Rockport History Book
Club
History of Religion in the United States
from 1620 to 1900
Wednesday, April 30,
2014
Our Rockport History Book Club met April 30 to discuss books on the history of particular religious movements or organization in the United States. Here are two reports:
Stein, Stephen J. The Shaker
Experience in America: A History of the United Society of Believers 1994
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
554 pp.
The story of the Shakers in America
is a story that is close to the bone of our national life, not because it has
succeeded, but because of what it has revealed about us Americans.
Shakers followed upon the Quakers in
17th century England because of their “uncommon mode of religious
worship.” Trembling, shaking of the
body, quaking, caused by “vapours in
their estatick fits.” They shook
when the spirit moved them. Heads jerked so rapidly that their facial features
were not distinguishable. They screeched and howled and their commotion
disturbed whole neighborhoods. The
frenzy and fits gave way to dancing until the participants were exhausted.
Shakers followed after the Quakers
in England as a religious society, but as the Quakers tamed down their
behavior, the Shakers got more “shaky”.
Ann Lee was born in 1742 in
Manchester. In 1762 she married Abraham Standley. They had a daughter, who died shortly after
birth. Both Ann and Abraham were part of
a society of Shakers in Manchester, and she got in trouble with the police for
her religious activities. Just
like the Mayflower pilgrims of 1620, Ann and her husband, and a few other
Shakers, came to America in 1774 to enjoy religious freedom.
For five years there was no record
of their activities, but then in 1779, during the Revolutionary War, they
popped up in a village called Niskeyuna, near Albany, NY. By then Ann had separated from Abraham
permanently.
Ann was illiterate, and didn’t think
much of the written word, so there is little written history of the early years
of Shakers in America. Much of Shaker history was written later, and probably
embroidered to fit the needs of Shakers in later years. However, the Shaker gospel and recognition of
them as a religion began on a “Dark Day” in May, 1780. The sun never came out that day, probably
because of many forest fires from farmers starting fires to clear farmland. But
it was seen as an omen by the Shakers.
From the beginning, Shakers were for
revelation, spiritualism, celibacy, oral confession, community, non-resistance,
peace, the gift of healing, miracles, physical health and separation from the
world.”
These were newly arrived English
people, located near Albany, a Tory stronghold during the Revolution. They were against war. The local American revolutionaries looked at
them with suspicion and did not welcome them in their midst. Ann was developing the Shaker doctrine at the
time. She was billed as the “Queen of
Heaven” and “Christ’s wife”. Marriage
was condemned, and Shakers were required to give public confession to the
leaders. There was no public prayer,
little reading (none in the case of Ann), but hymns, songs, shaking, hopping
and turning, smoking and running, groaning and laughing, hooting like owls, and
running naked through the woods.
One record describes a process where
a Shaker would lie on the ground, make a ring with his finger, stir the dirt,
then jump up and run at the ring, stamping and shuffling—a sign of destroying
the old heavens and condemning the existing world.
Ann and other Shakers (especially
her brother, William Lee and James Whitaker) left Niskeyuna in May of 1781,
five months before Lord Cornwallis surrendered to General Washington at Yorktown
in 10-19-1781. For over two years they traveled through Massachusetts Bay
Colony, down into Connecticut, and up to New Hampshire, staying with families,
and spreading their Shaker gospel. Ann
was a powerful public speaker and a charismatic leader. They spent the entire
winter of 1782 in the home of a farmer in Ashfield, MA, and spent much time in
Harvard, MA. Some were attracted to
their message, but others were repelled.
In some cases they were opposed, beaten, reviled, and their adherents
stoned.
The Shakers were obsessed with
overcoming lust. Ann was known to go
into a frenzied attack and pummel the private parts of her followers as an act
of ascetic discipline.
The author, in 554 pages never
really addresses this business of celibacy, how a whole colony of people can
give up procreation. It would seem quite
evident that eventually they would run out of adherents. However, he mentions occasionally that this
person or that, in some cases the leaders, dropped off the celibacy wagon now
and then. Especially James Whitaker.
One might wonder if Ann Lee might
have had a personal experience in her young life that turned her so against
marriage and procreation.
Ann and her other leaders returned
to Niskeyuna in September 1783. The war
was over, and the final contingents of British troops would leave New York
soon. However, the missionary work had
worn Ann and her brother William out, and both died the next year. James
Whitaker took over the leadership role.
Small communities of Shakers were
taking hold in various towns. Whitaker
died in 1787 and Joseph Meacham took over.
The pattern of forming communitarian societies was taking shape. Lucy Wright became leader. Shaker communities
were located in Alfred and Sabbathday Pond, ME; Shirley, Hancock and Tyringham,
MA; Enfield and Canterbury, NH and Enfield, CT.
