From Salvation to Damnation: Popular Religion in Early America

In the introduction to his book, Awash in a Sea of Faith, Jon Butler contends that a plethora of religious choices turned antebellum America into "a unique spiritual hothouse," which was so "complex and heterogeneous" that it "baffle[d] observers and adherents alike."¹ In divergent ways, both the books under review here capture the diversity and discordance of popular religion in early American history. The authors present compelling evidence in cogently argued narratives that address the advent of the new nation and its relationship to the emergence, on one hand, of a new religious group (Moyer) and the persistence of a standard component of Christian doctrine (Lum) on the other. Building on previous scholarship that has documented the varied religious repertoire of early Americans (by Catherine Brekus, Jon Butler, David D. Hall, Nathan Hatch, Christine Heyrman, Colleen McCannell, Erik Seeman and a host of others), Moyer and Lum attend to their respective subjects with meticulous and perceptive examinations that will be widely read, debated and cited by future researchers. Both authors are to be commended for extending scholarly knowledge of early American religious history through forceful and substantive arguments. Moyer for his contribution to the history of gender by bringing attention to a well known but often overlooked religious figure and sectarian group, and Lum for her incisive commentary on a prevalent, contested, and meaningful religious concept in early American society.

Paul Moyer's book, The Public Universal Friend, explores the life and ministry of Jemima Wilkinson, a young woman from Newport who, after a serious illness in the fall of 1776, awoke to claim that her former self had died, that she was neither male nor female, and that she had been resurrected as the "Public Universal Friend." Refusing to answer to her birth name, the Friend announced her intention to embark on preaching tours throughout New England to spread her version of the Protestant religion. These trips gathered several converts, who formed a new sect that became known as the Society of Universal Friends. Devised as a microhistory, Moyer's book covers Jemima Wilkinson from her Quaker background and early life in Rhode Island to the onset and expansion of her ministry to her final demise in New York in 1819. Along the way, we learn of the Friend's early ministry and itinerant travels, her growing notoriety and religious leadership, as well as the group's spiritual dynamics, internal conflicts, western migration, and land disputes. But this book is as much about the Friend's followers as its leader. Its chronological focus tracks the group's development and evolution over time from the early days of new converts to the last remnant of the Friend's followers in the 1840s. Each chapter title, taken from the Old Testament, correlates to its topic, e.g., chapter two, on the sect's beginnings and the group's early converts, is called "Numbers." "Exodus," chapter five, discusses the migration of the Universal Friends to central New York, while "Judges," the seventh and final chapter, examines the sect's factionalism, which led to a series of legal battles during the last two decades of Wilkinson's life.

Moyer both adds to and expands upon previous scholarship on Jemima Wilkinson by Susan Juster, Catherine Brekus, and Herbert Wiseby. Most notably, Moyer solves the thorny issue of how to refer to Wilkinson the sectarian leader. The author utilizes female pronouns when discussing the Friend's life before her ministry and when providing outsiders' views of Wilkinson; he uses male pronouns to refer to the Public Universal Friend because that was what his followers did and that was how the Friend conceived of his ministerial leadership (I will adopt the same strategy in this essay...