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  • Religious Studies Rules: Understanding Methodists, Shakers, and Antebellum Americans
  • Joel W. Martin (bio)
A. Gregory Schneider. The Way of the Cross Leads Home: The Domestication of American Methodism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. xv 208 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $29.95.
Sally M. Promey. Spiritual Spectacles: Vision and Image in Mid-Nineteenth Century Shakerism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. xxiv 169 pp. Figures, plates, notes, bibliography, and index. $35.00.

In recent decades, an upstart academic field called religious studies has been establishing itself in departments of religion in colleges and universities. Its scholars advocate an impartial approach that takes religion seriously as an important, complex human activity in its own right. Religious scholars define religion as a multidimensional phenomenon. They are concerned not just with religion believed, but also religion organized, practiced, embodied, symbolized, felt, touched, and seen. Using varieties of this approach, scholars such as David Hall, Jan Shipps, Robert Orsi, and John Loftin have provided fresh interpretations of Puritan worlds of wonder, Mormon religious migrations, immigrant Catholic piety, and Native American spirituality. Now, two new books, Spiritual Spectacles by Sally M. Promey and The Way of the Cross Leads Home by A. Gregory Schneider, offer further evidence of the illuminating power of the religious studies approach. Appearing in the Religion in North American series edited by Catherine L. Albanese and Stephen J. Stein, these books make significant contributions to the field of American religious history and to the study of antebellum culture.

Spiritual Spectacles introduces and interprets a neglected aspect of Shakerism: their religious paintings and drawings. Shakers, like many Protestants, were iconoclastic, opposed to representations of the sacred. They associated art with “superfluity,” not the simplicity they cherished. Why then did Shakers at New Lebanon, New York, and Hancock, Massachusetts, start producing religious representations in the 1830s and 1840s? Promey answers this question at two levels, articulating how Shakers themselves accounted for the [End Page 206] innovation, and simultaneously providing a historian’s explanation of why this change occurred. This is no mean feat. Envisaging her project as “an extended translating task” (p. xix), Promey pulls it off flawlessly, creating a rich, solidly researched interpretation that might satisfy the Shakers themselves and should convince historians.

The year 1837 marked an important turning point in the spiritual life of Shakers, for this was the year that “the spirits of Ann Lee (1736–1784) and of members of her immediate early circle traversed the boundary between heaven and earth to teach, exhort, admonish, warn, and comfort Lee’s followers” (p. xvi). The spirits communicated vital truths to individual Shakers, who relayed these messages to their communities in ritualized performances, often through “extravagant spiritual pantomines” (p. xvi). This celestial correspondence continued for more than a decade and became known as “Mother’s Work” and the “New Era.” Historians have long recognized its importance to Shakerism. What they have not adequately appreciated, Promey argues, was the significance given to images during the New Era. These images were central, she argues, because Shakerism was primarily a community of visions, not texts, and in the 1830s, the community was experiencing a crisis of vision.

The crisis was related to demographic shifts in the community, including a higher rate of turnover among converts, the maturation of orphans who had never made a formal faith commitment, and, most important, the rise of a generation of Shakers who had never “beheld the bodily presence of our Ever-blessed Mother” (p. 4). The images provided an essential, sanctioned means to resolve this crisis. Produced by individuals under the inspiration of spirits, these “sacred presents” established a direct and immediate relationship between the new generation and Mother Ann. Functioning as windows on the heavens, the drawings and paintings communicated central aesthetic and ethical lessons. They depicted a divine order characterized by symmetry, singularity, and squareness; they described the narrow path of the faithful; they represented the spiritual rewards set aside for the pure. Through these “spiritual spectacles,” young Shakers encountered “a more fundamental Shakerism” (p. 54), a Shakerism centered on the actual presence of the female Christ. In Promey’s terms, charism was tapped to revivify institution, “gift” reenergized “order,” “communitas” reanimated “structure.” The Shakers were...

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