The typical Shaker community
embodied Ann Lee’s motto: “Hands to work and hearts to God.” They arose and breakfasted according to
schedule, went to work, ate, and went to bed, all on schedule. They were fastidious, industrious and
conscientious—mostly. They became famous
for the beautiful, but very simple and spare furniture that they made and sold.
They
were having problems retaining young people in the Society. I wonder why?
By 1823 the Shakers were established
as a Society of Believers. They had
spread to Kentucky and Ohio. There were now about 4000 believers in America.
The middle decades of the 19th
century were a time for many religious movements in the United States, and one
would start and another would stop. The
Millerites predicted the end of the world in 1843 and they had quite a few
followers. However, when Doomsday came
and went, membership fell off, and some drifted over to the Shakers. Then there were the Jansonists.
Famous people visited the Shaker
villages and recorded their impressions.
James Fenimore Cooper praised their outward appearance, but depicted the
believers as “deluded fanatics.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: “A set of
clean, well-disposed, dull and incapable animals.”
Charles Dickens in 1842 described
them as a “gloomy, silent commonwealth” and described their worship as “absurd”
and “grotesque”.
Horace Greeley praised the Shakers.
Friedrich Engels, who went on to
fame as the founder of Communism in Russia, praised them as the first people to
set up a society on the basis of a community of goods in the whole world.”
Herman Melville called them a
“filthy sect” with utter lack of privacy, and a “crazy society”.
The Civil War changed everything for
America and it affected the Shakers as well.
Some Shakers were drawn into the draft, even though some leaders
petitioned President Lincoln. In 1864
they sent him a Shaker chair as thanks for his help, and he thanked them for a
“very comfortable chair.”
Charles Nordhoff wrote a book
(1875), Communistic Societies of the United States. He visited the Amana Society, the Harmonists,
the Zoar Separatists, the Oneida Perfectionists, and 14 Shaker villages. He called the Shakers the “oldest and most
successful communist society on the continent.”
Today, only one Shaker village
remains, at Sabbathday Lake, ME. There’s also an active Shaker museum on the
site of the Canterbury, NH Shaker village. Not many Shakers live today, but they made
their mark on American culture.
The author did a marvelous job with
notes and indexing, so that this can be the start of a marvelous
exploration. However, for the rest of
us, his last chapter puts the final spin on nearly 250 years of Shakers in
America. Entitled “The Shaker Myth” he
describes the picture Americans today have of Shakers as a squeaky clean but
obsolete religious order. They lived in
communes and made wonderful, stern, plain furniture. When you think of these Shakers you hear the
music of Aaron Copland in Appalachian
Spring:
“'Tis the gift to be simple, 'tis the
gift to be free
'Tis the gift to come down where we
ought to be,
And when we find ourselves in the place
just right,
'Twill be in the valley of love and
delight.
When true simplicity is gained,
To bow and to bend we shan't be ashamed,
To turn, turn will be our delight,
Till by turning, turning we come 'round
right.
Shakers, 1830
The
Author, Stephen J. Stein.: “I study and write about the history of
religion in American culture across the full chronological range of American
history. I have taught survey courses on religion in both early and modern America
as well as classes on such topics as “New Religious Movements,” “The Cult
Controversy,” and “Religion and Violence” and seminars focused on
“Eighteenth-Century Religion,” “Jonathan Edwards,” and “Religion and Region.”
------Sam Coulbourn
Title: Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel
Author: Kate Bowler
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Date: 2013
Title: Pilgrims in
Their Own Land: 500 Years of Religion in America
Author: Martin E.
Marty
Publisher: Little,
Brown and Company
Date: 1984
Every week upwards of forty thousand people attend services
at the Lakewood Church in Houston, Texas where senior pastor Joel Osteen offers
a rapt audience both at the church and on television a powerful, magnetic,
motivating message that strong faith in Jesus Christ will bring the benefits of
good health and new wealth to the lives of believers. It is called euphemistically the prosperity
gospel. Magically, over the past several
decades preaching the prosperity gospel has swept across the conservative
Protestant Christian community in America, especially among pastors and their
flocks of believers in megachurches with two thousand or more weekly attendees.
In Blessed: A History
of the American Prosperity Gospel, a 2013 book authored by a young
assistant professor of American Religion at Duke Divinity School, Kate Bowler
studies the basic tenets of the prosperity gospel. She also highlights the leading churches in
the prosperity gospel movement as well as their pastors who are often well
known television personalities like Pastor Osteen in Houston. And what did she find? In her telling of the story of the prosperity
gospel, she discovered a dynamic and energized Christian subculture focused on
achieving spiritual victory demonstrated by health and wealth in the here and
now. She concludes that the prosperity
gospel articulates a language of aspiration that speaks of materialism and
transcendence in a single breath.”
