The Second Great Awakening w/ George Bagby: The J. Burden Show Ep. 65

You can still find the old one, right, It's not like it's been unearthed, but I've been going through remastering the best of my backlook and so this is part of that. Anyway, Hope you guys are having a good Saturday. Oh by the way, this is a bonus. You're still getting five brand new episodes, but I figured I might as well throw this up as I'm going back through and fixing everything. Anyway, Hope you're doing well and anyway,

onto the show. All right, George Bagbee, welcome back to The Jay Burdens Show.

might start working on that next week. So I'll keep you posted about that, and when when it's finished, I mean to do some advertising. I want people to know about it, because that's my thing. My thing is American history.

I usually condense this one down to one lecture. I try to make it fit in an hour and a half block period, which is probably what you got when you went through my class, but it's it definitely merits more time than that, and it's one of my favorite subjects. It's about the second Great Awakening in the north of the United States in the decades just before the Civil War. So if we judge it generously, we can say last from eighteen hundred to eighteen sixty roughly, and it's the

second grade Awakening. We have two periods that we call great Awakenings in American history. The first period is right before the War for Independence. We have people like George Whitfield and the Wesley brothers who are doing a lot of things in English speaking Protestant circles. We see the foundation of what becomes the Methodist Church. And this is an interesting movement. The first Great Awakening is a movement towards a low church sort of experience, a more congregational

led church government. In a lot of American circles, it meant a revival among the Baptists and a great growth among Baptists who are dissenter like all purpose dissenters, and a movement away from organized legacy Protestant denominations. Well, in the second grade Awakening, we kind of see a a repeat of that, but it goes in very strange directions. So these these things, the first and second grade Awakening. They do have some things in common, but the second

grade Awakening is much more weird, much more alien. Yet it gives us. It gives us a lot of institutions and beliefs and even consumer products that surprise us that they've become very American elements in the Western world. Even they even have currency well outside of America now. So the lesson is the second grade Awakening.

and the South. And this is something about the Second Great Awakening that makes it very unique in American history is that it's part of the sectional conflict, especially that it's happening right before the greatest war in American history, the biggest sacrifice and struggle in American history, the contest between the no within the South. So here I'm kind of reviewing things that I've been making a point of

in my class up until this point. The North has practically all the cities, with the exception of New Orleans. Louisiana is always so exceptional. New Orleans is rebably the only city of any size in the South. The rest of the South is very rural. The North has an industrial base. The North is the center of the merchant marine. Practically all ocean going ships are owned and operated out of the North. They dock in the South. The South has a lot of commerce. But those aren't Southerners on

those ships. Those aren't Southerners manning those ships. And by the way, aren't they aren't Southerners bringing the slaves over back when the slave trade was legal. Those were Northerners and foreigners mostly doing that. The Southern trend is agricultural. The vast majority of Southerners are directly engagement agriculture on some level. So the northern trend is what I could characterize a modern We're going to talk more about what modern is, what modernism is. What are these people talking

about when they say they have modern ideas. It is strongly related to the rejection of traditional beliefs, traditional ways of living in favor of new fangled ways. The South is, in contrast traditional. Now, we could go on about this contrast. I bookend this lecture with another lecture in the series about what Richard M. Weaver called the older religiousness of the South, and this is something that the Vanderbilt Agrarians

also commemorated in their book. I'll take my stand end about how the South is this even even a medieval sort of holdout of Christendom. The South does not experience these religious innovations in this period. The South remains tied to its older religious beliefs, which is mostly low Church Protestantism,

mostly Baptists and Methodists. Actually, but they don't they don't under they don't undergo this this period of religious innovation and hysteria and fanaticism that the North experiences during this time. So the Northern trend is also centralized economically, you know, you you have these these big uh trade and manufacturing centers in the North major port cities uh Boston, Philadelphia, New York City, Cincinnati, Chicago, places like that, Whereas the

Southern trend is very decentralized. There are lots of local centers of influence and authority, and they are populated mostly by people and engaged in agriculture. So the Southern trend has always been with or had always been up until this point, it had always been with centers of influence

and authority in regions and in states. So the Northern trend, you have this popularity of Northerners thinking of the Union as the final governmental authority in all matters in which people should be united, and they increasingly think that Americans should be on the same page about more and more things. Their culture in the North, the political culture in the North, mirrors their economic experience, and that it becomes more centralized

and less diverse in a certain sense. In in the South of the word that we use to describe this decentralization and many many local centers of influence and authority, The old American term for that is a federal vision of politics. American federalism is also termed a vision of states' rights, where states have the final authority on what

the constitution means, what what is constitutional law. You have a lot of Southern states talking about nullifying federal laws, believing that they have a constitutional mandate to do that, and many Southerners also saying from from even the ratification of the Constitution forward, the states have the right to leave the Union because the center of authority lies in regions and localities, not in a central federal government created

by those states, by those regions. So that's that's a federal vision, and that's that's rather what Thomas Jefferson meant when when he was he was talking about republicanism and such. Jefferson has a lot to do with with those ideas. Anyway.

In the North, during during these decades before the Civil War, we see this growth of new religious groups, and in the South you see a faithfulness to their old religious formulas, and you see you also, kind of amusingly, you see a lot of alarm and shock in dismay in the South about what's going on in the North. During these years, Southerners are are writing observation of these Northern religious groups,

kind of commenting, these people are going and sane. Can we really be in a union with people like this, who who believe such such radical, strange things.

chapters from Albion's Seed. I've been working really hard to build chapters or build handouts for my other students about other groups in the United States, immigrant groups for instance, and their characteristics, but the predominant characteristics in American history come from the old Anglo American stock. We have other very important groups in American history. I am not denying their influence. I'm not denying their importance. I'm not denying

their prevalence or anything. I really like them and appreciate them. The Irish, Americans, the Germans, there are other major influences. But the Anglo American groups found themselves in conflict here just as they had been in conflict back in England. Even though they're all Anglos, they are differentiated by region of England, by religious tradition, and by many other things that Fisher documents in his book. They have different They've

got different food, they live in different housing. The religious differences are are major. He he has four different groups that he talks about, Quakers, Puritans, the Virginia Cavaliers, and the famous scotch Irish, who go mostly to the back country to the Appalachians. So of those of those four, the scotch Irish and the Cavaliers form what we what

we come to see as Southern civilization. The Northerners and Southerners obviously find themselves in conflict with one another about a great many things, not just not just political economic beliefs about slavery, but also beliefs about the past. What do we do with our heritage? Is there a constructive use for it? Must it be rejected in some radical way? Must we must we have some kind of purgation of

religious heritage or cultural heritage. What One of the things that makes the North stand out from colonial days is the agreement among Quakers and Puritans that their religious heritage in England can cannot be salvaged. It basically needs to be redone from top to bottom. It needs to be demolished and completely renovated, completely rebuilt. The term Puritan, for instance, it refers to their religious belief that the Church of England was deeply tainted by Roman Catholic beliefs and practices

and must be purified. And that's a very radical position. The Puritans rejected the church calendar. They would punish people that celebrated Christmas. These are people that took this separatism and this purgative view of their religious past and their culture as English, as English people. They wanted to get rid of old traditions, wanted to get rid of old

beliefs because they believed those things were evil. They believed that Roman Catholicism was of the devil, which is one of the reasons why they punished people that observed these things, even people who claim to be Protestants in all other respects. So these are these traits do have a lot to do with the things we see in the second grade Awakening and the difference we see between northern and southern religious traditions.

Prussian War. These things do seem to have a lot in common. But we can look at the history of Anglo Americans in England and in the United States, and we see some commonalities there too. Cavaliers and roundheads, we can see them in both places.

and Methodists for the most part. If we wanted to make a comparison these days, we would say it would be like Pentecostal worship or something the growth of Pentecostal sex. These are emotional responses that people are getting in the camp meeting atmosphere. In the North, the camp meetings seemed to produce rather different results, much more innovative results. So what happens is they are traveling evangelists. They go from

place to place. They may stay in one place for a week or so, give sermons every night, get a response from the audience. One of one of the innovations that come out of the Second Grade Awakening camp meetings is the altar call, which many American Christians now associate strongly with normalcy or tradition. In the tradition I come from the pastors that I grew up knowing, all Southern Baptists.

