Indicting the Devil: Austin Phelps’s Fight Against Spiritualism

Abstract

This article analyzes the rhetorical strategies of a nineteenth-century American professor of sacred rhetoric, Austin Phelps, in his opposition to the Spiritualist movement. Phelps’s approach encapsulates the most effective arguments used by a class of thinkers who were liberally educated, held great respect for science, and for whom biblical accounts of demonic activity continued to shed valid light upon modern-day phenomena. His booklet Spiritualism: The Argument in Brief (1871) employs elements of legal reasoning, especially a stasis approach—finding the “stopping points” in a judicial case—and apophatic strategy: using definition by negation to convince an audience to accept the rhetor’s definition of a key concept or term. “Counselor” Phelps grounds his arguments and conclusions in common experience, historical consciousness, commonly held religious belief, moral obligation, and professional duty. Far from being an unsophisticated rant about devils, Phelps’s treatment of Spiritualism was a high point of reasoned, classically argued discourse in the special domain of religious rhetoric: the supernatural.