Up from Methodism — Context and Discussion

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Authors: Asbury, Herbert, 1891-1963 Digital Source: Project Gutenberg Gutenberg Release Year: 2024 First Publication Year: Not confirmed

Key Word: Asbury, Herbert, 1891-1963 -- Childhood and youth; Methodists -- Missouri -- Farmington -- Biography; Methodist Church -- Controversial literature; Farmington (Mo.) -- Biography Target Reader: Readers of public-domain and historical texts

Book Edition: Project Gutenberg digital edition Book Language: en

Edition facts

Words 44,161

Reading time 193 min

Text sections 12

This digital edition of Up from Methodism — Context and Discussion is described by source-level measurements including 44,161 words, 3 hr 13 min estimated reading time, and 12 detected text sections.

The text analysis averages about 26.0 words per sentence, while the detected sections provide another way to judge how the source is divided.

Project Gutenberg metadata also associates the work with “Asbury, Herbert, 1891-1963 -- Childhood and youth,” connecting these edition facts with the source record’s subject description.

Source: Project Gutenberg record #73085

Herbert Asbury's memoir of growing up in a devout Methodist household in Farmington, Missouri, structured around the clash between religious taboos and boyish curiosity, with recurring images of legs, virgins, and the thin line between sacred and secular emotion.

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cs did not wish to have their mortal remains so close to those of such benighted heathen as the Methodists and the Presbyterians.

My mother’s people, the Prichards and the Blues, came originally from North Carolina, Georgia and Tennessee, and were for the most part devout Baptists, believing that in immersion alone was true salvation. The strength of their religious convictions may be seen in the fact that many of them never forgave my mother for marrying a Methodist and transferring her letter to my father’s Church, forsaking the austerities of her family faith. They considered the Methodists too liberal! The true Baptist of those days was in a constant emotional upheaval; his religion was a canker that ate deeper and deeper, and he was able to find no relief; the more religious he became, the more miserable he was. On the other hand, the Methodist enjoyed terrific and periodical emotional explosions, and thereafter was generally able to live for a few days in comparative calm. But the Baptist was wrapped in gloom from the moment of his conversion until he was called home to Jesus.

When my mother’s forbears came up from the South they settled within a radius of twenty miles of Farmington, many of them in the vicinity of Hazel Run and French Village. They were farmers, with a sprinkling of small storekeepers, preachers and country doctors. My mother’s father, Joseph Prichard, was a farmer, but he was very religious and was renowned throughout the countryside around French Village for his exploits as a faith healer; he could cure toothache, remove warts and stop the flow of blood. His method was merely to say: “It will be gone by the time you get home,” and generally it was. He frequently removed warts from my own hands; at least they vanished within a reasonable time after he had looked at them and pronounced his incantations, and I regarded him with awe.

There was a tradition in our family that my grandfather boasted Indian blood in his veins, and although I do not think it was true, at the time it gave me great pride and satisfaction; it invested me with authority at such times as we played Indian and Wild West games. He made a two-year trip overland to California during the 1849 gold rush, without conspicuous success, and brought back with him the musket with which we were given to understand he had slain innumerable Indians. Two or three times a year his children and his grandchildren, a vast horde all told, held family reunions at his French Village farm, and the big moment of the day came in the afternoon when all of the grandchildren trooped into the woods behind the barn to watch Grandpa kill a squirrel. We stood in a half-circle, almost overcome by awe, while my grandfather loaded his gun with great care, pouring the correct amount of powder from his powder horn and dumping the bullets from his pouch into the palm of his hand, where he counted them carefully. And then he killed the squirrel, while we stood behind him and marveled. He never failed; he was an excellent rifle shot; in his ninety-first year, three years before he died, he knocked a squirrel from a tree as easily as Davy Crockett could have done it.

As a young man in Georgia and later in Missouri my grandfather Prichard was famous as a leader of Baptist sing-songs. His favorite hymn was “The Prodigal Son,” which he was wont to bellow with fanatical fervor as he sat bolt upright in an uncomfortable, straight-backed chair and directed the singing with a stick. He sang from an old hymn book which had been in his family for many years, a curious volume with the music printed in square notes. Many of the hymns expressed sentiments that to-day, even in religious circles, would be considered obscene. I recall one that said: “Oh, sinners! My bowels do move with desire!”