That's that's the tradition of my birth. Those pastors would talk among themselves with pride that they had never given a sermon without an alter call, and they portrayed themselves as very traditional, old fashioned sorts of Baptists. They took that as a point of authority. Yet the alter call is something that becomes popular with the Second Grade Awakening. We can actually trace its origin and such, and it

was controversial at the time. The alter call is where there is emotional music played at the end of a service. The preacher makes an impassioned declaration for the members of the congregation to dedicate their lives to Jesus Christ. They sing an emotional chorus, and they may sing the chorus for many stanzas. This could go on for a while,

especially if the response has traction. You know, there are a lot of peace people responding, people coming down to the altar at the at the foot of the pulpit, which is which is a really interesting connection there, the pulpit and the altar kind of unified in this kind

of of religious expression. And I am Eastern Orthodox now, and the idea of the pulpit and the altar being in any sort of even proximity to one another is really shocking to me now, like that that is a really different kind of expression, uh, and different sort of symbolism. I think. I think Roman Catholics and and many Liturgical Protestants would would recognize that as a difference as well. I know in many Presbyterian churches the pulpit is off to the side, it's not in the center.

main point of the service. The Eucharist is. The homily could be omitted, you know, it's it's not not even a necessary part. But with the camp meeting, it's all about the the homily. It's about the speaker. It's about the evangelist who is talking and explaining scripture or some point of theology, or eventually it came to be social causes that the evangelist was focusing on in the meetings and asking people to dedicate themselves to a cause, maybe in the name of Jesus. But it seems to be

auxiliary to traditional Christianity or separate from traditional Christianity. You can advance the slide down.

but they're they're nevertheless influential. They tended to have a lot of literary people involved, so they were popular for that. But it's a movement away from the legacy denominations, if you will. It is Episcopalians becoming Methodists, it is Methodists becoming Baptists, it is Baptists becoming more narrow sectarians. And I'm not talking about what what we what we know of today in America. We talk a lot about the non denominational Christians. That's not what I'm talking about in

this instance. In this case, the people that fall away from organized religion altogether are coming up with their own broad organizations. We're going to see some of them had great ambitions on that front that never bore fruit, and some of them created some might say denominations, some might say new religions from scratch during this time. Now, I think that this is fascinating and I take this very seriously. Another thing that I do is I teach Greek literature,

ancient Greek literature. I teach Homer and Sophocles and Avid and Herodotus and things like that. And one thing that I'm always trying to do my students there is I

really want them to take paganism seriously. One of one of my pet peeves is I strongly dislike the modern approach to the Oracle at Delphi, where scoffing, mocking moderns, who typically don't know anything about any religious tradition, maybe nothing about their own or anybody else's necessarily they kind of take a new atheist approach and say, oh, it's

all superstition, it's all nonsense. You know, sophisticated people would never believe these things, And they talk about the oracle at Delphi getting high off of gases and then babbling away in some hallucination and the priests making money on this. On the side, there are a great many reasons to dismiss that interpretation and take the oracle seriously. Just because these people are pagans doesn't mean that there aren't spirits involved. I'm a Christian and I believe in the spiritual world.

It's one of the first things we say. I'm a Nicene Creed, right, I believe in that God created all of it visible and invisible, and it wouldn't surprise me at all if the Pagans were actually communing with spirits and getting information from spirits. But I bring that kind of sensibility, that that sort of outlook into the second grade Awakening. I am not entirely sure that the founders of Mormonism were Charlatan's for instance. I am willing to

accept the possibility. I believe it is certainly possible for people to talk to spirits. I believe that as an article of faith. I personally had experience with such things myself. But that's beside the point. Joseph Smith may have actually received messages from spirits, and I think they were liars. That's one of the reasons why we're not supposed to mess with spirits, is because we have no idea how

to distinguish between an angel and a devil. But this is a very mysterious time in American history where there are new religions coming into being, and these religions are still with us today, and some of them have lots of Christian trappings. I think that it's a productive question to ask, would you consider this group Christian? Do they believe enough Christian things. Some of them are more likely

candidates than others. Maybe we can still call them Christian in some sense, but others I think have obviously gone too far away.

right like, oh, they weren't really Christians. And look, don't get me wrong, there's there's a whole lot of that, you know, especially now you see it in the more like yeah, excuse me, kind of like out there like charismatic style, you know, evangelicals, right like if you're not you know, from the Bob Jones Memorial Baptist Church, well then you're you're hell abound. But nonetheless, and I kind

of know where this is going. You know, there's enough people and there's enough different groups in here that are really quite odd, you know, that are like technically Christian like they would say so. But yes, there comes a certain point where it's like, well, okay, like could do you really still apply?

it but it turns out they believe everything in the Creed. Uh.

did apologize to those that that pointed that out. I made a stream, well, I made I made a video, a solo video of my own, concerning that, just because I wanted to rectify that that was an embarrassing error in my part. But I did want to focus in on Charles Finny because Charles Finny is a very instrumental

character and socond great Awakening. He we we could we could quote him saying a number of interesting, influential, important things that that characterize some of these even evangelists doing the tent meetings during this time. He is very famous for tent meetings. If we look at his quotes that I selected here, Phiney said, the Gospel has been made

of no effect by the traditions of man. Now, I think that this is an exceptional quote and a and a very revealing sort of statement about the second grade Awakening and something of the spirit of it. This is an anti traditional sort of movement. This is going away from the organized denominations, the Protestant denominations. I don't I don't believe this is going on in the American Catholic world at all, which which is far far smaller back then.

It's it's practically only Irish immigrants back then. There are a couple of exceptions arrests. Bronson is a is an Anglo convert to Catholicism way back then. Very interesting character. But Charles Finny when he when he talks about the traditions of Man, he he lambasted Roman Catholicism. But he's not speaking to Roman Catholics in this sermon. He's talking to a Protestant audience overwhelmingly Protestant, and he is dumping

on the Protestant churches. So what happens in these these tent meetings, uh, these these cant meetings, these revivals, is people like Finny go around and say you need to have an intense experience, an individualized experience of religion, and you should be suspicious of what the established clergy and the Sunday schools and churches around here have taught you what religion is and what it means to be a confessing of you know, disciplined Christian in this community. And this,

and this leaves his converts with an interesting perspective. The evangelist always moves on. The evangelist leaves his his disciples behind as it were, you know, and they frequently form new congregations. But these things don't always work out there. There are an awful lot of disillusioned people after this who fall out of church membership, fall out of church attendance entirely. And we're going to revisit this phenomenon later because there's an important character that we visit that that

talks about this directly. Another thing, Finny says, God has found it necessary to take advantage of the excitability there is in mankind to produce powerful excitements among them before he can lead them to obey. Now this corresponds to what I had said about Finny previously when I mistakenly

called him Spurgeon. When Finny justified creating emotional outbursts in his in his congregants in order to get them to make an emotional commitment at the altar call, and he discounts you a reasoned decision in favor of the emotional moment. There's a certain sense in which he kind of the like a Protestant Edward Burne's, you know, a little bit less of like obviously much less cynical, you know, but in kind of the same way that it was a

It was like an escalation in arms almost. You know that unless you could you could match it, you were kind of out compete it to a certain degree. Indeed, now I want to be I want to be quite clear, I'm very hesitant to call any of these people cynical. I don't like looking in history and discounting what is said in what is done as pure cynicism. I think that I think that may happen far more often these days, but I'm not I'm not teaching the history of the

twenty twenties. I'm teaching history of a long time back well. And I think that was completely sincere.

praise choruses. I read about Dwight L. Moody, a Chicago evangelist who was a contemporary and disciple of Finny, and Moody does a lot to mainstream that practice as well. Now what's interesting about that is is those old praise choruses from Finney's day are like the classic old hymns in some churches, like Fanny Crosby eventually contributes to that tradition. She's not connected with Finny, but Amazing Grace is an

example of that tradition. And you'll notice that many of many of the hymns in that style, done in that style are individualized in focus. They're they're talking about the grace that saved a wretch like me. It's about me. Now, that's interesting because the church music that Finny is reacting against is more holistic. The older hymns of the established congregations of his day are singing about an event in the life of Christ, or they're singing about what baptism

does or something like that. It is it's a more universal thing. It's not a not an individual focus thing. And I've always thought that that is a very important thing. Nevertheless, when when we look back at the second grade Awakening, it's far enough away that it's it's outside of the thinking of a lot of people who think of themselves as traditional believers. That's that's too far in the past for them to realize that this is the origin of

some of these practices. Another important aspect which has a huge influence in the second great awakening is the social reforms that Finny brings into the pulpit and proclaims with his evangel while he's while he is teaching the gospel, he is also teaching for radical abolitionism, the immediate emancipation of the slaves in the United States, and other causes that we will we will see some have have Some have explained these things as a form of Christian socialism,

so called Christian socialism. Finny goes off to Ohio. He's from New York. He spends most of his career in upstate New York, but he does go west into Ohio to found Oberlin College. If you advance the slide, we'll see, all right, just give me a second. Again, it's a little clunky, but so Oberlin College starts out as a revivalist minister's school of higher education for social reform and humanism.

So this is a you could say it's it's evangelical in the sense that it's founded by evangelists, but in the context of annabellam America, this is a very progressive institution. From its start, Oberlin College is one of the first schools in the United States to have co ed students. To admit both male and female students, and it is one of the very first to have a racially integrated

student body, so well before the Civil War. They're taking black students at Oberlin College, and this is something that not surprisingly Oberlin is extremely proud of these days. But true to their origin, Oberlin is known as one of the one of the liberal arts schools that are on the extreme left of things. Oberlin College was founded in part to spread abolitionist ideas, and Charles Finn is part of this. He says that these ideas are essential for the work of the Gospel to take place on earth.

