Sex and Sects

The Story of Mormon Polygamy, Shaker Celibacy, and Oneida Complex Marriage

Stewart Davenport

• Editorial: University of Virginia Press
• Año: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780813947075
• Categoría: Theology & Religion
• Categoría: Philosophy of Religion

With a revolution behind them, a continent before them, and the First Amendment protecting them, religio-sexual pioneers in antebellum America were free to strike out on their own, breaking with the orthodoxies of the past. Shakers followed the ascetic path; Oneida Perfectionists accepted sex as a gift from God; and Mormons redefined marriage in light of new religious revelations that also redefined God, humankind, spirit, and matter. Sex became a powerful way for each group to reinforce their sectarian identity as strangers in a strange land.

Sex and Sects tells the story of these three religiously inspired sexual innovations in America: the celibate lifestyle of the Shakers, the Oneida Community's system of controlled polyamory, and plural marriage as practiced by the Mormons. Stewart Davenport analyzes why these bold experiments rose and largely fell over the course of the nineteenth century within the confines of the new American republic. Moving beyond a social-scientific lens, Davenport traces for the first time their fascinating shared trajectory as they emerged, struggled, institutionalized, and declined in tandem—and sheds historical light on the way in which Americans have discussed, contested, and redefined the institutions of marriage and family both in our private lives and in the public realm.

Part I

Context and Ideas

1

More

For some antebellum Americans the intensity of evangelical revivals was not enough and they wanted more.

From approximately 1790 to 1830, the Second Great Awakening reinvigorated established churches on the East Coast, created thousands of new churches on the frontier, and swept back and forth across the “Burned-over District” of upstate New York, inspiring both traditional and novel forms of devotion. Longstanding denominations such as the Congregationalists and Presbyterians, and more fledgling ones such as the Baptists and Methodists, all grew exponentially in these decades, from hundreds of churches with thousands of members to tens of thousands of churches with millions of members.1

Historians are generally agreed about what created this hyperactive religious environment. Starting with the American Revolution and the protections granted by the First Amendment, the new United States was primed for an era of religious creativity and expansion. After disestablishment, religious institutions could no longer rely on the state for support. Now dependent on voluntary contributions for their financial lifeblood, religious leaders were forced to attract and retain loyal and regularly tithing members.

This seismic shift in the structure of American religious life around 1790 led to two interrelated shifts in religious culture. The most important was the redefinition of religious authority itself. Until the early nineteenth century, Protestants vested the authority to interpret the Bible in a minister’s education. Knowing theology and the original biblical languages was deemed a prerequisite for accurate scriptural exegesis, and subsequent ordination and congregational submission. While definitely reading the Bible for themselves, members of American churches before 1790 would generally defer on theological matters to the greater knowledge and training of the pastor. In the aftermath of the American Revolution, however, the widespread “crisis of authority” affected not just churches but the entire, newly launched American republic. “Respect for authority, tradition, station, and education eroded” for every so-called learned professional, the historian Nathan Hatch writes, whether in medicine, law, or the ministry. The medical and legal professions eventually won their battles against post-Revolutionary egalitarianism through the exclusive institutions of the American Medical Association and American Bar Association, but religious leaders entirely reconstructed “the foundations of religious authority” in a way that resonates down to the present.2

If the first cultural shift after 1790 was the “crisis of authority,” the second was the redefinition of religious authority along populist lines. To quote Hatch again: “authority depended not on education, status, ordination, or state support, but on the ability to move people and retain their confidence,” a definition of authority that is fundamentally populist. Some antebellum religious leaders—including those investigated in this book—claimed to receive their spiritual authority directly from God through revelation, inspiration, visions, or special knowledge. But virtually all antebellum religious leaders, Hatch continues, “rested their claims to authority on the validity of lay proclamation.” In other words, any inspired individual could claim divine authority, but if he or she failed to move anyone, then the movement itself would fail, as many did during this era of spiritual trial and error. If no potential follower could identify and assent to any vestige of authority in an aspiring religious leader, then that religious leader had no authority. This complex relationship between leader and led has shaped American religious life ever since. Paradoxically, the United States’ egalitarian culture nevertheless creates authoritarian religious leaders to whom liberty-loving people willingly and often totally submit.3

This dynamic, which is best described using political terms such as “populism,” “egalitarianism,” and “authoritarianism,” is part of a system that is best described using an economic term—the American religious marketplace. Once multiple denominations had moved into a given territory, the previously dominant church lost its local monopoly and had to depend for its continuance on fickle and occasionally unforgiving American religious consumers. This turned the laity into spiritual shoppers and religious leaders into competitive salespersons and entrepreneurs for their particular brand of religious truth. Individuals, movements, and whole institutions would either succeed or fail based almost entirely on their ability to attract a following. This permissive context changed as the nineteenth century rolled on and the American government, economy, and culture became less tolerant of religious experimentation, but in the beginning there were virtually no limits to the possibilities of creative religious leaders and restless religious seekers.

