| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Bret E. Carroll. Spiritualism in Antebellum America. (Religion in North America.) Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1997. Pp. xiv, 227. $35.00.

Spiritualism conjures up images of fake spirit-rapping, gloomy seances, and dramatic mediums. Bret E. Carroll does not deny that these may be a part of the story, but Carroll asks his readers to look more deeply into Spiritualism as a genuine religious ideology. The religion of Spiritualism, Carroll argues, emerged in the context of a "spiritual crisis" (p. 2) faced by people in the United States by the late 1840s. Spiritualists drew on the Swedenborgian legacy of contact with spirits but developed that legacy in ways that suited the culture of the antebellum United States. The result was the "Spiritualist Republicanism" of the title of the third chapter. Spiritualists shared the "come-outer" spirit of many of their contemporaries, rejecting existing churches as well as traditional clergy. They sought democratized access to the sacred. At the same time, however, they lived in what they understood to be a highly structured universe. Concentric spheres radiating outward from God through levels of spirits to the humans on the margins traced both boundaries and opportunities for Spiritualist seekers. They sought ways to order their religious rituals and their everyday experience so that they would be in concert with cosmic circles. Opportunities for contact with the spirit world were ordered within the structures of churches, the Society for the Diffusion of Spiritual Knowledge, and the communitarian experiment at Mountain Cove, Virginia. . . .

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