So if we don't have these social reforms popularized, then people are not living the Christian life. Now, I'm on your show, so I can say things here that I wouldn't necessarily say elsewhere, like in my class, for instance, this is not something that my students could handle very well. But the notion that radical abolitionism is absolutely necessary for one to be a Christian is a pernicious and new notion. The Bible is full of holy men who owned slaves,

and this is this inclin inclutes the New Testament. We have the Book of Fileheman for instance where the apostle sends a runaway slave back to his owner and writes an epistle about the action. The Book of Filehemon does not instruct the man that owns Onisimus the slave to set the man free, even though both of them are Christians. It's merely explaining the circumstances, and the apostle Paul is

sending the slave back to his master. This this sort of thing strikes modern Americans in a very strange way, but perhaps they're even more alarmed by the injunctions we see in several books in the New Testament. In two Peter, the apostle says, slaves, obey your masters, even the mean ones, even the froward ones, even the ones that aren't treating you well. And this is an injunction that comes right alongside children oby your parents, and wives obey your husbands,

all three of which are hierarchical relationships. The Bible does not destroy those hierarchical relationships. The Bible teaches doctrines to reinforce those relationships. So this idea that Christians must be radical abolitionists, it's important, at least in the historical context here, this is not something that Christians have ever taught before, and I think I can just leave it at that. It's a novel new doctrine. Right.

of like syncratic gospel of you know, anti racist Christianity. Right, And you can have your own opinions on slavery, you know, you may or may not like it, but at the very least, like the widest I guess reading you can take is that the Bible is neutral on slavery, you know, right, And it's especially aggravating, you know, from a Protestant perspective, where this there is this doctrine of sola scripture, right, like only scripture, only scripture, just like going back to

that and going back to that, but except on this one thing, you know. And so again I'm not trying to turn this into a tangent. But that's an interesting point and not something I'd considered so explicitly.

these countries are very different from each other. In Haiti, there was there was kind of a wholesale slaughter that followed that that did not follow in the United States. Our slaughter was just armies of regions fighting and killing one another by the hundreds of thousands. But we will move on to more detail. Also about the second grade Awakening, I haven't gotten to the fun part yet, and we will skip along until we get to that. In the Second Grade Awakening, we see many examples of what early

Christians called chileasm. We could use an English word for it and call it millennialism. Millennialism is utopian religion, religious belief that expects some kind of earthly expression of an ideal world. Now, this is in contrast to the kind of traditional religious expression that people like Charles Finny. Not to dump too hard on Charles Finny, I want to give the man his due, But people like Charles Finny were contrasting their evangel with Charles Finny did not like

the modest position of traditional faith. Traditional religious belief believe it's a belief that salvation is a kind of mystery, and that is something that is accomplished ultimately by God, not by man. It is divine grace that works out the salvation of humanity. Human beings need to cooperate with this in some form or another. But this is a profound mystery that we also see in the Gospel. Christ

says his kingdom is not of this world. Millennialism denies that statement of Christ and expects to see the Kingdom of God established on earth by man. Now they might say, oh, it's God working through them, but they expect to see evil purged from the world, or evil purge from their special community. Now this is an American tradition. Both the Quakers and Puritans in the North, as David Hackett Fisher points out, did expect to set up kinds of utopian communities.

You may recall from early American history communes and communal experiments abolishing property and such were done in the South as well. Now, these things always failed very quickly, but the Colony of Georgia was set up as a utopian commune. Jamestown was originally a communist experiment with a master plan. But these things fizzled out very quickly because the incentives weren't right, the people were were not able to survive. So if we advance on to the next slide, we

will will see some millennialism at work. Oh, here we go. Is this what you wanted? Or should I go to the next Yes? I actually didn't expect the rest of those notes. There just my fault. I've already said. New England began with this theological notion that the right belief could build the perfect society. So maybe the least interesting movement to come out of this, at least I find it to be the least interesting. Or the Unitarians, who in more recent times merged with the Universalists and became

known as you you, the Unitarian Universalists. Now these are interesting, I suppose, and that they made the talking points of the Democratic Party their statement of faith. And if you want to know what Unitarians believe, you don't have to look very far. They like to post it on the fronts of their churches. They do not believe in any Christian creeds, unlike their Puritan forefathers. They don't believe that Christ was God. They don't believe he was born of

a virgin. They don't believe that he died or rose again or ascended into heaven. They don't believe the Bible is the word of God. And you wonder why they might use a cross as a symbol at all. They kind of get they kind of moved away from a traditional presentation of a Christian cross and started using stylized monad or something. If you advanced the slide one more, or it's a good, good place for us to rest, here we go. I haven't seen one that says.

Waldo Imberson. Oh, that's interesting, that said in church. And that's really interesting because the Transcendentalist movement of the American Humanists and things like that, that that is an American literary tradition, and there's there's something of style in that body of literature. But they they put it in a church pew and called it their faith, and I suppose it is a faith. This is this is a very

politicized religion, such as it is. It's it was never very popular, though it does have a lot of important adherents. I'm sorry to admit that John Adams was a Unitarian. I rather like John Adams President, John Adams of Massachusetts, John Quincy Adams, and surprisingly John Z. Calhoun of South Carolina. Oh that's incredibly surprising. Yeah, so there's there's kind of a diversity there. You know, you have some famous Southerners who are also Unitarians. But this was something that never

got very far from the elites. So it looks to me like like a religion of the political class, the political elites. I knew some people who became Unitarian, and they definitely wanted to think of themselves as upper crust yet still religious, not believing any unpopular religious things to believe, only believing the most popular sorts of doctrines. That's one way of looking at it.

You can see this, uh, this teal area, this blue green area. This is where most of this evangelist activity is going on. I have I have said before there are evangelists in the South, but they do seem to be doing something distinctly different just at the same time. In this in this region of the north where where most of this activity is taking place, most of the revival meetings are taking place, you see a bunch of special movements groups springing up. You see Shaker communes here

on the map, you see a few. You see a few of these red boxes. The red represents Mormon activity and Mormon communities. The red lines also also illustrate the movement of the Mormons westward. Of course, they eventually end up in Utah, where most of them do. Also, we see other things illustrated on this map. There there are some famous communes like Brook Farm in Massachusetts. Nathaniel Hawthorne was part of that experiment that was a vegetarian commune

that tried to eliminate private property. Another thing that you see marked on the map is the Foyerist phalanxes. This is after this is all establishments of a French utopian thinker named Fourier. And he was not a religious thinker, but he was something. He was a Communist thinker. Now this is before Karl Marx, which is important. He prefigures the Communists of eighteen forty eight and the Communist Manifesto.

And he was not a religious thinker, but he imagined that he could solve all the world's problems through applied reason and scientific thinking. He said there was no problem that human beings could experience that could not be reasoned to a solution. So he's a thoroughgoing rationalist, and he imagined that in the future humanity would live in gigantic

communal apartment buildings. It's a very curious thing. He was a prolific writer, and he had adherents here in the United States who were very motivated by the utopian millennialist spirit of the age and started selling all all that they had to buy spots in these experimental fall lengths settlements, and several of them actually built buildings and such some of them, some of them still exist. I understand if

you ad advance, will continue. So another one of these utopian groups that try to get rid of all their religious ideas and focus on humanist, rationalist approaches to perfect peace and harmony and the end of evil were the followers of Robert Owen. Now this is peculiar and interesting. We see this as an Anglo American phenomenon. The Second Great Awakening does have its adherents over in England as well.

But they find that they can get they can get financial support, and they can get people to go in with them in communal experiments and communes. Here in the United States. Whereas back in England these ideas are not so popular. In the United States, there are always wealthy New Englanders who are willing to finance things like this, these these utopian experiments. So Robert Owen, who is from I want to say, I want to say, he's from Wales. I don't think he's from England. I think he's from Wales.

