Shakers worshipped in dance

I’ve been reading up about dissenters, pantheists, cults, and other non-traditional religionists in the 18th and early 19th century. In religion, as in society as a whole, it was a time of ferment. New ideas and new ways of doing things led to (and came out of) the industrial revolution, the French and American revolutions, revolutions in the approaches to scientific inquiry, artistic expression, fashion, farming, architecture, and all kinds of other aspects of human society. How people worshipped was part of, and in part fuelled, that change.

Some writers make the direct link. It was those driven from France into the Lowlands after the Edict of Nantes (Lutherans, Catholics, Jews, and members of other persecuted sects) that, thrown together in exile, began to question conventional social mores.

Their heretical opinions about orthodox Christianity led some of them into the extremes of Puritanism, and others to deny all labels. ” I am not Lutheran, Calvinist, Arminian, Socinian, Anabaptist, or Quaker,” says book factor, Prosper Marchand, one of the voices in that place and time. He avowed a Christianity with no organised church and no official doctrine, and this in 1712. From such radical thinking, itself fuelled by Renaissance humanism, came the Enlightenment, as well as Hellfire clubs, messianic cults, poetic pantheism, and the Great Awakening, with its new forms of established religion such as Methodism. These, in time, led to the reform of those institutions that had triggered the change.

Millenialism was a strong strain in the American Revolution. Victory over the British showed that God favoured America, and those with millenialist leanings became convinced that it was in the United States that Christ would reign for 1000 years. Even the French revolution had religious roots, with the diaspora mentioned above strongly shaping the politics of the revolutionaries. Some argue that the industrial revolution, likewise, was a consequence of religious thinking.

Religions influenced by dualistic philosophies view the material world with suspicion and hostility. The material world is considered evil, while the spiritual world is considered good and noble. Renouncing this world became the mark of holiness. Equally detrimental to the development of science were world views that did not have a concept of a supreme personal Creator God. Some of the ancient civilizations, for example, which did develop some mathematics and technologies, did not develop general scientific theories, because of the absence of a creationist perspective that gives confidence in the existence of rational laws in nature. This clearly explains the lack of interest on the part of these cultures in scientific research and technology. It also shows how the Reformation, with its return to Biblical Christianity, spurred a phenomenal interest in fundamental research and technology. The great scientific advances and the industrial revolution that followed bear this out. (Institute for Christian Research)

The abolition of slavery, wide-spread education, broadening of the suffrage, workers rights — all of these 19th century innovations were championed by those who inherited the Great Awakening; that is, by the intellectual and spiritual children of those religious exiles.

In my book The Darkness Within, my hero’s investigation into a disappearance leads him into a pantheist cult.