Customer Reviews

Spiritualism in Antebellum America (Religion in North America)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

My "credentials": I have a published essay entitled "Unseen (and Unappreciated) Matters: Understanding the Reformative Nature of Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism" published in the Fall 1999 issue of the journal American Studies.

Carroll's book puts forward a thesis of a conservative angst in search of order. He depicts the "structured religious practice" of seance circles and the Spiritualists' hierarchical conception of heaven as counterbalances to the democratizing tendencies at work in antebellum society. This thesis comes up short when it tries to explain the contemporary portrait of Spiritualists as radical reformers left to us by disapproving novelists and editors.

Carroll's thesis may well have merit when it comes to some Spiritualists. I think the problem arises when he tries to lump all nineteenth-century Spiritualists together. I part company with him in seeing a more fundamental gap between those individuals he calls "Christian" and "rationalistic" Spiritualists. The latter whom I identify as Philosophical Spiritualists were clearly freethinkers reformers who dared to advocate upsetting the emerging socio-economic order. So many of these individuals have been left out of Carroll's book that were he to take them into account, I suspect that even he would say his thesis needs some revision. (Generally speaking, I think historians of American Religion by understandably assuming that Spiritualism was a religion of consolation have missed a lot of source material which might have led them in different directions.)

One last note for the general reader: Carroll's book is not a particularly easy read. It is filled with scholarly references, so much so that I think they sometimes interfere with the narative.

This is a brilliant, thoroughly researched, and thoroughly illuminating book. Though the prose and the ideas will be tough sledding for anyone looking for a light read on nineteenth-century mediums and seances, careful readers will be richly rewarded for their patience. This is an outstanding book for students of American religious and cultural history.