American messiahs False prophets of a damned nation

Adam Morris, 1983-

Book - 2019

Shares information on messianic prophets in United States history, including Cyrus Teed, Father Divine, and Jim Jones.

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Subjects
Published
New York : Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W. W. Norton & Company [2019]
Language
English
Main Author
Adam Morris, 1983- (author)
Edition
First edition
Physical Description
xvi, 413 pages, 8 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations ; 25 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages [383]-390) and index.
ISBN
9781631492136
  • Foreword
  • Introduction: The Messianic Impulse in America
  • 1. Women in the Wilderness
  • 1. The Person Formerly Known as Jemima Wilkinson
  • 2. The Universal Friends
  • 3. The All-Friend in the City of Brotherly Love
  • 4. New Jerusalem
  • 5. Mother Ann
  • 6. The United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing
  • 7. The Era of Manifestations
  • 2. The Chosen Vessel
  • 8. America's Best-Known Mystic
  • 9. The Poughkeepsie Seer
  • 10. The Fox Sisters
  • 11. The Apostolic Circle
  • 12. Poet in New York
  • 13. The Brotherhood of the New Life
  • 14. Salem-on-Erie
  • 15. California Idyll
  • 16. Paradise Lost
  • 3. The Great Cosmic Egg
  • 17. A Messianic Meeting
  • 18. Koresh, Shepherd of God
  • 19. The New Age
  • 20. Dr. Teed's Benefactresses
  • 21. Teed Goes Mental
  • 22. The Koreshan Unity
  • 23. Messiah on the Move
  • 24. Another New Jerusalem
  • 25. A Test of Immortality
  • 4. The Glo-Rays of God
  • 26. Divine Transformations
  • 27. The Messenger
  • 28. Trouble in Paradise
  • 29. The Harlem Kingdom
  • 30. Promised Lands
  • 31. Heaven Trembles
  • 32. Righteous Government
  • 33. Philadelphia
  • 5. Fall of the Sky God
  • 34. Jim Jones
  • 35. Divine Aspirations
  • 36. The Minister Wanders
  • 37. California Mystics
  • 38. New Directions
  • 39. Going Communal
  • 40. Peoples Temple Hits the Road
  • 41. Backlash
  • 42. Jonestown
  • Epilogue
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
  • Additional Sources
  • Index
Review by Choice Review

Morris, a freelance writer and translator, focuses on American religious movements with founders or leaders who claimed to be divine or were regarded by followers as somehow possessing a divine nature. Most had Utopian visions that, when implemented, would allow devotees to experience a heavenly existence on Earth. Morris directs attention primarily to Jemima Wilkinson (1752--1819), Shaker founder Ann Lee (1736--84), Andrew Jackson Davis (1826--1920), Thomas Lake Harris (1823--1906), Cyrus Teed (1839--1908) and the Koreshan Unity, Father Divine (1877--1965) and his Peace Mission, and Peoples Temple founder Jim Jones (1931--78). Drawing on a host of primary sources, Morris describes these figures and their associated movements in lush detail. However, a lack of analysis leaves readers yearning for more. Morris does not, for example, probe the social and cultural context in which each emerged to see if certain conditions make messianic religious movements plausible. Nor does he probe the nature of charismatic leadership and what transpires when a charismatic, purportedly divine founder dies. The title suggests there is something uniquely "American" about all this, but Morris does not examine that in depth. These shortcomings rule this book out as a scholarly resource, but lay readers may enjoy it. Summing Up: Recommended. General readers. --Charles H. Lippy, emeritus, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review

