The Missionary Era · 1848-1906 · N. America, Britain
Spiritualism / New Thought
Not a Christian movement
This doesn't identify as, or historically function as, a Christian movement.
About This Movement
In March 1848 two young sisters in a farmhouse at Hydesville, New York, said they were communicating with the dead through rapping sounds, and within a few years séances, mediums and spirit circles had spread through the United States and Britain, drawing in reformers, grieving families and scientists who wanted to test the claims. Running alongside it, and partly overlapping, was New Thought. A family of teachers descended from the Maine healer Phineas Quimby who held that mind governs matter and that right thinking heals. Both borrowed Christian vocabulary heavily and grew in the same nineteenth-century soil as the revivals, but neither is a Christian tradition; they are named here only because visitors reasonably ask where they fit. Spiritualism's public credibility took a heavy blow in 1888, when Margaret Fox declared before an audience in New York that she and her sister had produced the original raps by cracking their toe joints — a confession she withdrew a year later.
Sources
- Spiritualism's own texts: Andrew Jackson Davis, The Principles of Nature (1847); the Fox sisters' record (1848; Margaret Fox's 1888 confession and recantation); Emma Hardinge Britten, Modern American Spiritualism (1870); women's platform mediumship (Cora L. V. Scott) (primary) — Named here for context, since participants will rightly ask about it, though Spiritualism is not a Christian tradition. These are advocacy chronicles from inside the movement; women's leadership was structurally central to it, including the famous Fox sisters' confession and later recantation of fraud.
- New Thought's own texts: Quimby's manuscripts (pub. 1921); Warren Felt Evans; Emma Curtis Hopkins; the Fillmores' Unity (1889-) (primary) — Included for context only. Quimby's manuscripts were edited after his death, worth weighing with that in mind; the contested question of how much Mary Baker Eddy depended on Quimby is noted here, not settled (see also Christian Science).
- The investigative record: the Seybert Commission report (1887); SPR investigations; the fraud-exposure literature (primary) — Investigative and hostile: adversarial pens that were themselves part of how the movement came to be publicly known.
- Ann Braude, Radical Spirits (1989; 2nd ed. 2001), with Catherine Albanese, A Republic of Mind and Spirit (Yale, 2007) (secondary)
- Cambridge History of Christianity vol. 8, ch. 22 'Christian America' and 'Christian Canada' (Noll) (reference)