John Wesley — "I have often thought, that if I were to choose a place of abode, it should be in…"
I have often thought, that if I were to choose a place of abode, it should be in a country where there were no rich people.
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About John Wesley (1703-1791)
English Anglican cleric and founder of Methodism, whose open-air preaching and class-meeting structure created the largest 18th-century evangelical revival. Closely associated with Charles Wesley (his hymn-writing brother) and George Whitefield (early co-revivalist, later doctrinal opponent). For an intellectual contrast, see George Whitefield, Calvinist evangelical revivalist — Whitefield's predestinarian Calvinism vs Wesley's free-grace Arminian theology split the early Methodist movement permanently in the 1739-41 break. The founding evangelical Calvinist-Arminian schism — the two parallel evangelical traditions American Christianity descends from.
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Understanding this quote
What it means
The quote expresses a radical preference for living among the economically equal rather than the wealthy. Wesley is saying that the presence of rich people corrupts communities and creates spiritual danger. He would rather inhabit a place of shared poverty than one stratified by wealth. It is a statement about how inequality poisons social fabric and Christian community—wealth breeds pride, class division, and moral compromise Wesley found incompatible with genuine faith.
Relevance to John Wesley
Wesley spent decades preaching in coal pits, jails, and slums to Britain's poorest—people ignored by the Anglican parish system. He warned repeatedly that wealth was religion's greatest enemy, writing that wherever riches increased, true piety decreased. He gave away nearly everything he earned, lived austerely, and believed Methodism's power came from its working-class roots. He genuinely feared wealthy patrons would corrupt the movement's soul, as he witnessed money destroy authentic faith repeatedly.
The era
Eighteenth-century England was defined by brutal inequality. Enclosure Acts displaced thousands of rural poor into factories and slums; child labor in mines was normalized; debtors' prisons swallowed the desperate while aristocrats inherited vast estates. The established Anglican Church largely served wealthy landowners, leaving industrial laborers spiritually neglected. Wesley emerged precisely in this moral vacuum, building Methodism as a movement of the discarded. His hostility to the rich reflected the lived conditions of the millions he spent his life serving.
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