrangement of the cutting edge family.