It is true that spiritualism presumably provided proof of the sorts of claims made by traditional Christianity for centuries, but this does not meant that Christian leaders eagerly welcomed it. Quite the contrary, actually — although a few certainly involved themselves with the spiritualist movements, this was often as a result of attempting to contact loved ones they had recently lost.
On a professional level, most religious leaders condemned the spiritualists, accusing them of being in communication with demons in contravention to biblical commands. There was much more going on than a simple case of breaking some traditional religious rules, though. Spiritualists were posing a fundamental challenge to traditional authorities, religious, political and social.
In the first place, spiritualists were themselves becoming religious leaders, but without having gone through specific religious training and without having roots in traditional religious institutions. This freed people’s religious yearnings and expressions from institutional controls, both for better and for worse. On the one hand, such a release allows for more creativity and personal fulfillment; on the other hand, the lack of institutional controls can more readily allow for the development of fanaticism and fraud.
Spiritualists’ challenges to traditional authority were not limited solely to religion. From the very beginning they were recognized as a threat to other traditions as well, particularly with regards to people’s social roles. Many spiritualists, for example, came from the lower classes and as a result of their powers gained access to the homes and families of some of the richest families in America and Europe — a level of social intermingling otherwise unheard of in an era of strict class segregation.
Spiritualists also became associated with a variety of radical causes. They tended to advocate abolition, women’s rights, socialism, and even free love. This last issue was regarded as particularly scandalous by many, and it seems that a number of spiritualists used seances as a means to “spiritually commune” with clients of the opposite sex. There was a long list of spiritualists who left their spouses because the spirits told them to, a message they also communicated to any number of other clients. Marriage was only supposed to exist between those who had “spiritual affinities” with each other — which meant, of course, that this required divorce when such people met later in life after having already married the “wrong” person.
The concern for women’s rights was also regarded as scandalous by many — especially because it was not simply promoted as a theory. Women commonly held very important positions in spiritualism and in the religious movements which were eventually spawned by spiritualism, for example Theosophy and Christian Science. This early feminism can readily be characterized as “vehement,” although it does not appear to be based upon any coherent theory of society or humanity. This may be why it never accomplished a great deal on a larger social scale.
In her essay “Women in Occult America,” Mary Farrell Bednarowski describes some of the basic feminist principles which keep reappearing in “occult spirituality” in the United States. The three themes she identifies are:
- “First, there is an indictment of male-dominated Western society as both “unnatural” and as antagonistic to woman’s very nature. Second, there is an insistence on the need to heal the Cartesian split in the universe, to reintegrate spirit and matter, mind or soul and body, experience and reason. Third, there is an affirmation of women’s nature as defined by the particular movement as especially suited for the enterprise of restoring wholeness and balance to all the institutions of society. Interwoven with these themes is the implication that women must seek the development of their own spirituality outside the framework of institutionalized religion — that the mere reform of existing institutions is not enough.”
This association between a spiritually radical movement and politically radical movements did not end in the 19th century. The recent public resurgence of alternative spiritual beliefs in the United States can be traced directly back to the counter-cultural movement of the 1960s. That era was characterized by direct challenges to traditional political, social and religious authorities — and although people tend to remember the first two of these, the 19th century reformers have also had a significant influence on the course of religion over the last decades of the 20th century.