But he's from He's from the British Empire. He's from Great Britain. He comes to Indiana and he starts a commune there. Now, this has a lot in common with the the Foaeis Phalanxes that that I just talked about. Robert Owen imagined that everyone would live in a giant apartment building. There would be no there would be no religion. It would be totally peaceful, there would be no crime, and everyone's lives would be planned so there would be no conflict. We see this kind of thing done again

and again during this period. But Owen wanted to eliminate all religious education, which is a very important aspect, and he blamed this on the failure of his commune. If you advance the slide one click, we'll see a picture of Robert Owen. There we go. Yes, he was from Wales. I remembered it right, Okay, So Robert Owen he believed that the Christian teaching of the sinfulness of man and the fall of man was actually the source of human misbehavior, and he was. Though he failed as a utopian, he

became a pioneer in public education. And I I know, I know critics of Marxism have cited Robert Owen as an inspiration to Karl Marx and his advocacy of public education. I don't know that Marx himself ever cited Robert Owen for that, but it's but it is. It's a coincidence anyway, both Marx and Robert Owen both both said that there should be universal public education. Shall I go to the next slide? Yes, go right ahead. So the Nashoba community

is another small phenomenon. It did not take off, but it's it's another instance of an Anglo a Scottish woman in this case, who came to the United States found funding with a Meremerican elites who were willing to fund these utopian experiments. Francis Wright went to Memphis, Tennessee, and had had a lot of abolitionist goals and had a lot of abolitionists enthusiasts who are funding this effort. She went to Memphis, Tennessee. She bought a derelict plantation and

began buying slaves. Now, this is a very strange thing for a radical abolitionists to do, but she intended to found a utopian community with her slaves, with the goal of making enough profit on the plantation to send them to African colonies. Now this is a gradualist approach. This is not a radical abolitionist approach. It's a gradualist approach. What's radical is the other things that Francis Right attempted

to do with this experiment. Like Robert Owen, Francis Wright was also a radical atheist, so she attempted to get the slaves to stop practicing religion, to stop believing in Jesus. So, these slaves had been in the United States for a few generations for the most part. There are exceptions we're talking about this period of history, but most American slaves were born into slavery. Most American slaves were not brought

to the United States. The number of slaves born in the United States have vastly outnumbers the number of slaves that were brought to the United States in slave transportation in the Middle Passage in the Atlantic, but Francis Wright she attempted to de christianize them. This did not go overwell and it did not seem to take At least Francis Wright did not think her efforts made much impact. Another thing that she did was she preached something that

she became very infamous for on the lecture circuit. She preached free love to her slaves. She attempted to abolish marriage. Now evidently she had more success along these lines, but her success destroyed whatever organization she had at this experiment. The slaves all began fighting amongst themselves, and order in cohesion totally broke down at the Nashova experiment and the

whole thing had to be dissolved. She ended up having to sell the slaves again, which was traumatic I think for everyone involved, including Francis Right by the way, I mean she she failed and realized that she became insolvent, which is why she had to turn to the auctioneer. If you advance once you'll see a picture of Francis Wright here. She is. She's lionized by feminists these days, is what I understand.

the other groups that we're talking about here. They do not date back to the second grade Awakening. They're actually much older than that. And we have a lot of illustrious members of this sect. William Penn who founds Pennsylvania for instance. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is founded by the Quakers. The Quakers start out as kind of a Pentecostal sort of sect. They're known to have these really wild religious emotional experiences,

which is why they are called Quakers. They would quake, their bodies would shake in religious ecstasy, which is why they earned that name. They called themselves the Society of Friends. Now, though they started out with this Pentecostal sort of experience, they became quietest over time. So the Quaker's service did not involve any leaders. These people denied all social hierarchy, so there was no leader of the Quakers east in

theory that they had no pastors. In the Quaker meeting, the men and women would separate, as you see here in this illustration. They would separate in the Quaker meeting house, the men on one side, the women on the other, and they would sit down. There was no order of service. There were no prayers, there were no creeds. There was no Bible reading until someone felt motivated to get up

and say something. And sometimes in a meeting and a Quaker meeting, no one would say anything and eventually everyone would go home. They had no symbolism, no art. Quakers do not display the cross, they do not practice baptism, they do not believe in the Trinity. So Quakers, though they are older than these groups, we should see immediately

these are very radical, non traditional Christians at best. I do not think that you could say that anyone who denies the deity of Christ and the Trinity of God can be a Christian.

tends to be uh what comes up in services. But anyway, you were saying.

abide with their family members anymore. They attack public officials and say, you have no right to make rulings on anything, You have no right to judge anything, you have no right to make laws on anything, because everyone is equal, which sounds ought to sound familiar to us. I think that it was Curtis Jarvin who claims that Quakerism is the official religion of the United States. And I have always loved that remark. That has always struck me as

true somehow, because they do just as you say. They talk about the light that leads every believer to his own vision of goodness or truth. So it's a very personalized, individualized sort of experience with Quakers. But all that to say, the Shakers, they split from the Quakers. The Shakers are founded by a woman that calls herself Mother Ann Lee. Now she is another Britisher, like like William Penn. She comes to America from England, and she's a She is

a curious figure. Evidently she had a very terrible marriage and was something of a mystic and a strange person, like a a non traditional sort of woman, r wife and eventually gets rid of her husband. She separates from her husband after having several several children that die very early, so she she experiences pregnancy and birth her children die.

This seems very traumatic for her, and she has visions and mystical experiences, and she begins teaching in the Quaker meetinghouse where women are allowed to get up and speak, where women preach. This is something the Quakers are very

famous for. Us is a very controversial thing, and Mother Anne Lee proclaims to her followers that Christ has already come back, that Christ has returned to Earth, that the Kingdom of Heaven is now and that no one is to be married anymore, and no one is to own anything anymore, and that they are going to live a

serene life with no evil. And she also teaches as opposed to the quietest mode of the Quakers, where they just sit in silence, she teaches ritual dancing, so the Shakers people that join this sect are known to dance ritually together. Now this becomes very popular during the Second

Grade Awakening. Mother ann Lee lives well before the Second Greade Awakening and dies here in America, but the Shakers sect only finds an audience during the Second Great Awakening, and it becomes a popular commune and unlike the other communes like the Owenites in the Nashoba community and the full lengths that are set up here and there. The Shakers actually make a go at this. It seems to be a successful experiment, at least to all these people live.

This is an example of a Shaker village. You may have encountered Shaker style furniture that comes from the Shakers. They invented that style. Here's a Shaker workshop. You can see that they have very minimalist sort of approach, which corresponds to their Quaker heritage, which is very minimalist. You can see that the chairs on the walls here. These communities are now empty because the Shakers all forswore marriage to join these communes. They did not marry, they did

not have children. Their only way to keep their sect going was to recruit from the outside, and after a certain point no one was interested in joining anymore. They basically lived a monastic existence. You can see they did have really remarkable craftsmanship and grace in the things that they built. Another another funny little point about the Shakers. They were the first people to be granted a conscientious

objector status. When Lincoln was looking for soldiers for his war, he did not try recruiting amongst the Quakers who were all pacifists, strict pacifists, and refused to fight. And this is the origin of the conscientious objector status in the United States military.

among the radicals. He is a very vocal abolitionist in Boston, and he's friends with William Lloyd Garrison, who spends the rest of his life doing this kind of agitation. But Noise decides to return to Vermont. He studies theology in college, and when he goes back to Vermont, he starts publishing a newspaper. Now, it's it's really strange. People people in this day read huge amounts of material, even compared to

our set. I'm just I'm just dumbfounded at the number of newspapers and the fact that that people could write so much as to publish a newspaper just blows my mind. But he publishes a newspaper and and kind of lives on the income for a while, which is also just stupendous. Like there are people wanting to buy his writing, like everyone wants to buy reading material everywhere, even even crackpot

reading material like like from John Humphrey Noise. He becomes known as a perfectionist and preaches the novel doctrine that Christians can do no evil, rather like the Shakers. John Humphrey Noyes also believes that the Kingdom of God is now, we aren't anticipating it, it is right now, and that true Christians commit no sin at all, hence his his uh, his moniker perfectionism. Now he has two close friends, a young couple and and a third man, I believe, I

believe this is how the story goes. So, so he has like two other men and one one married woman in his set who is married to one of these men. The woman ends up having an affair with the single man in his little sect. Now at this point, he has a church of of four okay, so he has a very very small group, but he's still publishing this newspaper of publicizing his ideas. John Humphrey Noise says, well,

no one here has done anything wrong. We are all members of this perfect church, and this is not adultery. But he also realizes this presents a unique problem, so he formulates a new doctrine called complex marriage. Now, obviously, the woman's husband is not okay with his wife having this affair. She assures him that everything is fine because she's a perfect Christian and he should not feel so bad about this that he might be in sin for feeling bad about this. John Humphrey Noise sides with her

and says, you should not feel any jealousy. That is evil to feel jealousy. Christians should not feel jealousy anymore. And so he comes up with his doctrine of complex marriage. In the perfectionist Church of John Humphrey Noise. All adult men are married to all adult women. Now that doesn't mean that they just swap partners every night. No, John

