Anna M. Lawrence, One Family Under God: Love, Belonging, and
Authority in Early Transatlantic Methodism (University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2011). Originally a sect within the Anglican
church, Methodism blossomed into a dominant mainstream religion
in America during the nineteenth century. At the beginning,
though, Methodists constituted a dissenting religious group
whose ideas about sexuality, marriage, and family were very
different from those of their contemporaries. Focusing on the
Methodist notion of family that cut across biological ties, One
Family Under God speaks to historical debates over the meaning
of family and how the nuclear family model developed over the
eighteenth century. Historian Anna M. Lawrence demonstrates that
Methodists adopted flexible definitions of affection and
allegiance and emphasized extended communal associations that
enabled them to incorporate people outside the traditional
boundaries of family. They used the language of romantic,
ecstatic love to describe their religious fe