The Calvinistic world view that had formed the basis for the foundation of American culture, and dominated life since the colonial period, had begun to collapse in the United States before the Civil War.  Thus the mainstream view of the nature of God and the supernatural in America, along with the idea of God's absolute predestination of mankind to either heavenly glory or eternal damnation, had been questioned for some time and had finally been supplanted after the war.  In place of these Calvinist concepts the Spiritualists put forward the idea that human beings could have direct contact with the God or other spirits, and that the supernatural realm and the natural world could really interact.  In addition, Arminianism had become more important in theology and it strongly asserted human free will, which concomitantly implied that the human person (i.e., the self) was not intrinsically evil, but was essentially good and that the self was something that should be nurtured.  Examples of both paradigms can be seen throughout Barbara Goldsmith's book Other Powers, and even a blending of these two world views occurs on occasion.

          During this period Calvinism held a view of God that asserted His complete transcendence from the created world.  It held that the divine was wholly other than and foreign to the natural world and thus it was a view of God and of His interaction with human beings that made Him appear cold and somewhat uncaring.  Importantly it should be noted that it did have a conception of God's mercy, but it focused more on the idea of God's judgment.  In addition to this, the human person was understood to be so completely depraved by Adam's original sin that it was not really possible for human beings to come into contact with the divine.  Thus, those who were saved were saved solely by the will of God, and nothing they did could affect their salvation in either a good way or a bad way.  This of course makes mankind completely powerless, both in the natural and in the supernatural orders of being.  Arminianism was a reaction to this view of God, and in opposition to Calvinism it followed the line of reasoning of many of the early Christians who held that human action was important in a person's salvation.  An example of this can be seen in the writings of St. Augustine, who wrote that, "He who made you without your consent does not justify you without your consent.  He made you without your knowledge, but He does not justify you without your willing it." [Jurgens, 3:29].

          The Spiritualist movement that arose in the middle of the 1800s put forward a view of God and the supernatural that held that human beings, especially those who were seen as the most powerless in the general culture (i.e., women and children), could actually commune with the spirits of the dead.  It emphasized a view of the divine as something accessible to human beings, and thus as something immanent.  It also promoted the importance of feeling and emotion in the spiritual life as opposed to the dry rationalism of the standard orthodoxy of the religious establishment.  This was all a part of the reaction to the enlightenment called romanticism that had begun at the turn of the century and which greatly influenced thought throughout the 19th century.  In this regard, Schleiermacher's idea that religion was primarily emotive and that dogmas had no real meaning except in so far as they reflected the individuals spiritual experience played an increasing role in the theological developments that took place in the United States at this time.  Thus when order is finally restored to the Tilton's household after their experiment with free love had failed, Lib Tilton writes to Laura Curtis Bullard and says, ". . . I cannot reason – only feel" [Goldsmith, 262], and in this way she reflects the ideas current at the time which elevated emotion over reason.  All of this led to an emphasis on the immanence of the supernatural realm in the natural world, and it meant that extraordinary phenomena could intervene in every day life.  The supernatural was not distant, because it could actually touch people in this life.  Clearly, Spiritualism and the occult in general can be seen as a natural response to the extremely dry view of Calvinist orthodoxy.  It was in a sense a pendulum swing toward to opposite extreme.

          The Calvinist view of predestination, that is, double predestination can be very brutal in that it creates major uncertainty as to one's fate after death.  In a time when infant mortality was extremely high, the idea that a person's recently deceased child may be consigned to eternity in hell through no fault of its own, can bring a terrible sense of anguish which in combination with the loss of the loved one itself, can be debilitating.  This was true especially in the case of women, who worried greatly about the state of the soul of their dead children.  In response to this the Spiritualists and others, under the influence of the Arminian ideology, asserted human free will.  That each person was the master of his or her own destiny.  This assertion of free will necessarily entailed a rejection of the concept of human depravity, one of the cardinal points of Calvinist doctrine.  The outsiders view of free will, to use Mardsen's terminology, would triumph in time over the insiders view of absolute predestination.  But the concept of predestination would still have some influence even on the Spiritualists, an example of this is noted by Goldsmith where in reference to his wife's indiscretion, Theodore Tilton is reported to have said, "I think she sinned as one in a trance.  I don't think she was a free agent" [Goldsmith, 224].  The Spiritualists held that in some sense the person who was channeling a spirit was no longer fully in control of their actions, and though this is not identical to the idea of predestination, it does negate the idea of free will in a similar fashion.

          In Calvinism the self was seen as something to be overcome, as a thing that needed to be destroyed.  It concentrated on God and not on the human person.  Human beings were seen as powerless to act and could not advance their salvation in any way, but this view of man was beginning to recede even prior to the 19th century.  As Marsden points out Jonathan Edwards had to reassert in the face of growing opposition "that God must always be the active agent in turning humans from their selfish ways to true religion and true virtue" [Marsden, 34].  So Edwards reaffirmed the primacy of the divine over the human in the 18th century, but he was clearly fighting a losing battle.  About a century after Edwards, Lyman Beecher, a prominent Calvinist preacher, was trying to force conversion upon his daughter, a conversion that would entail ". . . the complete submission and obliteration of self in the name of [the] Calvinist faith" [Goldsmith, 265‑266], but to no avail, because after the death of her finance Catharine Beecher "rejected Calvinism and chose a life whose rules she created for herself" [Goldsmith, 266].  In doing this Catharine Beecher was not unique; instead, she was following the individualistic trends coursing through American culture affecting both civil and religious affairs.

          So Barbara Goldsmith's book nicely illustrates the interaction between what Marsden refers to when he speaks of insiders and outsiders in a religious culture.  It shows that the outsiders can influence and even change the structure of a religious culture and of a society in general.  The 19th century was experiencing a paradigm shift from the previous Calvinist based culture to a culture based on concepts of God and the supernatural as both transcendent and immanent, while simultaneously asserting a form individualism, of free will, and of the idea that the human person was meant to develop himself or herself to the fullest degree possible.  These religious ideas, which also affected secular culture, helped lead to the abolition movement in America, and with the end of the Civil War, the inevitable enfranchisement of African American males, and although greatly delayed in time, it can even be said to have caused the eventual triumph of women's suffrage.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Barbara Goldsmith.  Other Powers.  (New York:  Harper Perennial, 1998).

William A. Jurgens.  The Faith of the Early Fathers.  (Collegeville:  The Liturgical Press, 1979).   3 volumes.

George M. Marsden.  Religion and American Culture.  (Orlando:  Harcourt College Publishers, 2001).

An Essay on the Books:  "Other Powers" and "Religion in American Culture"

by Steven Todd Kaster

San Francisco State University

History 482:  Religion in America

Dr. William Issel

8 March 2002

Copyright © 2002-2024 Steven Todd Kaster