Humphrey Noise must choose all the couplings. So John Humphrey Noise ends up coming up with a complex system of eugenics to purify the breed in his church, so dysgenic members, ugly people, unattractive people, less intelligent people do not get to procreate. John Humphrey Noyes preaches his position of complex marriage along with a h a teaching of male continents which we need not elaborate on. Basically, the men needed permission to UH participate in a an act that could

be pro creative. And once once he had had formulated this this uh eugenics philosophy. John Humphrey Noise was was known to be a very popular amongst the new female recruits. Yes, so this is this is a very strange story because he he had a certain kind of popularity. They were chased out of Vermont when it became public that his group was engaged in wife swapping. Basically, he was chased out of Vermont with threats of violence. He went to the town of Oneida, New York, which I think is

in the Hudson River Valley. I think it is. I think it's near Syracuse if I'm not mistaken. Anyway, they bought land and of one of his new recruits to his church was the owner of a small industrial concern. So the whole community, his church community, built a manor house to live in. They all lived in the same house. Again this idea of the future of humanity in a

humanist socialist harmony. Everyone lived in giant apartment buildings together, renovating the sexual mores, renovating their vision of private property, or doing away with their vision of private property. They they found prosperity in this industrial concern. They actually made a fortune selling, manufacturing and selling animal traps, so like beaver traps and things like that. That was their original thing. But they but they got to they got to manufacturing

flat wear and dishes. Eventually, if you advanced the slide, this is a photograph of the Oneida community. So Oneida is still known as a as a manufacturer of flatwear and such. But this cult did not survive the death of John Humphrey Noise. After his death, people kind of they took the stock in this corporation that they were a part of. They took dividends from it, but they stopped,

they stopped practicing this religion. Interestingly, John Humphrey Nois's own son called himself an atheist and grew up in this community and was not ostracized for his about atheism. But by the time he was more or less left in charge of the thing, he dissolved it. The religious component did not survive the generation, but the corporation survived the religion, which is also curious. Shall I go to the next one? Cored ahead, we find a bunch of radical vegetarian evangelists

during this time, which I'm very amused with. One of the most famous is doctor Sylvester Graham. Doctor Graham was interested in two things that he made a great deal of during his life. Firstly, he preached far and wide on the dangers of masturbation, so that was that was one of his first pet peeves. The second was he

believed that all of all human cuisines were wrong. Everyone in the world was eating wrong, and if people would simply adopt a pure grain based vegetarian diet, then we could eliminate a substantial amount of evil from the world. So doctor Graham was something of a granola fanatic, and that's that's actually where granola comes from. It It comes from vegetarian evangelist preachers who combined religious fervor and the Gospel with their dietary ideas. Something all Americans should should

recognize as commonplace. This is a very American phenomenon to to pick up radical new diets as a pseudo religious fad. It's a very American thing to do. We we live in it and and we don't necessarily realize that's that's kind of strange, but it strikes other people from other parts of the world as strange. And I enjoy seeing that as strange. I want to think I've come out of that. I don't live in that world. But doctor Graham, he founded the American Vegetarian Society. He preached against the

use of coffee, tea, tobacco, and milk. It's very interesting, and he popularized the use of a very special flour made of whole grain for his followers. And what's very interesting is doctor Graham's special diet did not survive, but his special flower survived. The Graham Cracker is an American thing that came out of this movement, and of course none of us eat Graham crackers, thinking of the weird religious sect that spawned it. But nevertheless it did come

from doctor Graham. You may continue, all right, the Miller writes, this is another fun group. William Miller was a Baptist pastor. He published tracts like you see here popularized these things. William Miller, after long study of the Bible, decided that he knew the day and the hour that Christ would return. So he said the end of the world would take place in eighteen forty three. I believe, taking thirty three according to your sides. But oh, maybe I get Maybe I got that.

of the new Heaven and the new Earth. So this was known as the Great Disappointment, ironically by detractors who came up with this term for this day. Millerites mostly in New York, which is where this movement was most popular. New York, Ohio, Vermont, Massachusetts. It kind of spans that area. They sold all that they had. They were preaching to their neighbors to repair, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand. You know, they're they're using lots of biblical injunctions.

They go up onto hilltops and nothing happens, and they're disbelieving. Neighbors mock them for it. Now, surprisingly this is not the end of the Miller Rights. William Miller says, oh, well, I got it wrong by a year, and some some go up to the hilltop the next year, but again nothing happens. They do not see the judgment of humanity, and once again they are disgraced. But rather than disband this movement, Miller's followers develop something new and something lasting.

They develop a denomination, if you will, that is still with us today, the Seventh Day Adventists. Now William Miller does not come up with with many of the peculiar teachings of this group. It is his followers who come up with many of these peculiar teachings. In particular, another woman mystic. There are a number of female mystics that

are involved with in the foundation of these groups. And I forget this woman's name, but she sees a vision of the Ten Commandments, and it's based on this vision that the Seventh day Adventists worship on Saturday instead of Sunday.

vegetarianism rather than attempt to find kosher prepared foods. But because they are so invested in a special practice of food, the Seventh day Adventists started food companies. So doctor Kellogg of Battle Creek, Michigan, a follower of doctor Graham up in Connecticut. Doctor Kellogg becomes a Seventh Day Adventist and invents the cornflake. Now, doctor Kellogg is also following some

Grammite ideas. In addition to being a Seventh Day Adventist, doctor Kellogg is also a vegan like doctor Graham was. So doctor Kellogg invinced the corn flake as a breakfast cereal. He imagines and teaches. Now, this is not what Seventh Day Adventists claim, but this this has more in common with what doctor Graham claimed. But Kellogg believes if he can change the American diet to make it vegetarian one day, one meal a day, that he could mathematically reduce the

amount of evil in the world by one third. So he popularized his corn flakes. And this is one of the reasons why Americans have two visions of breakfast food. We have the cereal thanks to doctor Kellogg, the cereal breakfast. Now, Doctor Kellogg, being a vegan, would not suggest milk with this. He wanted people to eat it with water. But Americans have more taste than that, and so we eat the cereal with milk, of course, But that that was doctor

Kellogg's idea. Another another famous Seventh Day Adventist food maker is the founders of Little Debbie Cakes, which are made according to Jewish ceremonial law. Strangely enough, because their Seventh Day Adventists, I think I think the writers of the epistles would call them judaizers. Are ready to go into the next one, Yes, go right ahead right. Another another unusual group here is the Christian Scientists, founded by Mary Baker Eddie, who was from New Hampshire. Mary Baker Eddie

started a franchise of health spas. These are these are what is the word I'm looking for? They're kind of like resorts asylums. An asylum might be the word I'm looking for. It doesn't sound quite right. Anyway, There we go. A sanitarium. Sorry for that, my brain just just stopped working. Sanitarium sorts of organizations where people would go for rest cures. She was a student of innovative interpretations of the Bible.

She ends up writing this book Science and Health. Now, if you look carefully at this, you can see she wrote the book before she was married. The name on the book is Glover. She was Mary Baker Glover Eddie, so she became She married mister Eddie and took the name Eddie. But she wrote this book Science and Health as a key to the Scriptures. Mary Baker Eddie is what we would call a gnostic. She believed that the physical world was an illusion. We do not have bodies.

According to miss Eddie, the physical world does not exist. Therefore, if you have an ailment in your body, you need to believe that your body is not real, that you were actually a healthy Christian soul. Now, to be a Christian in missus Eddie's formulation means to deny the incarnation of our Lord. She did not believe that Christ had a body either. Okay, so this is not traditional Christianity at all. This is gnosticism. This is something that was

condemned in the first century by the Apostolic fathers. The denial of the incarnation is one of the earliest Christian heresies. But Mary Baker Eddie was a gnostic. She denied the incarnation, and she said that all cures were based in faith. So you just had to believe properly and you would feel no pain and presumably experienced no evil. If you advance and take a look at Christian Science reading rooms. This is what they call the mother Church. This is

the largest of the Christian science reading rooms. It's in Boston, Massachusetts, which is where it is based. This had its day. I think they do not publicize the numbers of their members, but it really does seem to be in sharp decline at this point. Lots of Christian science reading rooms have closed and been converted into into Christian churches usually. But one thing that you note here is the lack of symbolism,

the centrality of a podium for a speaker. This is a very intellectual experience and that is something that you can recognize about the Christian scientists found it as they were in New England. They correspond to the Puritan tradition of religion as an intellectual exercise, minimizing the importance of sacraments, say which Puritans were. Puritans were very very focused on the on the sermon, all right?

and it's such a unique story. It does, it does merit some in depth uh, in depth storytelling here Mormon. The Mormon church is called Mormons by outsiders. The adherence to this church call it the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints. It is founded by the the LDS prophet founder Joseph Smith of Vermont, another New Englander. We see. Joseph Smith starts out a very interesting career. He's very interested in deavening rods, so he has magical

sticks that he uses to find things buried in the ground. Now, this is this is a very interesting practice. I don't know the origins of it. This is presumably something very old. I had a relation that used devening rods to find oil and gas down here in Louisiana. And he was one of my favorite relatives. I really love this guy. He was He was a real character. I love my uncle Joe. He tried getting in touch with me right before he died, and I still I still regret that

I didn't reconnect with him. I didn't know that he was about to die, obviously, but I loved that guy. But anyway, there are other people that do stuff with devening rods. But Joseph Smith had a reputation for looking for buried treasure. He lived in what is called the Burned Over District. Now this is this area of intense reformist activity during the Second Great Awakening. You have lots of abolitionist radicals that are starting churches in the name

of abolitionist politics. You have Miller Rights, you have utopian communes, and all sorts of curious things going on. Joseph Smith writes a very interesting introduction to the Book of Mormon, which is worth your time. I take this man seriously, and I don't know what's going on with him. I am not a Mormon, and I'm not sympathetic to Mormon theology.

