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 Everyday Methodism was unknown to the establishment, including the left, who saw it as a tin-roof organisation prone to pottiness and vulgarity. Yet, as in the trade unions, or the co-ops, mutuals and friendly societies, or the clubs, pubs and welfares, this was a society where men and women could feel more confident in themselves – in ways they would not have felt when dealing with “high-ups”, or bosses, or professional people (all of whose time was money). “Clubs” and “squashes’’, “fellowships” and “sisterhoods”, “packs” and “leagues”, choirs and Sunday schools, communion and “contact” groups – the names said it all in a common round that brought people into regular and informal union. 

In other words, the Methodist church was a place where what was high and mighty mixed with the ordinary and the day-to-day. We talked about Jesus Christ almost as if he was a member away at university (long hair, at Oxford, probably). Of course, as it was an intensely social organisation, the church could amplify all the usual human obsessions. Which is to say that, although we were no big deal, unimportant by most standards and unwelcome by some, it was the nearest any of us would come to running a bit of that complex thing we went around airily calling “society”.

Intellectuals talk about “civil society” – but here it was for real, run by people who weren’t intellectuals – far from it – and who belonged to much more than a church. In the context of those other forms of associational life, Methodism and the cooperative movement – as William Waldegrave argued in this journal (4 November 2022) – can be placed alongside non-ideological conservatism as one of Britain’s two great contributions to political theory. (He omitted liberalism.)

Here.