WHENEVER AMERICANS attach the label "cult" to a religious group, they reveal more about their own anxieties than about the theological eccentrics themselves. In "American Messiahs," Adam Morris offers up some truly strange historical characters. All were charismatic prophets who dissented from traditional Christianity - and claimed, in one way or another, to represent God himself. But what, exactly, were their enemies so afraid of? Was it their wacky theology, or their disregard for traditional gender roles, racial hierarchies and capitalist values? Morris opens his gripping narrative with Jemima Wilkinson, a Revolutionaryera mystic from Rhode Island, well-known to historians but often left out of conventional accounts of that era. In 1776, after a bout of "fatal fever" - likely typhus or typhoid - nearly killed her at the age of 23, she claimed to be reborn as a divine messanger of God: the Public Universal Friend. The Friend claimed to transcend sex and preached the spiritual advantages of celibacy. He preferred male pronouns and dressed in men's clothing, a white or purple cravat and beaver fur hat. In the 1790s, he persuaded about 50 families to prepare for the coming apocalypse by building a new Jerusalem on the frontier - a communal village near Seneca Lake in western New York. As idiosyncratic as Wilkinson was, the Friend emerged from a long tradition of Christian experiments in mysticism, communal living and occult theories about controlling sexual energy to connect with a bigendered God. For Morris, that ministry set the tone for messianic sects that followed, from Ann Lee's community of Shakers and Father Divine's racially integrated communes in 1930s Harlem to the deadly Peoples Temple of Jim Jones. He sketches a theological family tree that, while selective, highlights the connections between these individuals across generations: They read one another's metaphysical treatises and visited one another's communes. When a self-proclaimed messiah died without inaugurating the apocalypse, you can bet that younger rivals were ready to scoop up disappointed disciples. These leaders demanded total obedience and called followers to abandon family and live communally, as the first Christians did. They controlled disciples' sexuality - in part because of trauma that often lurked in their own backgrounds. Wilkinson's mother died giving birth to a later child; Ann Lee suffered three stillbirths and the death of one child who survived infancy. Thomas Lake Harris - a New York mystic who specialized in channeling the afterlife verses of dead English Romantic poets before founding a commune in Northern California - modeled his vision of the Divine Mother goddess on his own mother, who died when he was 9. No wonder these prophets preached that salvation lay in renouncing family and transcending one's reproductive organs. Even when a man was in charge, these communities were primarily women's movements. Wealthy patronesses helped fund them, and membership was disproportionately female. Androgynous images of God, rejection of traditional gender roles and the promise of economic security on a quasi-Christian commune held special appeal for women, especially those who needed a way to leave toxic marriages and survive on their own. Women held most of the leadership roles in the Koreshan Unity, a Chicago-based group founded by an obscure figure named Cyrus Teed. "Dr." Teed dabbled in alchemy, astrology and electrotherapy. He advocated celibacy in order to redirect sexual energy to the brain, which would in turn cause "combustion" in the pineal gland. "The explosion would cause the production of gametes to cease entirely, allowing the body to regenerate to the bisexual completion of pre-Adamic man," Morris explains. When Teed himself transformed into a bigendered deity - which would happen soon, he promised - he would destroy the cruel capitalist system and inaugurate a "New Order of celibate socialism." In the meanwhile, he appointed favorite disciples to the Planetary Court, a seven-woman advisory council. Women also surrounded Father Divine, a son of a former slave who proclaimed himself God. In 1915, he formed a commune with followers (black and white) in a New York apartment building. Father Divine rejected racial labels and "casually referred to himself and his followers as both masculine and feminine." They broke family ties and took new "angelic" names like Wonderful Wisdom, Pearly Gates, Twilight Twilight and Precious Jewel. Women vied to be one of his "Sweets," an inner circle of secretaries dedicated to recording their leader's prophecies. Father Divine's disciples abstained from sex. They rejected alcohol, tobacco and other temptations in exchange for the promise of eternal life - and lavish communal suppers, a successful method of evangelism during the Great Depression. His movement, the International Peace Mission, is absent from most histories of the civil rights movement because of "its tacky theology, its unappealing blend of communistic lifestyle and respectability politics, its disavowal of racial identity, and most of all, its iconoclastic leader: a squat, bald, dark-skinned man whose followers called him God and their Redeemer," Morris writes. Yet over the next 20 years, the Peace Mission expanded into a global network of racially integrated hostels and businesses, with outposts in at least 25 states and several foreign countries. No matter how many times critics accused Father Divine of causing a public disturbance, racketeering or other charge to get him hauled into court, they struggled to prove that he had broken any laws. (They also struggled to explain the mysterious wealth that allowed him to buy up dilapidated mansions and drive around in a chauffeured Rolls-Royce.) But in 1932 he was convicted of violating Section 72 of New Jersey's Crime Act, which made it a misdemeanor to impersonate Christ. The law was a needful one. America has long been a hothouse of apocalyptic sects and self-proclaimed saviors, "overrun with messiahs," the Methodist minister Charles Ferguson wrote in 1928. As strange as Morris's subjects may seem, in some ways they are quite typical of American religious culture. Take their demographics. Morris's messiahs were unusual in appointing women to leadership positions, but their femalemajority membership was ordinary. For at least the past 300 years, most religious communities in North America have included a disproportionate number of women. Religion has long offered women a sphere of meaningful work and greater autonomy wherever mainstream culture restricts their opportunities - even if it has subjected them to other kinds of domination. Nor did theories of personal divinity, goofy pseudoscience, communication with the dead or prophecies of worldly glory distinguish these spiritual entrepreneurs. People like Cyrus Teed and Father Divine were only the most zealous exponents of America's unofficial national faith: a spiritual smorgasbord of positive thinking, seasoned by the eclectic 19th-century movement known as New Thought. Other scholars have traced this mishmash of mind cures, millennialism, mesmerism, spiritualism, theosophy and other strains of pseudoscience and mysticism. The central idea of New Thought spirituality is that all humans possess a divine essence. God, or Spirit, is everywhere, and once we learn its secrets, we can manipulate reality with our minds. Faith is not a gift or a comfort, but a superpower. One might get the impression from "American Messiahs" that this spiritual stew has appealed only to feminists and socialists. But New Thought's legacy - not to mention the fierce strain of authoritarianism among Morris's subjects - is at least as prominent on the religious right. Domesticated by celebrity pastors like Norman Vincent Peale, apostle of positive thinking (and Donald Trump's childhood pastor), New Thought became the bedrock of the modern Prosperity Gospel, the capitalist catechism of the New Gilded Age. Morris shows that these oddball spiritual liberators are not just historical footnotes. They reveal society's fundamental themes and contradictions. "That they appear irrelevant to American historians, aberrant to contemporary evangelicals and abhorrent to the average consumerist is a signature of the victory capitalism has achieved over the American religious imagination," he writes. But the deeper impulses that drove these would-be messiahs and inspired their followers are not the province of the right or the left. They are simply human, and no messiah can save us from ourselves. These communities were primarily women's movements. MOLLY worthen is the author, most recently, of "Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism," and an associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 23, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review