I categorically reject it. But that does not mean that I think Joseph Smith was a liar, and I would beg I beg your indulgence on the seeming paradox of that. I happen to believe people can have mystical experiences and that not not all mystical experiences come from God. Okay, they can come from lying spirit spirits too, which is why Christians are commanded to test the spirits and uh not go find found their own religions and such. Christians

aren't allowed to do that. But Joseph Smith writes about growing up in western New York State and going to revival meetings, and he writes very sincerely about this that it made him very confused, and it made his neighbors

very confused. Smith says that after years of Revivalist meetings and the foundations of various churches that claim different doctrines in different practices, he was left thinking that religion was discredited, that religion was not something for serious people, that Christianity was a confused mess. And this is I think a good a good capstone to our investigation here, because what are the results of these things. I think it does discredit faith. I think it does discredit faithful people. It

does discredit religious tradition as such. Even though it is a modernist thing, it's built in a rejection of tradition. We might say that that's another critique, that it's not actually traditional at all, But Justice Smith's observation is I think very sincere and important in these circumstances. Joseph Smith says that he received a vision of God eventually. I think. I think at first it is an angel named Moroni who speaks to him, and then God the Father and

God the Son speak to him. Now, in the the Mormon understanding, there is no trinity. These people do not believe in the trinity of God. They believe that Jesus is the literal son of God the Father through a female who is spiritual. I believe not. It is not that they aren't talking about the Virgin Mary in this context. Is something else anyway? This is this is a Mormon artwork of the young Joseph's Smith conversing with God the

Father and God the Son. He receives in these visions instruction that the Church, the Christian Church, has gone wrong ever since the time of the Apostles, so all of Western Christianity is wrong. That the church ceased to exist. The Church of Christ founded at Pentecost ceased to exist. According to the Mormons, this means that the Catholics, the Orthodox, the Lutherans, the Baptists. They're all wrong. None of them understand the Bible correctly. None of them are practicing the

religion of Christ. And Joseph Smith is appointed to restore the Church of Christ in America, and he's to do this with a particular American source. So the angel Moroney leads Joseph Smith to a hilltop in Vermont, in southern Vermont, where is buried golden plates inscribed with something Joseph Smith describes as reformed Egyptian hieroglyphics. That this is the site in southern Vermont. This is the hill where the Mormons have built a monument to commemorate the finding of the

Book of Mormon by Joseph Smith. Now this is a very interesting document, or it pretends to be a historical ancient document. Joseph Smith said that this was the record of Jews who had crossed the Atlantic Ocean before Christ and had established a pre Columbian continental civilization in what is now the United States, and had been utterly exterminated to a man by the people who are now Native Americans. So there were no Jews left in America by the

time Columbus and the Anglo colonists arrive. All right, he's not and he's not saying that Native Americans are Jews. Though Native Americans have always had a the Mormons have always been very interested in Native Americans for this reason. The Book of Mormon is the record of the last Mormon, or the last Jewish patriarch, whose name is Mormon. He writes the story of his people and buries it. Now what makes this part of particular importance. Not only are

these Jewish people, but Christ visited them. The Mormons believe Christ had a ministry in Palestine and that Christ had a ministry in America to his Jewish tribes here in what is now the United States. So Christ had two ministries on earth, according to the Mormons. And that's why they call the Book of Mormon another gospel of Jesus Christ. They claim it is a lost gospel if you advance. So with the Book of Mormon, which is inscribed on

gold plates. So this is like a book with metal pages. Okay, here is here is an artistic portrayal of what Mormons think it looked like. All right, he finds as well the Urim and the I'm gonna get this wrong. I'm remembering it, but don't I don't know the word the urim and the theream. These are biblical artifacts. So the Old Testament mentions the priesthood of Israel having stones that they use in a kind of ritual. They can use these stones to detect the guilt or innocence of someone

accused of a crime, for instance. This is all in the Mosaic Law. So this is in the Old Testament. Joseph Smith claims that he recovered those stones the Book of Mormon on the hilltop in Vermont. He also claims that he found a breastplate that the stones are attached to. Now, I like this portrayal right here. Joseph Smith did not give us an illustration of these things, not to my knowledge anyway. I'm not aware of that for sure, but

I don't think he did. I think this right here, this is a modern Mormon artistic expression of what they believe Joseph Smith found with the Book of Mormon. What this is magical magical eyeglasses that translate the reformed Egyptian hieroglyphics in the metal plates that he found. The Mormons say Joseph Smith translated the book that they call the Book of Mormon. In this manner, he publishes this book

in I think he translates it in northern Pennsylvania. He publishes it in western New York as another Gospel of Jesus Christ and starts a new church, a rest a restorationist cult if you will, cult, meaning a following with this movement and in his adherents. He moves westward. First he goes to northern Ohio, a place settled mostly with New Englanders, the same area where you find Oberlin College. Actually this is this is an area that's that's very

important in the second grade Awakening. But he keeps getting chased away because this is this is a very radical preaching or teaching that he has. He goes to Missouri. He claims that independence Missouri, which is right beside Kansas City, is going to be a capital in some spiritual sense for America, but is unable to stay in Missouri. He

faces major backlash and persecution from the Missourians. There are a lot of stories of these Mormon missionaries, uh, these Mormon evangelists getting very hostile receptions in these frontier communities. But Joseph Smith ends up in a town called navu Illinois. Now he founds this town. He names it Nauvoo in a U v o O. And it is on the Mississippi River. And it's it's kind of at the at the corner of Missouri Iowa in Illinois. So it's it's

rather near Hannibal, Missouri. And is it Moline, Illinois up that way, it's it's rather Quincy, Illinois. Quincy, Illinois is one of those towns. It's on the Mississippi River. They build a town there. They build a temple there. I think this is their second temple. And Joseph Smith proclaims two very interesting things. First, he says that God wants all Mormon men to practice polygamy. And Joseph Smith, according to some accounts, there is controversy on this point and

that and this is a very interesting controversy. I don't we know what it's about. That there's controversy about how many wives Joseph Smith ended up taking. On one group of Mormons. Those that follow the son of Joseph Smith deny that he ever claimed a teaching of polygamy and that he ever married anyone but his first wife, which is a really wild claim of the Mormons in Utah, which are the predominant Mormon sect. They're overwhelmingly the largest

Mormon sect. They claim that Joseph Smith married dozens of women, and this is this is a really peculiar story. How did he manage to do this? He did this mostly in secret, but the teaching of the Mormons and their practice of polygamy becomes known. The second thing that he does is he runs for president of the United States. Mormons believe that the United States of America is a providential organization that is put together and contains divine intent.

That America is literally a nation chosen by God to work God's will on earth. The Mormons believe that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States are divinely inspired. And this is a very important thing. This, This has gone to serve Mormons very well in modern times. I understand Mormons are great favorites of the FBI and the CIA. They like to recruit among them because they believe that they are serving God by serving the United

States government in some way. Anyway, Joseph Smith, while he's running for president, he is lynched in Illinois. So Joseph Smith he forms a militia in Nauvoo that destroys the press of a paper criticizing Joseph Smith and the Mormons, rather than run from the warrant issued to him for doing this. The charge is treason against the state of Illinois. Because he has formed a militia and commanded a military formation to carry out an act of violence in the

state of Illinois. That's treason against the state of Illinois. He is usurping the role of the governor, who has the sole authority to command military forces in Illinois. So Joseph Smith decides to turn himself in to the authorities. He goes to the local magistrate who has a jail building, and a lynch mob shows up. Joseph Smith is there with his brother, Hiram Smith, who is one of his key lieutenants. He does everything with Hiram, and the lynch

mob attacks the jail. Joseph Smith and Hiram are both armed, so this is a very interesting thing. They aren't locked in a cell here. The magistrate knows that a mob is out for blood and he's actually trying to protect them, and Joseph Smith and Hiram Smith fight the mob through a and in the process, both of them are shot. I believe Hiram is shot in the face and Joseph Smith is shot elsewhere on his body. Joseph Smith then jumps out the window where he is shot several more

times and succumbs. So this this year is a Mormon monument by the jail where the lynching took place. And this is a statue of Joseph and Hiram Smith. Now this is something as as a history guy in twenty twenty three, I have a certain appreciation for the Mormons for getting behind their own people. Mormons have repudiated their doctrine of polygamy, though they do not deny that Joseph Smith and Brigham Young were politeimists and their forefathers were polygamists.

