The Return of Spiritism

Seeing how the church triumphed over the New Age movement of the 1850s can help us in the 1990s.

Dozens of Christian books have decried today’s New Age movement. But many have missed an important historical precedent: A massive spiritist movement in the United States during the 1850s espoused many of the same doctrines and practices—pantheism, channeling of spirits—that characterize today’s New Age movement. The success of the nineteenth-century church in responding to that movement contains lessons for contemporary Christians.

Though largely forgotten now, midnineteenth-century American “spiritism” was much remarked upon at the time. New York businessman George Templeton Strong in 1854 thought spiritism was nonsense but its popularity extraordinary: “What would I have said six years ago to anybody who predicted that … hundreds of thousands of people in this country would believe a new Revelation, hostile to that of the Church and the Bible?”

Physician Thomas Nichols wrote that “nothing within my memory has had so great an influence. It has broken up hundreds of churches and changed the religious belief of hundreds of thousands.” In 1854, author Orestes Brownson counted 300 spiritist clubs in Philadelphia alone and complained that “the infection seizes all classes, ministers of religion, lawyers, physicians, judges, comedians, rich and poor, learned and unlearned.”

Newspapers expressed similar amazement at spiritism’s rapid spread. The Cincinnati Daily Times noted in 1854 an “astonishing” expansion of spiritism, with adherents found “on every street and corner of the city.” The New York Times in 1855 noted spiritism’s “rapid extension and wide-spread effect” and called it “the new Mahomet, or the social Antichrist, overrunning the world.” The Cleveland Plain Dealer reported in 1857 that spiritism was “gaining ground on every side. One month ago, there were not fifty believers in the city; now there are hundreds including some of its best minds.”

A regional difference was evident. Spiritist inroads were slight only in the South, where one spiritist encountered a “singular hostility.” Thomas Nichols noted that “spiritualism [as spiritism was sometimes labeled] is most common in New England and the northern states. The southern people have given themselves very little trouble about spiritualism.” If slavery was an evident sin of the South, spiritism was a significant sin of the North.

The spiritist movement was powerful because it had both popular manifestations (such as seances with “spirit-rapping” sound effects) and an ample intellectual base. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s transcendentalism fed the spiritist movement; notable lines from his essays (for example, “I become a transparent eyeball, I am nothing, I see all”) became midcentury sound bites. Harriet Beecher Stowe (married to Calvin Stowe, a medium) made sympathetic bows to spiritism, and writers such as James Greenleaf Whittier and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow regularly attended séances. Congressmen, judges, and radical abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison announced their support for spiritism.

Spiritist theology reached its nineteenth-century peak on the eve of the Civil War, when spiritists were holding regular Sabbath meetings and conferences in at least 3,000 different places. During the war, some used the tune of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” to sing of their immunity to concerns about heaven and hell: “We have come unto the mountain, and the city of our God, / to the ways of truth and beauty by the souls perfected trod, / and the resurrection trumpet shall not wake us from the sod / as we go marching on. / Glory, Glory, Hallelujah … / and we need not ask St. Peter to be ready with his keys, / as we go marching on.”

Estimates of total spiritist support are difficult to make because the 1850s were not all that different from the 1990s: as Orestes Brownson observed, many people were “indifferent, syncretic, and disposed to accept all religions and superstitions as true under certain aspects, and as false under others, and to pronounce one about as good as another.” Probably about 2 million persons, of a U.S. population of 30 million, espoused some spiritist beliefs or engaged in some spiritist activities.

Spiritism also had social implications. Dr. Benjamin Hatch in 1859 described how “women who have abandoned their husbands … and who are living in adultery with their paramours, produce abortion, and arise from their guilty couches and stand before large audiences as the medium for angels.” Adultery and abortion were acceptable because, as one spiritist channeler put it, “Our spirit friends say all purely natural passions must have ample scope to work themselves out in their true order. The hoops which have bound the past must be … trampled under foot, and a high and holy freedom must take their places.” Many 1850s’ New Agers boasted of their freedom from “social conventionalism and the superstitions of Christianity.”

Spiritism’S Allure

Spiritism was dishonoring God, displacing Christianity, and creating social havoc. The doctrine had to be fought—but how? Christian leaders began by assessing the five major reasons for spiritism’s appeal so that discerning responses could be developed.

First, as historian Frank Podmore later wrote, “The ranks of the Spiritualists were naturally recruited, largely from those who had freed themselves entirely from the Christian tradition, and had therewith lost all definite hope or belief in a future life.” The leading spiritist theoretician, Andrew Jackson Davis, wrote that everyone had an afterlife in a place called “Summer-Land,” where there was no real punishment. All of Summer-Land was “vastly more beautiful than the most beautiful landscape on earth. Celestial waters are more limpid, the atmosphere more soft and genial, the streams are ever musical.” This was a pleasant thought for those otherwise hopeless; besides, spirit beings wore “silken gauze or gossamer fabrics … which, in a moment, can be either wound about the person in graceful folds or taken off.”