Most cultural historians see mass delusion in the murder-suicide of the fanatics who perished with the Reverend Jim Jones in Guyana in 1978. Morris sees much more. In Jones, he discerns an American messiah whose social gospel traces back to Jemima Wilkinson and Ann Lee, whose messianic leadership inspired the Shaker movement. The Shakers disappeared, but Morris faults religious historians for not recognizing the repeated reemergence of kindred communities of messianic socialism. Readers learn, for instance, about the Poet, Thomas Luke Harris, leader of group seances among his Apostolic Brotherhood; about Dr. Cyrus Teed, known as Koresh to followers, who quivered at his apocalyptic jeremiads; about George Baker, an African American messiah who, as Father Divine, celebrated energized communion services that anticipated the civil rights movement. Though they will recognize linkages between Jones and his predecessors, readers may marvel that because those messiahs rejected capitalism and the traditional nuclear family, Morris actually regards Jones' followers as representative of a truer American Christianity than that found among conservative churchgoers. Astonishing sympathy for a lethal cult.--Bryce Christensen Copyright 2018 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Scholar and journalist Morris examines the theological, ideological, and personal relationships among a series of American spiritual leaders over the course of two centuries in his captivating debut. He argues that these messianic figures-such as Civil War veteran and anticapitalist Cyrus Teed, civil rights pioneer Father Divine, and cult leader Jim Jones-compose a movement and shared a conscious rejection of the individualism engendered by "capitalism and exclusionary social hierarchies." Hoping to restore "primitive" religion to a modern age in need, these figures often emerged from reform movements and embraced communal living, celibacy, and new scientific theories. Though the book examines familiar figures such as 18th-century Shaker Ann Lee, many of these messiahs-including Cyrus Teed, Father Divine, charismatic Quaker Universal Friend (born Jemima Wilkinson), and 19th-century California spiritualist Thomas Lake Harris-will be new to a general audience. Morris's research is extensive, and his reconstruction of his subjects' complex personal histories is impressive. Readers hoping for salacious tales will find a few of those too, though in the main these leaders were troubled by the physiology of the brain, the difficulties of running communities, and the aspirations of underlings who might contest their claims to divinity. Morris's work is a fine examination of a series of Americans whose lives and missions shed light on the dominant institutions and values they sought to subvert. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

