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IN 1868 General U.S. Grant remarked that the United States possessed three great parties: “The Republican, the Democratic, and the Methodist Church.” More recently my colleague Stanley Hauerwas quipped that “long after Christianity is dead and gone, the United Methodist Church will still be flourishing.” When I share those wisecracks with my preponderantly Methodist seminary students, they invariably react with nervous laughter. There is just enough truth in them to make the comments worrisome as well as funny. David Hempton’s brilliantly provocative book tells us why.

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The book holds two aims. The first is to look at Methodism as an international enterprise–a global empire of the spirit. The second is to penetrate beneath the surface of Methodist institutions to grasp the “heart of something both elusive and important.” Both aims assume that Methodism has been more than the sum of its parts.

Hempton, professor of church history at Boston University, pursues those goals in eight tautly argued essays. He explores how Methodism grew from a barely perceptible impulse in the Church of England in the 18th century to a foremost expression of Christianity in the modern world; how the mixing of Enlightenment rationality and evangelical enthusiasm resulted in Methodism’s perennial doubleness of vision; how the Methodist message was heard, internalized and enacted in a bewildering variety of social and geographic locations; how opposition from outsiders fostered strength while conflict between insiders fostered weakness; how money was raised, spent and symbolized; how women and racial and ethnic minorities found nourishment in the Methodist message; how the movement managed to circle the globe completely; and finally, how a gaggle of theories about secularization might help us understand Methodism’s decline in the latter half of the 20th century. Though the eight chapters interlock, each stands as an independent essay. Since I teach in a trinitarian divinity school, it seems apt to try to convey the flavor of the whole by focusing on three chapters.

The first chapter, “Competition and Symbiosis,” asks a disarmingly simple question: How did it happen that a religious revival that first took root among the “flotsam and jetsam” of English society in the 1730s became, in just 150 years, one of the major religious movements of modern times? At the beginning of the 20th century, Methodism posted 9 million members, 36 million adherents and 150,000 ministers and lay preachers. It owned more than a half billion dollars worth of property, including hundreds of schools on six continents. Methodist steeples graced the skylines of villages, towns and cities everywhere. More important, John Wesley’s theological children had moved to somewhere near the center of the culture in most of the English-speaking world. As late as 1950 Methodists in the U.S. alone numbered nearly 10 million members and claimed 6.4 percent of the population. In the 2004 election three of the four candidates for the nation’s top jobs were Methodists. So again, how did all that come about?

Hempton is too subtle to give a single-cause answer, but he does suggest that evolutionary biology offers a clue. The secret lies in the symbiosis between the organism and the environment. More precisely, Methodist growth took place not in isolation but as an integral part of the New World order of the 18th and 19th centuries. Though Methodism remained a subspecies of the old Anglican establishment, it proved able to adapt to popular demands for seriousness over frivolity, cooperation over competition, compassion over force, and egalitarianism over deference. Hempton admits that Methodists’ special packaging of means and ends–evangelical conversion, emotional assurance, entire sanctification, itinerant preaching, bottom-up associationalism, top-down connectionalism, communal discipline and national regeneration–is well appreciated, less well appreciated is how all of those ingredients worked together to create an elastic, mobile, aggressively expansive movement. Methodism survived as the fittest of the many religious options available.