Second, some flocked to spiritism because within it there was no real good or evil, and no sin. People could follow their “naturally benevolent instincts.” This had interesting social implications, including some educational policy. Davis founded a Lyceum movement featuring schools in which teachers and students decided by voting (one person, one vote) what was right and what was wrong. Instead of stressing reading, writing, and arithmetic, children discussed topics such as Summer-Land customs, death and dying, and “the universal law of love.”

Third, spiritist showmanship was appealing. Séances featuring glowing objects were a leading form of entertainment during the 1850s. Participants were thrilled by thin veils of vapor and luminous fabric that appeared in front of them and shining arms that embraced or gripped them. Musical seances featuring trumpets or accordions that seemed to play tunes in midair—a gift from the spirit world—also became common.

Fourth, spiritism certainly appealed to those who had lost a spouse or child and hoped beyond hope to converse with the dead. Horace and Mary Greeley and Abraham and Mary Lincoln were two of the famous couples who repeatedly went to séances as a means of contacting dead sons. Mrs. Lincoln became a spiritist believer; she said her dead son Willie “comes to me every night and stands at the foot of my bed.”

Finally, spiritism and feminism grew together. As historian Ann Braude writes, “The two movements shared many leaders and activists.… Those who assumed the most radical position on women’s rights became Spiritualists.” Both movements praised “self-sovereignty” rather than God’s sovereignty. Spiritists, as one Christian book in 1876 complained, tried to “introduce a feminine element into the Godhead, in direct opposition to the express terms of Scripture.”

A Truth That Sometimes Hurt

How could Christians respond to those five appeals?

Ministers such as Henry Ward Beecher added showmanship to services in order to compete with spiritist thrills: Plymouth Church in Brooklyn became known as “Beecher’s Theater,” complete with well-paid musicians and dramatic performances. Ministers such as Beecher and Phillips Brooks of Boston, recognizing the appeal of Dante’s vision without the inferno, spoke of heaven but forgot to mention hell. Some churches even slid toward the “free love” emphases of some spiritists.

The most discerning Christian leaders, however, realized they could not compete with spiritism in a race devoted to pleasure. Spiritism was an “easygoing, popular, happy-go-lucky religion,” one minister noted. Spiritists said that life after death was inevitably happy and all religions equally good: “How pleasing this is to the average man; how soothing to the soul that is morally and spiritually lazy.”

Ministers such as William Clagett of St. Louis knew that if the church tried to outbid spiritists it would lose. The only option both principled and practical, Clagett suggested, was to live by truth that sometimes hurt. For example, he told bereaved parents that they could hope to meet a dead child in heaven, but not before, and he quoted David’s words in 2 Samuel 12:23 following the death of his son: “I shall go to him but he shall not return to me.”

Some Christians ridiculed all of spiritism, and there was certainly much to ridicule. In Newark, New Jersey, local police raided a spiritist temple and found the leader preaching to his flock while stark naked. Members of the congregation were also dressed “in the costume of Adam and Eve before the fall,” with the goal of getting back to Eden. The New York Times, then under the editorship of Presbyterian Henry Raymond, described medium Marie Draper as “a corpulent, double-chinned middle-aged woman who weighs about 300 pounds and is capable of a wonderful flow of ungrammatical language,” none of which kept her from being “a favorite confidant of the Virgin Mary.”

Discerning Christian leaders, however, did more than laugh; they remembered that the Bible takes spiritism very seriously. Ministers cited warnings about spiritism contained in such passages as Leviticus 19:31 and 20:6; 2 Kings 21:6 and 23:24, and Deuteronomy 18:9–12, which warns that anyone “who is a medium or spiritist … is detestable to the Lord” (NIV). They quoted Paul’s writing in 1 Timothy 4:1, “The Spirit expressly says that in later times some will depart from the faith by giving heed to deceitful spirits and doctrines of demons.” Many books, such as J. W. Daniels’s Spiritualism Versus Christianity (1856), portrayed spiritism as a revival of sorcery.

The most common attempt to discredit spiritism was by declaring all of it a fake. Books by Thomas Nichols, Benjamin Hatch, and many others exposed spiritist pretensions. P. T. Barnum devoted the largest section of his book The Humbugs of the World (1866) to spiritism, calling it the stomping ground of “grand humbugs” and “bogus babies.” (Barnum himself always showed people how he had tricked them, and he praised Christianity as the only true religion.)