Independent scholar Morris considers the Puritans, who came to America to reestablish the "pure" Christianity of the early church based on ideals of mutual aid and equal acceptance, in this examination of the history of messianic movements. He details how eclectic leaders, their followers, and movements often appealed to the highest tenets of equality, racial justice, gender parity, and shared wealth. In an early example, he describes how Jemima Smith in 1776 claimed she had died and been reborn as the Public Universal Friend, founding an itinerant public ministry, dressed as a man, to establish the New Jerusalem. He continues to trace the lineage of messianic movements up to Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple massacre in 1978. America's long tolerance of religious cults almost disappeared after this tragedy when an anticult mentality developed. The book closes with a look at the current singularity movement, which melds messianic tropes with technology to claim that humans in union with artificial intelligence will become software and live forever. VERDICT Scholars of American religious history will appreciate this meticulously crafted account.-Judy Solberg, Sacramento, CA © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

A detailed account of messianic movements in America.On Nov. 18, 1978, more than 900 people died at Jonestown, Guyana, a remote settlement of the Peoples Temple cult led by self-styled messiah Jim Jones. This mass murder-suicide, the largest single loss of American civilian life in a deliberate act until 9/11, serves as a gruesome denouement in this new study, in which independent scholar Morris analyzes a largely forgotten chapter in American history. From Jones to Mother Ann Lee to "Walla Walla Jesus," charismatic would-be prophets have established quasi-communist settlements as correctives to the racism, misogyny, rampant individualism, and capitalist greed they believed have characterized American society. To further foster this defiance of mainstream America, most of the communities also shared an aversion to the nuclear family, with celibacy frequently promoted "as a rejection of marriage, childbearing, and traditional kinship structures." Morris is at his best when he discusses the man who arguably embodied these tenets more than anyone else: Father Divine (c. 1876-1965), a black spiritual leader and civil rights advocate. Father Divine was an important and influential figure in his day, yet his controversial views on familyfollowers were expected to change their names and leave behind wives, husbands, and children once they joined his movementensured his virtual erasure from the nation's collective memory. Unfortunately, the rest of the chapters are somewhat dry, scholarly, and jargon-laden. Moreover, the brevity of many of the chapters impedes the narrative flow, and the brief epilogue would benefit from more information on post-Jonestown cults (David Koresh and the Branch Davidians receive only one paragraph). Ultimately, the book should serve as a useful reference for students of messianic movements and the history of American religion in general, but nonscholarly readers may lose interest at some point in the narrative.An informative and occasionally enlightening survey of American messianic movements, but it will likely have limited appeal among general readers. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.