Book Review

Ann Taves's ambitious new book is intellectual history written with religious studies concerns: its horizon is clearly comparative and epistemological. Her work begins with religious "enthusiasts"—a nasty word used in the eighteenth century to describe what some considered religious "excess"; it ends with subjects who early in the twentieth century were understood, in a psychologizing mode, as possessing multiple personalities (specifically, "co-conscious secondary personalities," a designation that naturalized and distanced unusual religious phenomena). In between the two figures (the "enthusiast" and the "multiple"), Taves studies the representative figure she calls the "clairvoyant somnambule"—literally, a clairvoyant "sleep-walker," but in practice an entranced subject whose mind functions independently from sense data and whom she finds thriving within nineteenth-century spiritualism. What provokes Taves in all of this is the way that discourses concerning religion are historically constructed as narrative "chains of interpretation," both by those who have encountered episodes of nonrational experience and endorse it and those who stand aside suspiciously as more rational religionists or as denizens of a scientific and/or secular world. In between the confessing and supernaturalizing believer and the analytical (and often reductionist) and naturalizing outsider, Taves identifies a mediating tradition that is the work of those who see trance-produced and similar nonrational phenomena as both authentically religious and natural. She does not tell us which interpretive chain is right, and her probing, searching narrative style, by not taking sides, raises questions about what we know and how we know it.

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Within this critical framework, Taves provides much more than a simple narrative history of how we got from revival religion to the psychology of religion. Indeed, her book is a revisionist study that deserves to be noticed for its rich material content, throwing light on certain groups and processes in American religious history that have been generally neglected or underemphasized. The first is the role of the Methodists in helping to constitute the consensus narrative of American religious history from the late eighteenth through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with a range that extends from the rise of evangelical Methodism itself to the migration, later, of Methodist themes into holiness and pentecostal movements and even into liberalizing and psychologizing explanations of religion. The second is the significance of the metaphysical tradition (spiritualism, theosophy, mind-curing New Thought, and the like) for understanding religion in the United States from the middle of the nineteenth century onward. The third is the significant interplay and overlap between Methodism, especially Methodist experientialism and perfectionism, and the growth of American metaphysical religion and related phenomena. To say this another way, Taves makes Methodists major players in the American religious game that—except for the "Methodist era" of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—much of the scholarship has given over to Calvinists. Still more, she makes Methodists major players in the easy glide (part of the game) between things evangelical and things metaphysical and then psychological that her history demonstrates.

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