Today’s widespread proclamation of the prosperity gospel
across America is only the latest incarnation of a new religious movement that
attracts hundreds of thousands of Christians.
There have been many such movements over the past five centuries of
American history. No one understands
this extraordinary history of religious struggle, faith, and fulfillment better
than Martin E. Marty, the unofficial dean of the history of American religion
at eighty-six years of age.
What a remarkable career he has had, coming from a small
town in rural Nebraska where his father was a Lutheran schoolteacher. A Ph’D from the University of Chicago. Ten years as a Lutheran pastor. From 1963 to 1998 he taught at the University
of Chicago Divinity School. Most
significantly, he has been an amazingly productive writer, authoring or co-authoring
more than fifty books and more than 5000 articles, winning a National Book
Award for Righteous Empire: The Protestant Experience in America. In addition, for much of his career he was a
senior editor at Christian Century, a
highly regarded journal covering the American religious landscape. All of these accomplishments earned him 80
honorary degrees. And he is still
writing.
In Pilgrims In Their
Own Land: 500 Years of Religion in America Marty offers a solid,
comprehensive, ever enlightening narrative of the tumultuous religious
experiences of the American people as they settled the continent and sought
spiritual meaning and guidance in their lives.
He sees Americans as on a perpetual spiritual pilgrimage, using the
observations of French philosopher Jacques Maritain for an understanding of the
American experience.
“Americans,” he quotes Maritain, “seem to be in their own
land as pilgrims, prodded by a dream.
They are always on the move --- available for new tasks, prepared for
the possible loss of what they have.
They are not settled, installed……..”
Marty tells us that America’s five hundred years of
religious pilgrimages began in Europe with the Reformation. Only one generation after the discovery of
America, all Catholic Europe became divided.
Many Protestant sects emerged. In
the seventeenth century these sects became pilgrims on the eastern shore of the
future United States. What stands out
are their conflicts and their differences.
Marty gives well-crafted vignettes of the histories of the principal
colonies and their prominent leaders: Virginia and Captain John Smith, the
Massachusetts Bay Colony and John Winthrop, and New Amsterdam and Peter
Stuyvesant.
Then there are the dissenters who Marty believes “played
some part in enlarging freedoms that later Americans took for granted.” Readers are introduced to Roger Williams and
Anne Hutchinson in New Enngland, brothers Cecil and George Calvert, first and
second Lord Baltimore, in Maryland, and Quaker William Penn in Philadelphia. No one form of Protestant Christian belief
became the established faith in the American colonies, no established faith
dominated. And those who tried to stifle
dissent failed.
And then in the seventeen hundreds, Marty expounds, came
competition, competition between the faiths for converts, for new believers. It was the beginning of the American
religious marketplace for saving souls that would fully blossom in the eighteen
hundreds. Charismatic preachers went
after backsliders whose faith needed to be reinvigorated. They also sought new immigrants arriving on
American shores without faith.
Being a preacher was a good profession for the well-educated
elite from the best colleges. There was
increasing competition to fill the pews of their churches and to attract large
crowds to mass meetings usually held during the summer at campgrounds. Cotton Mather, Solomon Stoddard, Jonathan
Edwards, John Wesley, and George Whitefield stand out. They and others aroused the populace,
bringing emotion and passion to their preaching.
It was a time of Christian revival. Historians call it the Great Awakening. Marty points out that religion was becoming
more and more a matter of choice. He
writes: “Some see this increase of choice as the essence of modern faith. Faced with this new freedom, most chose their
parents’ faith or the majority faith of their community, or that of their
spouse. But no longer did a particular
faith simply come with the territory as it had back in Europe. Now Americans felt spiritually stirred to
take up their own pilgrimages, to be restless about the soul in their new
environment.”
Revolution followed the emotional revivals of the Great
Awakening, according to Marty. Three
revolutions, in his view, beginning with the Enlightenment in Europe and its
influence in the colonies. He singles
out the Reverend Jonathan Mayhew of Boston as an exemplar of the effort to make
religious belief as much a matter of reason as of the heart. Serving West Church from the eighteen forties
to his death in 1766, Mayhew preached
inflammatory sermons against the Church of England and the threat of London
sending a bishop to Boston to oversee religious life in the colony. Throughout his ministry he preached on
liberty, laying the Biblical basis for resistance against established authority
at the time of the Stamp Act.