There were always fresh stories of hoaxes, such as when America’s most famous midcentury socialist, Robert Dale Owen, abandoned atheism and embraced spiritism in 1860. He then received kisses and a lock of hair from a “spirit” named Katie King. When Owen learned that Katie King was actually a young woman who had conspired with two mediums to fool him, Owen temporarily lost his sanity, and his children placed him in an asylum.

And yet, as Reverend Clagett contended, “Too many Christians are accustomed to dismiss spiritism by simply denouncing the whole thing as a fraud and delusion, and saying that there is nothing in it. But I tell you there is something in it … some things that I cannot explain away as a delusion.”

Ministers emphasized that much of spiritism was “a base fraud” but some was a work of Satan. They noted that spiritists sometimes had bits of insight that were hard to explain materialistically, and they quoted Banquo’s lines in Macbeth: “Oftentimes to win us to our harm / The instruments of darkness tell us truths, / Win us with honest trifles, to betray us / in deepest confidence.” Lest some be fearful, ministers also emphasized “the shield against devices of Satan … the Word of God. Jesus cast out evil spirits with his word, and if we would cast them out we must follow His example.”

The Dust Of History

As more Christians took spiritism seriously and challenged it theologically, spiritism as a mass movement faded. God raised up scholars like Charles Hodge and evangelists like Dwight L. Moody; Hodge reemphasized the cohesiveness of biblical orthodoxy, and Moody was particularly influential in fighting spiritist inroads among middle-class urbanites. Although there were no parachurch organizations devoted to fighting spiritual counterfeits, dozens of popularly written antispiritist books in the stacks of the Library of Congress stand as testimony to the interest among church members in finding ways to stem spiritist advances.

Furthermore, the harshness of the Civil War cured millions of people of frivolity and produced ministers willing to proclaim without hesitation that death is conquered only through the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The spiritists themselves proved to be poor organizers, since each believer considered himself or herself above any rules imposed by anyone else.

This is not to say that the church made a sure-handed tackle of spiritism as it was running down the field. In some ways, spiritism’s weakening, like its rise, is humanly inexplicable. But by 1876, Christians were optimistic. Author G. H. Pember predicted that God, who for his reasons had raised spiritism as a challenge to his church, would return it to the dust of history. Pember was right. The greater danger by the turn of the century was liberal theology, which was opening the front door to atheism, not spiritism.

We should remember, however, that individual spiritists found new niches. Medium Addie Ballou became a leader of California socialists. Midwestern spiritualist leader Juliet Severance became an agitator for radical feminism. Medium Cora Hatch Richmond fought for clemency for convicted anarchist bombers. Others sold statuettes of guru Andrew Jackson Davis and established “churches” with deceptive names like the “Puritan Spiritualist Church.” And still others merely passed on their lore to students and descendants, who have arisen again in this particular New Age.

As C. S. Lewis wrote in The Silver Chair, “And the lesson of it all is … witches always mean the same thing, but in every age they have a different plan for getting it.”

The Witchery Of This Age

To absorb Lewis’s lesson we must discern the witchery of this age. Some churches, turned off by dull, pedantic preaching, have turned to trendy, contentless preaching. This may attract the lost for a time, but attendees may be lured away by the Church of Harmonic Consciousness down the way, which also promises warm and fuzzy “spiritual” feelings.

Christians must resolve, in the words of Titus 2:1, to “teach what is in accord with sound doctrine.” Pittsburgh minister William H. Smith puts it well: We need “fresh confidence in the power of competent relevant expository preaching that both evangelizes the lost and edifies the saints.”

A second protection against New Age inroads is Christ-centered worship—worship that is oriented to the glory of God rather than to the needs of men and women. When worship reflects the majesty of our triune Creator and Redeemer, we are less likely to feel the need for redemption by channeled wisdom from spirit guides. Churches that stress the aggressiveness of sin and the need for confession are prepared to resist the New Age idea that we are all gods who must merely unleash our goodness.

A third way for churches to fight New Age inroads is through the development of leaders (elders or some equivalent) who do not wish to invent new doctrine but are able to teach and exercise biblical authority. Those who try to syncretize New Age and Christian doctrines, either by proclaiming humanity’s essential goodness or recommending “visualization” techniques that place us at the center of things, should not be allowed to be church leaders.

The importance of serious preaching, worship, and discipline is hard to convey during an era of frivolity in which even Gallup polls reveal that more and more people know less and less about the Bible. But growing fuzziness makes it all the more necessary to show the sharp distinction between a biblical world view and the ways of the world. Whenever discernment is lacking, it is easy for spiritist wolves to snatch away sheep from shepherds on vacation.

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