They don't deny it, but they don't practice it anymore. But that doesn't mean that they don't like these people. And and they're they're controversial people that do things that that Americans traditionally found distasteful and dreadful and wicked. And yet Mormons do not back down, and they like their own people. And I like that, and I wish that other Americans had more of that themselves. I think that's a healthy attitude in spite of all the weird and

untrue things Mormons believe. I really appreciate this about them. So, after the death of Joseph Smith, Brigham Young becomes the leader of the Mormons. Young is he presides over a kind of church split at the death of Joseph Smith. Young is one of Smith's lieutenants, and Young decides to abandon Nauvoo, Illinois, the town that the Mormons built. At one time, it was one of the largest cities on the Mississippi River. It was like it wasn't as big

as Chicago. It never was as big as Chicago, but at one point it was like the second largest city in Illinois, is what I want to say. Young decides to abandon this. He decides to send a lot of missionaries to England, where they recruit lots of new conferts, and he decides to move westward to the Great Desert beyond the mountains. And so Young travels to what is now Utah and founds Salt Lake City, Utah, as the new center of the Mormon people. They're going to get

far away from these hostile Protestants back east. This is a really remarkable story because they go to Utah, which is a very very forbidding landscape. Young says, this is the place which I think is like the slogan of Utah today. And they build Salt Lake City, and this is a very urban environment, which is also very curious. Utah is the most heavily urbanized state in the United States today. Young brings his English converts all the way from England, all the way out there to the desert.

They transport their belongings in things like wheelbarrows. They don't even have wagons for this trek. They walk all the way to Utah. Young Mary's dozens of women. This is his house complex. They have several names. One is called the Beehive House, one is called the Lion House. Now something interesting about Young. He was married when he converted to Mormonism and became an apostle of Joseph Smith. That's his official title. By the way, they have the Council

of the Twelve Apostles. These are restored Apostolic chairs. Catholic and Orthodox listeners would immediately hone in on that and go, oh okay, the Apostolic seats seats to exist. They're all vacant, and Joseph Smith filled them, he restored them. There's there's a there's a certain recognition that we have there. Anyway, his first wife always had predominance. Uh Young's first wife had her very own house, and all the other other

wives lived in other houses. One of these houses is rather like a dormitory, okay, where every wife has her own little living area, her own little apartment that she lives in. But Young's first wife was always the head wife. So there's there's a certain similarity there to the complex marriages in the Kingdom of Siam, or in a in a chikh's hareem or something, or or in the co leif's boudoir or whatever. Wherever the Muslims and Pagans keep their wives, there is a head wife. There's a wife

with predominance, and the Mormons adopted that practice too. Polygamy has worked, and it has worked in America in the sense that it was part of a successful social construction, a new society, a new community in which polygamy was at the top and widespread within. It's a very strange story. Eventually, of course, we know that the Mormons do give up that teaching, and we might call them orthodox Mormons today do not practice polygamy. It is fundamentalist sectarians in Mormonism

that practice polygamy. Today in America and elsewhere, there are or there are oddball Mormon polygamists. The Mormons build temples around Utah. These are two examples. On the right, you see the main temple in Salt Lake City that was built by Young. On the left you see a smaller temple in Saint George, Utah. These are unusual constructions. There are American art students that specialize in the oddity of this architecture. Just where does this architecture come from? This

is a curious thing. The Mormons do not always meet in temples. There are a limited number of Mormon temples, and certain Mormon rights in rituals can only be performed in a temple, So Mormons make pilgrimages, if you will, to regional temples. Unsurprisingly, most of these temples are in Utah, but there are temples spread around the world at this point. Yeah.

an Old Testament image. This is something that's copied from what we see for the designs of the temple in Jerusalem, or or is it the tabernacle? Is the design for the Tabernacle? There is a great basin that is described in the Old Testament? Is it the bronze see? Is that what these the bronze basin?

a baptismal font for them. Mormons practice the baptism of the dead, so they believe that through proxy baptism of Mormon the Mormon faithful, Mormon faithful being baptized in the names of people who are dead, can restore those people spiritually and make them members of the Mormon Church. And for this reason, Mormons have a the most amazing knowledge of genealogy, perhaps anyone has ever accomplished in all of history.

They've devoted great recent sources to this because this is a religious tenant for them, and they're interested in saying the names of every person who has ever lived in proxy baptisms and in keeping these names. So they've built doomsday vaults to store the names of baptized Mormons, presumably the vast majority of whom are long dead and they've

been baptized in a proxy baptism. So Mormons have people converted to Mormonism will try to find the names of all of their ancestors in order to participate in proxy baptisms for all of their forebears. I've described all of this as restorationism of the idea that the Church founded by Christ and the apostles ceased to exist at some point in history and must be refounded. So that's what this is all based. In one last Mormon story, and we will conclude on his way out west, Brigham Young

had several church splits along the way. There was a lot of dissatisfaction with Young's leadership, and the most amusing of these stories, at least to me, is that of James Strang. James Strang was a follower of Joseph Smith, a disciple of Young, who left Young on their movement westward. And interestingly, Strang denied that Joseph Smith was a polygamist.

He said that Young by making Smith's teaching public, which is what Young claimed to have done, Strang said that he was departing from this teaching of Joseph Smith, and so Strang claimed to represent the true teaching of Joseph Smith and led a faction away from Young. They went to Beaver Island, Michigan, in the middle of Lake Michigan, this is an island in the north of Lake Michigan, so it's near it's near Wisconsin, I suppose, and started

his own utopian commune on Beaver Island. He claimed he was king. He was crowned on Beaver Island by his followers. He then proclaimed polygamy. Now this is very amusing because he split from Young because Strang said polygamy was not a true Mormon teaching in practice. But when he became the leader of his own group, he claimed he proclaimed a teaching of polygamy. He claimed that he found his own golden plates and he published them, and he was

elected to the state Legislature of Michigan. It's just, oh, very delightful. It is the only self proclaimed self proclaimed king to ever sit in the Michigan State Legislature. Maybe so it's the only one I know of in America. But I yes, yes, I think this is so delightful because he would he would serve as an elected representative. He had some accomplishments in organizing regional governmental authority in Michigan. His goal seems to be the autonomy of Beaver Island

in the state of Michigan. That seems to be his practical purpose, but he ended up doing a lot to organize county government, I believe in Michigan, and he's still known for that in Michigan, which is delightful. I don't I don't know much about Michigan, but maybe maybe this guy deserves to be on a future currency of the state of Michigan, or needs some statues in Michigan or something like that. But his story has has a shocking end.

Being isolated out on this island, mister Strang King Strang would get on ships very frequently and this was a place where his enemies knew that they could find him. So he would go back and forth from the island to the mainland, and one day his enemies jumped him. Now these were members of his church who assassinated him, and very strangely, they were never prosecuted for the crime.

There were dozens of witnesses that saw them jump out and shoot James Strang while he was walking down the gang plank to the ship in the harbor at Beaver Island, so there was no shortage of witnesses. But the assailants were brought to the mainland by a navy cutter that was in port at the time. So the navy brought these people to the magistrate. The magistrate released them on a trivial bail, and the community on the mainland then through them a celebratory dinner and they never faced charges

for the murder of James Strang. That's hilarious.

at all, and say, well, this is an example. You know, sometimes people just really want to kill and they take the lawn to their own hands. And this happens many times in American history, right, right, So I think we have one more slide.

efforts when the goal has been lost. The goal has been forgotten, so a fanatic ends up working against his own goals by increasing the enthusiasm with which he pursues them. We see this in American politics. We certainly see it in the run up right before the Civil War, with people like John Brown the Terrorist. We see like religious ideas about a barent sexual behavior, like novel religious sanctions for a baran sexual behavior, which is certainly still with us.

Anytime we hear, you know, transsexualism as holy or something like that, were our ears should perk up. This is something that has been part of American religious rhetoric for a long time. We didn't focus so much about this in our presentation today, but there is a lot of interest in race and racial relations in many of these movements, especially the humanist communes. We see that in particular with people like the Shakers who want racial harmony. This is

one of the things that they preach. They teach the Quakers and Shakers both talk about the universal brotherhood of man, and that's something that they elevate highly in their religious rhetoric. Again making me think that the way that those ideas have gone so mainstream as to be counted as as doctrine and indisputable by otherwise Orthodox Christians, small Orthodox Christians in America today shows just how far those Quaker and

Shaker ideas have gone in our religious beliefs. In America or in the West, there's a lot of interest in economic inequality and trying to rectify that with Christian socialism, as Finny's critics termed it most disturbingly, a obviously a willingness to abandon all manner of orthodox dogma and practice

for temporal political goals. Finally, I want to reiterate, these radical religious innovations were almost exclusively confined to the North, to the point that Southern writers on religion and politics, people like the Presbyterian R. L. Dabney, who ended his life teaching at Hampton Sydney College in Armville, Virginia. R. L. Dabney said that this was a This was all examples of the Northern religious tradition. This was where Northern religious

belief led inexorably. And uh he he roundly damned it and cursed it frequently. He's he's very colorful in that. Other Southern theologians, uh, James Henley Thornwell, other interesting writers. Uh. Defenders of Southern institutions, uh, defenders of Southern politics, uh. Defenders of the institution of slavery, people like George Fitzhugh also had a lot to say about this. They were saying, well, these Northerners are are doing all sorts of crazy things.