Soon resistance to established authority would be armed
rebellion. Marty traces both the support
of and the opposition to rebellion by church leaders against British rule. Loyalist Episcopal clergy comprised the
largest force against the movement for independence although it must also be
pointed out that many Episcopalian clerics supported the rebellion. Strongly in favor of the independence
movement were the Presbyterians. Marty
sited the Episcopal rector of Trinity Church in New York as saying he “found not
a single American Presbyterian minister who did not use his pulpit and every
other means to promote the Continental Congress and its colonist causes.” The author also writes that “the
Presbyterians in general were so vigorous in support of revolt that their foes
sometimes called the war the Presbyterian
Rebellion.”
Marty’s story of revolution in American religion reaches far
beyond the end of the War of Independence.
Led by Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Benjamin Franklin, efforts
were undertaken to end government support for state supported churches in the
colonies. Countries in Europe had established churches
and still do in many instances. Jefferson and Madison were particularly anxious
to end government support in Virginia for the Episcopal church. Franklin was against any religious preference
in America, arguing that “if a religion could not support itself and God did
not care to come to its aid, it was a bad sign if their members had to call on
government for help.” In 1785 Jefferson
and Madison succeeded in ending state support for the Episcopal church in
Virginia. It should be noted that
Massachusetts was the last state to end its preference and support for the
Congregational church with its strong Puritan roots in 1833.
But long before 1833 major religious change was
underway. Marty’s third revolution. Maybe revolutions three and four. Many of the nation’s founders, including
Benjamin Franklin, called for channeling
religious impulses into something larger. The nation instead of a religious
denomination or sect. A public
religion. What we call today civic
religion. No one exemplified American
public religion better than Abraham Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address.
Another religious change identified by Marty with roots in
the revolutionary period is individualized faith. Thomas Paine said “My own mind is my church”
and so it has been for millions of Americans for two and a half centuries. Sometimes individualized faith allows people
to leave a church and declare themselves atheists. But it also opens the way to conversion from
one faith to another. Or perhaps
conversion by being born again in the spirit of Jesus Christ.
So it was in the nineteenth century when new religious
groups were formed and many Christian denominations split apart, often because
of differing interpretations of the Bible.
It was a time of continual religious controversy and upheaval as the
nation spread westward to the Pacific coast while also fighting a terrible
Civil War that divided established churches north and south. It was also a time of great success for
preachers who brought passion to their ministries. Marty covers these developments with clarity
and insight. He is particularly good at
explaining theological or doctrinal differences which can be maddeningly
complicated. Major differences between
Christian groups lie in the literal interpretation of the Bible and the mixing
of faith and science and evolution, as they have since the period of the
American revolution. Even with the
addition of Jewish, Muslim, and other non-Christian religions to Marty’s narrative
in Pilgrims in Their Own Land, it
would seem that little has changed.
Martin Marty published Pilgrims
in Their Own Land in 1984. There is
no coverage of the big new megachurches that have appeared in the last three or
four decades. There is no coverage of
the prosperity gospel so wonderfully explicated by Kate Bowler in Blessed. Certainly Christians from the seventeen
hundreds would be lost trying to find their way from the crowded parking lot of
Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Church in Houston to the plush seats inside. But once Pastor Osteen begins his sermon
about how Jesus brings health and wealth to believers, well, those Christians
from the era of the Great Awakening would be right at home, pilgrims seeking
salvation. Only a little bit richer and
who can argue with that?
-----Richard Heuser
On May 28 we will discuss a
book you have read on The Roaring Twenties. You can read
about Flappers, Prohibition, the Stock Market, Gangsters, Harding,
Coolidge, whatever interests you!
On June 25 we will
discuss The Great Depression. What caused it? What
happened? What have we learned? FDR.... Read about any slice
or aspect of the 1930s as it connects with this economic disaster.
On July 30 we will
discuss The Viet Nam War. Read any book on any aspect of this
critical time in our history. Don't hesitate to read about Indo-China and
French and Japanese Colonial times.
On August 27 we will
discuss books about History of Persia or Iran. Read
about the old days of Cyrus, the Achaemenids, Sassanids, the Zoroastrians,
that conquests by Greeks, Turks and Arabs, the Shahs, Mossadegh, Shah
Mohammad Reza Pahlevi, the Islamic Revolution of 1979, the Iran-Iraq War.
On September 24 we
will discuss books you read about Major Discoveries in Medicine,
from earliest history up to 1900.
On October 29 we will
discuss books you read about the History of the North Shore, 1900 to
2014. We recently read books about the history of our part of
Massachusetts, from 1620 up until almost modern time, about Salem, Rockport,
the Granite Industry, Shipbuilding in Essex, the ships that sailed the world
from Salem, a naval battle right off the coast of Gloucester and more. By
October we should be ready to read, discuss and learn much more about our part
of the world.
On November 26 we'll
discuss books you have read about The Development of Public Education
Around the World.
