John Wesley’s Political World

Glen O’Brien’s John Wesley’s Political World is a substantive and welcome addition to work on Wesley’s political perspectives and the context in which Wesley was formed and lived. Other works on Wesley’s political perspective often give us a window into the author’s perspective more than Wesley’s. O’Brien’s volume is a much-needed corrective. At the core of O’Brien’s project is the attempt to understand Wesley in context, a larger project near and dear to this reviewer’s work.O’Brien quickly corrects misconceptions of Wesley’s political perspective, acknowledging that ‘Wesley was a constitutional loyalist with a deep-seated aversion to radical revolution’ with ‘an “amended” Toryism that was informed by his deep Christian commitment to the poor and what he considered to be their rights under the crown’ (2). Wesley had an appreciation for the Hanoverian monarchy and the constitutional settlement ‘as the surest safeguard of civil and religious liberty’ (3). Key to O’Brien is the place of loyalty as central to Wesley’s thought, arguing that ‘liberty and loyalty’ reflect Wesley’s social and political thought. Loyalty to the crown was the surest way to safeguard the divine gift of liberty.With the introduction, John Wesley’s Political World, contains eight chapters. O’Brien takes the reader through the foundational British political theories and major political developments of the long eighteenth century, including lingering repercussions of divine right kingship, the revolution of 1688–89, the slave trade, and the American War of Independence.The introduction sets the stage for the entire book, introducing O’Brien’s perspective but also explaining the meaning of loyalty and liberty within the eighteenth-century context. The second chapter dives into the Jacobite rebellions, particularly 1745 under the ‘Young Pretender’, and Wesley’s earliest political works. O’Brien rightly sees Wesley’s view of these events as ‘an expression of God’s judgement upon such a sinful nation’, warning ‘that it was not too late to return to repentance and avert God’s wrath’ (26) in the form of Catholic, authoritarian, and pro-French occupants on the throne. The chapter delves into the status of freeholders and voting rights, arguing that the century was marked by expanding voting rights, and rightly points out the misconceptions of later political radicals and ecclesiastical propaganda that painted the century and the Church as moribund.In ‘Resisting the Patriot Mob’, the third chapter, O’Brien tackles the political repercussions of Wesley’s populist evangelism in a way that I found reminiscent of the work of John Walsh and a correction to the work of E. P. Thompson. At the heart of the chapter is an insightful comparison of Wesley and the radical MP John Wilkes, particularly ‘their populist appeal to the middling classes’ (45). Wesley’s perspective can be summarized in his own words, quoted by O’Brien: ‘God deliver us from reforming mobs!’ (51). Wesley’s social and political commitment to decency and passive obedience (key to the period) never abated. As O’Brien notes, ‘The organic constitutionalism of Wesley was founded on an understanding of the contractual arrangement between king and people embedded in the ancient constitution, which he saw as under threat by radical elements’ (61).Chapter 4, ‘The “Execrable Villainy” of the Slave Trade’, tackles both the reality of the slave trade and Wesley’s direct opposition to it. The famous tract, Thoughts on Slavery (1774), which Wesley published against the slave trade, is seen in its proper light, not as a strange moment of Whig thought from the Tory Wesley but as an outgrowth of Wesley’s theological commitments. O’Brien notes that ‘few voices had been raised against slavery at all before the 1780s’ (75), placing Wesley at the vanguard of the movement.O’Brien’s engagement with the American independence in chapter 5 and his work on Roman Catholicism in chapter 7 are both my favourite chapters and the ones with which I found myself in sharpest disagreement, particularly their conclusions. The quality of the work greatly outweighs my critiques. Simplistic descriptions of the American rebellion are rife in my native country and O’Brien provides a corrective tour de force. In the chapter on ‘Papists’, O’Brien lays out clearly the political, social, and theological challenges of Catholicism, challenges that were thought to undermine the Protestant constitutional order that secured the very liberty of Britain, but ultimately sees them as an embattled religious minority, a move that lacks the nuances seen so prominently in the chapter. However, O’Brien’s scholarship is so solid and his research so adept that even if I retain my disagreement with his conclusions in these chapters, I had to assess my own perspective when faced with such high-quality scholarship.Chapter 6 should be read by anyone interested in Wesley, least of all his political thought. O’Brien rightly notes that due to Wesley’s travels throughout the British Isles, he provides some the keenest insights into the reality of life, agriculture, and culture in eighteenth-century Britain, a role not often given to him by theologians more interested in his theology. The book concludes with chapter 8, rightly placing Wesley’s political vision as a ‘subset’ of his ‘Drama of Salvation’ (200), reiterating why O’Brien’s work is so vital to any description of Wesley’s political theology.What O’Brien has produced in John Wesley’s Political World is a must-read for anyone serious about Wesley, early Methodism, the eighteenth century, or the development of political thought. I commend O’Brien for this solid work.