In large part there were no spiritual limits because there were no spatial ones. The seemingly unending American frontier provided adequate room for the dozens of religious and communal experiments that were launched in the first half of the nineteenth century. While not literally blank slates, these tracts of land were blank enough for the various communities to find a safe environment in which to experiment and grow outside of the reach of hostile or competitive forces. And if the host society did become hostile, the religious experimenters could either fight back with the First Amendment’s “free exercise” clause, or move again, at least until 1890, when the frontier closed and there was nowhere ungoverned left to go. But before 1890, and especially before the Civil War, wherever one finds the dislocating phenomena of both a frontier setting and a rapid transition to market-capitalism, one has two of the most crucial ingredients for creating a society primed for religious awakening and innovation.

In no place was American society more primed and the religious soil more fertile than in the Burned-over District. Filled with recent immigrants, upstate New York was as fresh and unsettled as any new Western state. The completion of the Erie Canal in 1825 brought in even more settlers, new kinds of jobs, and dozens of new and radical religious ideas and practices. Religious seekers who longed for meaning and an identity-forging cause and community could easily find them among the myriad choices that the Burned-over District offered. Some, however, were overwhelmed by so great a spiritual selection. For them, the ability to choose was a double-edged sword, providing religious shoppers with plenty of options, but nevertheless confusing them with their competing and mutually exclusive truth claims.

So how exactly did the Mormons, Shakers, and Perfectionists manage to succeed in this overcrowded religious marketplace? As mentioned in the introduction, much of their appeal came from the intensity of their sectarianism. In addition to recognizing that their religious environment was chaotic, each of these groups also judged it harshly according to an uncompromising sectarian standard. To their minds, even with all of their evangelical zeal, antebellum Christians were hopelessly compromised, and these sectarians wanted to return to the purity of the early Church. What counted for Christian life in their antebellum present, they judged, was merely the latest manifestation of a Church that had lost its way centuries ago, and sometimes as early as the second or third generation after Christ. All three sects therefore had powerful stories to tell of Christian corruption that had derailed the original intentions of Jesus and the apostles. As the next chapter on “Metanarrative” will make clear, each group described the precise cause and date of this corruption differently, but they nevertheless all shared in a common critique of a Christian tradition gone awry, and one that they believed they were restoring to its original glory.

Coexisting with this sectarian critique of worldly churches was the sectarian longing for more: more intense and frequent spiritual experiences, more radical doctrines, more separation from the world, and more demanding individual sacrifices. The Second Great Awakening had raised the level of religious enthusiasm throughout the antebellum North to a new high. In such an environment it was difficult for intense religious seekers to distinguish themselves further from the awakened masses. For all kinds of reasons, the people investigated in this book deemed the standard options in their religious marketplace to be insufficient and they wanted more—a kind of spiritual satisfaction that would come only after they had embraced the most extreme form of religious expression, or as they called it at the time, the most “ultra” form of “ultraism.”

This spiritual dissatisfaction and desire for more was true for both the religious leaders of these new sects and their followers. Both were confused by and critical of the cacophony of religious voices around them, and both sought answers that went beyond the orthodoxies of their day. The only real difference between the leaders and the led is that the leaders claimed to have found those answers and the followers assented to them. Both, however, shared the same intense spiritual longing that could only be satisfied once they had separated themselves thoroughly from the so-called nominal believers around them.

In Mormon history, Joseph Smith’s formative years illustrate this point precisely. As he records it in his 1838 “History,” soon after his family moved to Palmyra, New York, in 1816: “there was in the place where we lived an unusual excitement on the subject of religion. . . . Some were contending for the Methodist faith, some for the Presbyterian, and some for the Baptist; . . . Priest contending against priest, and convert against convert.”4 This passage describes perfectly the religious excitement, competition, and confusion of a Burned-over District town in the midst of the Second Great Awakening. Energized denominational leaders preached salvation and fought for converts, but the overall effect on some—Smith included—was perplexity. “In the midst of this war of words, and tumult of opinions,” he continued, “Who of all these parties are right? Or are they all wrong together?”5 Smith’s answer was that they were indeed “all wrong together,” but he did not reach this conclusion through personal Bible study. His answer to the question of which denomination was right came directly from God.