Are saying that it's evil to eat meat. They're saying that everyone should live in an urban apartment house as like a religious tenant. This is impossible in the imagination of Southerners at this time in history, where practically no one lives in a city. But they aren't centralized, they're spread out. They don't want to participate in an industrial economy, and they're very suspicious of charismatic personalities starting innovative cult movements.

Southerners at this point in history do not go in on that. Now. Much has changed since then, and I think the South has become much more Americanized since then. But this is the American scene just at the cusp of the Civil War. And I do think it has a lot to do with how the war, how the war develops, Where does the war come from? Art it is religious differences? Well, well again, right.

And so I know Massachusetts and Georgia, for instance, both of them had established churches after the ratification of the Constitution. That is federalism. That's what Americans meant back when they adopted the Constitution by a federal government, that the states could be different from each other. They could have different economies, they could have different populations. Right, tiny little Delaware has two senators and so does mighty huge New York. They're

equal in the Senate. States are different from each other in size, different in population, but the same in some federal way, equal representation. In some way. They could have been different from each other, they could have developed differently, but at some point they became more alike. In this upset people on both sides. Northern Ners wanted. They wanted common values on things like slavery. They eventually coalesced about that and said we want to abolish slavery, and they

didn't want to allow for diversity on that opinion. It's not something that one can compromise on. You either have slavery or you don't. There's no middle way. The Republican Party initially ran against what they said in their platform, those two relics of barbarism, slavery and polygamy. They actually ran against Mormon polygamy. They wanted to outlaw Mormon polygamy as well as slavery. They weren't going to let the Mormons be different out in Utah. The Mormons had to

be made the same. This is what Lincoln said. He said that this country cannot remain half slave and half free. It must become all one thing or all the other. And that's a nationalist sort of idea. And Southerners, or at least Southern jurists, were responsible for the dread Scott decision, which Northerners feared would destroy all prohibitions on slavery in

the North. The dread Scott decision destroyed the Missouri Compromise, which divided the sections into slaveholding and non slaveholding states, and that was kind of a broken compromise in a broken protection that the Northerners thought was was protecting them from the expansion of slavery. So in one sense, you could say both both Southerners and Northerners had gotten to a point where they were uncomfortable in a union that

would have those things in common. They became points on which no one was comfortable and agreeing to permit those things.

but Shakers do not equal Quakers. Yes, I think we covered that. He was probably just a little bit ahead of a there, and then a little bit later he said, it's true what they said progressives were born as a Puritan cult. Yeah, it's interesting.

can find it anywhere. But he goes into quite he goes into a lot of depth from his perspective on why he used progressivism. It's essentially like a Protestant heresy. But I think that's pretty much you know, foundational reading for our spheres. And then Machiavelli sucks to go just donated and said good show, thank you, I'm glad you enjoyed it. And then this is I think crnch Walker lu Templar again talking about you know, when we were

talking about the Mormons. A little known, but there is some mention of ruins with supposed Hebrew inscription from the seventeen hundreds. Smith wasn't the first one to claim finding strange artifacts in that area.

pre Colombian civilizations. And it's interesting that much like kind of you know, Evangelical Protestants have kind of like crowd funded their own movies, there's like a subgenre of essentially like Mormon fiction movies, you know, and then none of them are particularly good, but they are they are out there, and it's interesting because I obviously just didn't. There aren't

very many Mormons in the American South, you know. I think it was famously was it Arkansas or Oklahoma where it was technically still legal to kill Mormons until the seventies.

about about modern religious sensibilities. I'm trying to remember just what it was, but I think so.

neither here nor there. So that he has at least several essays by Orson Scott Card on his channel.

is it, and believe them confidently? Yes, actually actually live their lives, going against the flow and having a having a heritage that is despised and mocked, and yet holding their heads up high. I admire that that is manly, That is good, and it it takes that sort of behavior to survive what we undergo today. We need to cultivate those virtues in our And I'm I'm a member

of very small, an obscure group in America. There are very many Eastern Orthodox Christians in America, but I I have something to learn from these groups who are who are also you know, dismissed or discarded.

own traditional thing, whatever that is. I don't claim to know what it is. But well, right, why should they be like everybody else? Why should Why should Brigham Young University be like any state university. It shouldn't. And it's tragic that it's not. They should do Brigham Young stuff whatever that is.

I don't agree with Mormon theology at all. You know, We've said that, But I'm beginning to think that the reason they're so despised has absolutely nothing to do with theology and has a whole lot to do with the fact that they're not progressive clients.

am very interested in Baptist groups. I was actually talking this afternoon about Baptist groups, and I would like to do more more reading on the subject. There seem to be two interesting camps in the Baptists. There's Landmarkers. Landmarkers believe that all of Christian history, as as known by every every one else in Christianity, is more or less

a conspiracy to libel Baptist groups. So landmark Baptists say that the the Gnostics, the Albigensians, the Cathars, the Nestorians, the Aryans were all Baptists and they were being libeled and accused of complete falsehoods by the official Church, and that Baptists are actually the Apostolic Church in hiding through all of the history. Now, they don't actually have any

documents for this at all. It is basically a conspiratorial view that the Baptists are the Apostolic Church, and you have to give them courage for making that argument, at least. I mean, they believe apostol roots are absolutely necessary for legitimacy, and so do I. So I give them that.

want to take their position seriously. But outside of a few very short tracks with no footnotes, I can't get much information about their beliefs and where they came from. So I really want to get more information about them, and I need a big library to do that. I guess.

I have a and I won't say his name until I confirm him on the show, but a mutual friend of ours, Bagbee, who's an expert on both Southern American history and also Southern Christian American history, and I've been trying to get him on to talk about the history of Presbyterianism across the across the US, which is also quite interesting because a lot of this, you know, it is on one hand, people always say like, oh, like you know, Broadest in particular are always fracturing, which is

partially true. But there are kind of four main traditions, uh, and these these branches much like you and they're not completely correlated with the you know, with the four or five groups from a from Albion seed that they're quite close, and so the history of these groups can kind of provide a second level of information when you look at American history.

correspondence with one another. What people believe about God and the nature of man and the story of evil and redemption has an awful lot to do with what they will believe about politics and what should go on as

far as justice. And if we remember the map that we looked at with the Second Great Awakening where the reformist activity took place and where it's spread, you would notice the area that was highlighted on this app goes from Massachusetts across western New York, across practically all of Ohio, and into Indiana in part. And this area was almost

entirely settled by people from New England. And though we've talked about the influence of Quakers and kind of their outsides, their outsized role in American religion and thought and posture, we see the Second Great Awakening has an awful lot to do with that Puritan heritage. I like to point

out where these people were from. In my overview, we have lots of New Englanders and then people from Western New York and Western New York kind of served as the frontier for those isolated, landlocked New England states that cannot expand westward. Those people went into western New York before they went off to places like Ohio. Part of Ohio is actually given to Connecticut so that their children would have a place to go and settle and they didn't have to divide the farms back in tiny little

Connecticut further and further impoverishing future generations. They sent some of their people out west to northern Ohio, so that area had a Puritan culture. And it was the descendants of those people that joined the Mormon Church and went west became Millerites and Seventh day Adventists. These traditions correspond with one another. There is a reason why Southerners did not go off and become Christian scientists, Why Virginia cavaliers were not interested in this utopian city on a hill

project down in Virginia. Did not join these things, did not build communes. It wasn't part of their heritage. They didn't think of religion that way. They had a more traditional Christian mindset, and they knew that the Kingdom of Heaven is not of this world. They did not sign up for utopian projects. They didn't go in for chileasm. And this is the legacy of what we call Bible Belt Christianity in America. It's an older kind of Christian belief.

It's a different kind of Christian belief. Whereas these areas were describing are now the most irreligious areas of the United States. Massachusetts has the lowest level of church attendance in the United States today, and yet it was this hotbed of political or in religious vation in in our history. It's burned out that the area is still a burned over district Sadly, I think religion has a role in our lives, should have a role in our lives. We

we ought to treat these things seriously. It's not just a bunch of made up stuff.

you know, we can have you on again. I know that you're you know, you're working on potentially you know, having a course through the Academic Agency, which you know, I think that will be really really interesting, you know, if it's based off of kind of fear.

It's nothing, nothing very serious. You're organized, but if you want to follow my work, those are places that you can find me for now, and I'll I'll be back on the Ja Burdens Show. I don't know how often, but come back.

prefer to YouTube. It's a better system, it's a better app It is you know, much less advertising, and it's completely you can say whatever you want there, right, and so all my stuff is backed up there. I'm kind of getting a feeling that our days are numbered here and so I'm trying to push people over to the audio show and over to Odyssey, where we have a little bit more lateral freedom, so to speak. And if you guys want to support the show, I don't require it,

but I do appreciate it. You know, there are different ways you can do that. Down in the description, I basically will take anything and again, guys, thank you so much for coming out, and remember keep your head up. The lie can't last forever.