2020 Liberal Democrats Leadership Election

[LabourJersey]

I'm reading the "Fall Out" book of the Brexit negotiations and the 2017 election and the author said that Farron's team in his London HQ was "half gay, half Christian" (leading to the difficult situation during gaygate)...how representative is that Christian wing of the Lib Dem party membership and activists? Is there still a quite prominent Christian wing, inspired a bit by Christian Democratic parties across the EU?

I always assumed that there was a strong link between Methodism in the South West & the Liberal Democrats; political staffers do tend to be dispropotionately LGBT for some reason in my experience (even more so among the Tories)

There was a link between West Country Methodism and Liberal (and then LibDem) voting, yes, but Farron is a Happy Clappy Evangelical Anglican.

Maybe it's just cause I'm an American Episcopal, but "evangelical Anglican" seems like an oxymoron to me.

Also I'm guessing West Country Methodism is the origin of all the American Methodists, then? IIRC the West Country was the region that produced the most American colonists/early 1800s emigrants

[LabourJersey]

You've got to remember that Anglicans in the UK have historically been a much larger and more socially variable group than Episcopalians in America. There's always been a significant evangelical wing to the Church of England, though what evangelical means in the UK isn't quite the same as what it means in the US.

Good points here.

[LabourJersey]

I'm reading the "Fall Out" book of the Brexit negotiations and the 2017 election and the author said that Farron's team in his London HQ was "half gay, half Christian" (leading to the difficult situation during gaygate)...how representative is that Christian wing of the Lib Dem party membership and activists? Is there still a quite prominent Christian wing, inspired a bit by Christian Democratic parties across the EU?

I always assumed that there was a strong link between Methodism in the South West & the Liberal Democrats; political staffers do tend to be dispropotionately LGBT for some reason in my experience (even more so among the Tories)

There was a link between West Country Methodism and Liberal (and then LibDem) voting, yes, but Farron is a Happy Clappy Evangelical Anglican.

Maybe it's just cause I'm an American Episcopal, but "evangelical Anglican" seems like an oxymoron to me.

Also I'm guessing West Country Methodism is the origin of all the American Methodists, then? IIRC the West Country was the region that produced the most American colonists/early 1800s emigrants

I think that Farron does not attend an Anglican church. But yes, certainly Anglicans in the UK run the gamut from more US Episcopalian-types to evangelical social conservatives. Of course traditionally the divide was between High Church Anglo-Catholics (generally paternalistic Tories) and Low Church members, more similar to nonconformists (traditionally Liberal/Labour). So in 19th/early 20th century Britain you had the opposite of what you have in modern America, with members of the established church leaning right, and evangelicals leaning left.

Actually, I think that most American Methodists probably converted when they were already in America, many as part of the various Great Awakenings. Remember, Methodism did not emerge until the mid-18th century, after which there was not really substantial immigration from England to America. Certainly many Scots-Irish abandoned their original Presbyterianism, as the church could not send enough ministers to the backcountry as they required them to be university-educated, and converted to Baptism and Methodism (much more egalitarian in their leadership), long the two dominant Protestant denominations in the South. In the US, Methodism does not seem to have had any particularly strong demographic connections (unlike most other Protestant denominations), whereas in the UK it was traditionally very strongly linked with the working class - “The Labour Party owes more to Methodism than to Marx”.

Welcome to the forum.

And your point about Methodism and Baptism being spread thru missionaries and not necessarily by demographics is probably more accurate. I do believe both denominations had a footprint in Colonial America, but both of those really exploded in size after 1783 and after English immigration slowed down.

And Methodism is definitely pretty broad in the US, although I tend to think of them being a more Northern-based denomination compared to the Baptists, for instance. Of course there's plenty of Methodists in the South and Baptist in the North but that's my impression.