In 1820, when Smith was only fourteen years old, he received his “First Vision” in what Mormons now refer to as the “Sacred Grove” near his home in Palmyra. In this vision, both God the Father and Jesus the Son appeared to Smith in a blaze of light, responding to his queries about “which of all the sects was right” with the command to “join none of them, for they were all wrong.”6 By divine fiat Smith was now denied any traditional, denominational option in his search for spiritual answers and had to rely on other sources. Over the rest of the 1820s those answers came slowly but surely through visitations from the angel Moroni, the discovery of the Golden Plates, and the translation of the Book of Mormon, subjects that will be treated in detail in chapter 4, “Spiritual.”

The story of John Humphrey Noyes’s early spiritual formation likewise reveals a dissatisfaction with antebellum Christendom, and a desire for something more than the standard denominational offerings. After graduating from Dartmouth in 1830 and preparing for a career in law, Noyes was converted at a revival in Putney, Vermont, in September 1831 and began his religious studies in earnest. “John, like his mother, could do nothing by halves,” one early biographer perceptively writes. Accordingly, Noyes committed himself to both perpetual “ardor” and a life-long search for religious truth.7

But unlike Joseph Smith, the farm boy who received guidance from visions, revelations, and entirely new sacred texts, Noyes took a more traditional route for someone of his socioeconomic background, matriculating first at Andover Theological Seminary and then Yale. But as with Smith, and in spite of their educational differences, Noyes also “lost confidence in the religion around me, and saw more and more the need there was of . . . an internal reformation of Christendom.” Thus, like Smith, Noyes was unsparing in his critique not just of worldly “irreligion,” but of “ordinary sinful religion” from which “believers in their primary state” need further rescue. In other words, they needed more—in this case a second conversion that would take them from what he deemed their sinful “‘double-minded’ state” into the so-called “higher stage of experience,” which for him was sinless Perfectionism. Only in this “stage,” Noyes argued, would the believer be spiritually satisfied and fully united with God.8

For the Shakers, while it is difficult to identify what Ann Lee thought because she was illiterate and thus left no documents of her own, it is possible to see the continuity of their sectarian priorities in other Shaker documents. In 1808, more than thirty years after Lee’s death in 1774, Shaker leaders published a six-hundred-page tome that, in the words of historian Stephen J. Stein, “functioned as a theological norm.”9 In one chapter, simply titled “Worldly Christians Contrasted with Virtuous Believers in Christ,” the author “sum[s] up the whole matter” with an indictment of “the Christian world” as irredeemably and “universally corrupt.”10 Similarly, in 1790 when the Shakers published their first attempt at systematizing their beliefs, they gave it the unconcise title A Concise Statement of the Principles of the Only True Church, According to the Gospel of the Present Appearance of Christ, As Held and Practiced upon by the True Followers of the Living Saviour.11 Most revealing of their sectarian understanding of themselves, obviously, are the terms “the Only True Church” and “the True Followers of the Living Saviour.”

Religious groups often think that they have a monopoly on truth and that all other groups deviate from that truth. The point of these three separate but similar critiques was for each sect to establish itself as the guardian and restorer of the one true faith. Animated by this powerful sense of right and righteousness, each of the three called upon the “worldly Christians” in their midst to quit their confusion, abandon their “ordinary sinful religion,” and join them in the vanguard of this new and thrilling godly movement.

Context, however, was still crucial for the success of all three sects. The Shakers, for instance, made many converts in Ohio and Kentucky in the early 1800s. Very much like the Burned-over District of New York, the Ohio Valley was a recently settled frontier where competing religious groups found receptive audiences for their various messages. In particular, this is the time and place of the...

Índice

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue: The Perfectionist Snow-Bound Funeral Orgy of 1839 and What This Book Is Not About
• Introduction
• Part I. Context and Ideas
• Part II. Geneses
• Part III. Early Crises
• Part IV. Practices and Enforcements
• Part V. Sectarian End Times
• Notes
• Index