{"product_id":"the-origins-of-primitive-methodism-9781783270811","title":"The Origins of Primitive Methodism","description":"\u003cb\u003eThe Primitive Methodist Connexion's mature social character may have been working-class, but this did not reflect its social origins.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis book shows that while the Primitive Methodist Connexion's mature social character was working-class, this did not reflect its social origins. It was never the church of the working class, the great majority of whose churchgoers went elsewhere: rather it was the church whose commitment to its emotional witness was increasingly incompatible with middle-class pretensions. Sandy Calder shows that the Primitive Methodist Connexion was a religious movementled by a fairly prosperous elite of middle-class preachers and lay officials appealing to a respectable working-class constituency. This reality has been obscured by the movement's self-image as a persecuted community of humble Christians, an image crafted by Hugh Bourne, and accepted by later historians, whether Methodists with a denominational agenda to promote or scholars in search of working-class radicals. Primitive Methodists exaggerated their hardships and deliberately under-played their social status and financial success. Primitive Methodism in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries became the victim of its own founding mythology, because the legend of a community of persecuted outcasts, concealing its actual respectability, deterred potential recruits.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e   SANDY CALDER graduated with a PhD in Religious Studies from the Open University and has previously worked in the private sector.","brand":"Sandy Calder","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48280452563195,"sku":"9781783270811","price":130.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0779\/3917\/9771\/files\/9781783270811.jpg?v=1772486581","url":"https:\/\/indiepubs.com\/products\/the-origins-of-primitive-methodism-9781783270811","provider":"IndiePubs","version":"1.0","type":"link"}