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Herbert Asbury opens his memoir with a genealogical catalog that reads like a parody of Methodist hagiography: his great-great-uncle was Francis Asbury, the first Methodist bishop ordained in America, while his great-grandfather founded the first Methodist church west of the Catawba River and converted an entire Indian tribe. The family lore is laced with a comic precision—every major event in the great-grandfather's life happened on a Sunday. This structural pattern of sacred coincidence sets the tone for a book that treats religious earnestness with a skeptic's eye, using the very machinery of Methodist testimony to undermine it.

The Geometry of Salvation

The book's chapter titles map a spatial and moral journey: from “Home Life of a Boy Destined for Heaven” to “Conclusions of a Man Gone to the Devil.” Asbury moves through the town of Farmington as through a stage set, each location—the church, the store, the hay ride—becoming a site where religious authority and bodily impulse collide. The recurring image of legs—a boy's leg touching a girl's on a hay ride, a woman riding astride—becomes a shorthand for the erotic anxiety that pervades Methodist discipline. Asbury notes that the old Brother who interrogated him about the hay ride “gloated and trembled” over the sin of proximity, revealing the voyeuristic pleasure beneath the piety.

The Thin Line Between Emotions

Asbury draws a structural parallel between religious and secular emotion, arguing that “the line of demarcation is very thin.” He observes that young men knew “religious emotion is very akin to secular emotion” and exploited camp meetings and revivals as opportunities for seduction. The buggies around the meeting tent, he writes, were “filled with men and women petting, or, as we called it then, spooning.” This observation recurs across multiple chapters, suggesting a deliberate pattern: the same fervor that drives a sinner to the altar can be redirected toward the opposite sex. Asbury does not moralize but reports, letting the juxtaposition of holy and profane speak for itself.

The Machinery of Testimony

The book's structure mimics the revivalist's toolkit: chapters titled “The Machinery of Salvation,” “Taboos of the Lord's Day,” and “Agents of God” break down the components of Methodist culture into analyzable parts. Asbury treats the church's apparatus—preachers, brothers, sisters, camp meetings, protracted meetings—as a system of social control and emotional release. He notes that the Sisters described Heaven as populated by “handsome, stalwart young men, presumably virgins,” and that one Sister prayed fervently to be made an exception to the rule of no female angels. These details, drawn from the excerpts, show Asbury's method: he takes the church's own language and turns it back on itself, exposing the human desires that the system both channels and denies.

Movement Between Scenes

The narrative moves rapidly between domestic interiors, church services, and public streets, each scene linked by a recurring figure—the preacher, the brother, the sister—who embodies a particular aspect of Methodist authority. Asbury's transitions are abrupt, often signaled by a shift in tone from genealogical catalog to anecdotal vignette. In one passage, he moves from the hay ride interrogation to the story of the storekeeper who abandoned his customer to watch a woman ride astride, then to a general reflection on the Sisters' fantasies. This montage-like structure emphasizes the pervasiveness of religious surveillance: no space, not even the store or the street, is free from the church's gaze.

Readers approaching Up from Methodism should attend to Asbury's use of repetition—the same images of legs, virgins, and emotional manipulation recur across chapters, building a cumulative portrait of a community obsessed with sin. The book is not a straightforward autobiography but a structural critique, using the church's own methods of testimony and classification to expose its contradictions. The excerpts suggest a work that rewards careful attention to its patterns of imagery and scene construction.

Years among the shelving have taught me how youthful restlessness tints both sacred and profane longings. I think of Asbury's boyish fidgeting in the pew, and then of another wanderer's raw impressions in My adventures during the late war — Background and Themes. Both are memoirs of a body discovering its own impulses, uncertain whether the stirring is reverence or rebellion. That tremulous boundary—what hushed feeling belongs to God, what to the world—binds them quietly.