The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume III: The Nineteenth Century

This volume is the first to be published in a five-volume series, two of which are planned to cover the twentieth century. Much of it is concerned with the institutional history of the various traditions, which will probably only interest readers of this Journal insofar as it sheds light on the ways in which those traditions did (or did not) reflect material theological differences between them. Almost inevitably with a multi-authored book of this kind it can be easy for particular issues to slip between the cracks. Three chapters are specifically devoted to theological topics: first, a typically concise and readable analysis by Mark Noll of issues concerning the Bible and scriptural interpretation; secondly, a more general treatment of theology by David Bebbington, which covers the legacy of the Enlightenment, the ways in which it affected Calvinism (primarily in North America, rather than Scotland) and Arminianism (principally Methodism), and the influence of Romanticism and evangelicalism; thirdly, a chapter on preaching which focuses on lectures and advice given by senior ministers to those beginning, since even a snapshot of what ordinary members of congregations heard week by week would be a mammoth task. The curious reader, however, may learn more from Densil Morgan’s lively and wide-ranging account of spirituality, worship, and the spiritual life. This is in the final section on congregational life, but it is more subtle theologically.

Reviewed by: The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions Volume III: The Nineteenth Century ed. by Timothy Larsen and Michael Ledger-Lomas Mark Knight (bio) The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions Volume III: The Nineteenth Century, edited by Timothy Larsen and Michael Ledger-Lomas; pp. xix + 546. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2017, £103.00, $145.00. Timothy Larsen and Michael Ledger-Lomas’s The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions Volume III: The Nineteenth Century makes a wonderful contribution to Oxford University Press’s five-volume history of Protestant Dissent, and the editors and contributors are to be congratulated for the expert way in which they help us understand the complex contours of this part of the church. Protestant Dissent played a pivotal role in the nineteenth century theologically, politically, and socially, and its influence grew as the decades went on. One of the contributors to this volume, Eugenio Biagini, describes the years between 1862 and 1922 as a “golden age for British Dissenters in politics,” and he is far from alone in calling us to recognize the reach of Dissent across different areas of the Anglophone world (416). The volume is impressively wide-ranging in its scope, focusing on both sides of the Atlantic but looking more globally, too, and the editors have assembled a strong team of scholars to help them in their theological and historical explorations. Among the many things the contributors do well is finding an appropriate balance as they seek to convey the unity and diversity of Dissent. The vision of Dissent that emerges in the volume is coherent enough to hold the essays together but alert to the differences and diversity of those who identified with this part of the church. Bill J. Leonard writes compellingly about the ways in which Baptists in North America “searched diligently for common threads of theology and praxis that provide continuity,” finding them on some occasions but not on others (233). And as the other contributors to the volume consider different denominations, such as the Presbyterians, the Congregationalists, the Quakers, and the Methodists, we are led to see how the Dissenting impulse gave rise to multiple movements, fractures, and new communities of faith, some of which were too small to merit a denomination label. Ledger-Lomas acknowledges that “the history of nineteenth-century Anglophone Protestantism is often largely identified with global evangelicalism,” but he still insists on [End Page 156] the value of shifting the spotlight from evangelicalism to Dissent (2). The positive results of such a shift in focus are evident throughout the volume—but it is noticeable, too, how many of the histories of Dissent written by contributors lean heavily on evangelicalism. Timothy Larsen’s essay on the Congregationalists observes how closely the denomination was incorporated “into the wider evangelical movement” (41); Thomas C. Kennedy’s chapter dwells at length on the evangelical orientation of many (though certainly not all) of the Quakers; Janice Holmes’s essay on the Methodists remarks at one point the ways in which the denomination was “like many other evangelical groups in Britain” in its struggle “to maintain its distinctive identity and presence” (124); Mark A. Noll’s discussion of the Bible and scriptural interpretation is heavily indebted to evangelical thought; and David Bebbington’s chapter on theology draws extensively on his expertise as a historian of evangelicalism. Evangelicalism may not be the only way of conceptualizing Protestant Dissent, but it is vital to that tradition and rightly given a great deal of attention in this volume. Recognizing the central role of evangelicalism in our stories of Dissent does not need to blind us to other actors, and the “sheer variety” of Dissent, as Tim Grass puts it, is fundamental (150). In a chapter on the Unitarians, Shakers, and Quakers in North America, Stephen P. Shoemaker reminds us that “[w]hile evangelical Protestantism held a hegemonic position in American culture, plenty of religious groups deliberately swam against that cultural tide” (256). There are similar instances elsewhere across the volume where the accounts of Dissent (and evangelicalism) highlight this plurality and difference. This can be seen in the careful explanations of the ways in which denominations such as...

The nineteenth century was a period of remarkable advance for the Baptists in the United Kingdom. The vigour of the Baptist movement was identified with the voluntary system and the influence of their leading pulpiteers, notably Charles Haddon Spurgeon. However, Baptists were often divided on the strictness of their Calvinism, the question of whether baptism as a believer was a prerequisite for participation in Communion, and issues connected with ministerial training. By the end of the century, some Baptists led by F.B. Meyer had recognized the ministry of women as deaconesses, if not as pastors. Both domestic and foreign mission were essential to Baptist activity. The Baptist Home Missionary Society assumed an important role here, while Spurgeon’s Pastors’ College became increasingly significant in supplying domestic evangelists. Meyer played an important role in the development, within Baptist life, of interdenominational evangelism, while the Baptist Missionary Society and its secretary Joseph Angus supplied the Protestant missionary movement with the resonant phrase ‘The World for Christ in our Generation’. In addition to conversionism, Baptists were also interested in campaigning against the repression of Protestants and other religious minorities on the Continent. Baptist activities were supported by institutions: the formation of the Baptist Union in 1813 serving Particular Baptists, as well as a range of interdenominational bodies such as the Evangelical Alliance. Not until 1891 did the Particular Baptists merge with the New Connexion of General Baptists, while theological controversy continued to pose fresh challenges to Baptist unity. Moderate evangelicals such as Joseph Angus who occupied a respectable if not commanding place in nineteenth-century biblical scholarship probably spoke for a majority of Baptists. Yet when in 1887 Charles Haddon Spurgeon alleged that Baptists were drifting into destructive theological liberalism, he provoked the ‘Downgrade Controversy’. In the end, a large-scale secession of Spurgeon’s followers was averted. In the area of spirituality, there was an emphasis on the agency of the Spirit in the church. Some later nineteenth-century Baptists were drawn towards the emphasis of the Keswick Convention on the power of prayer and the ‘rest of faith’. At the same time, Baptists became increasingly active in the cause of social reform. Undergirding Baptist involvement in the campaign to abolish slavery was the theological conviction—in William Knibb’s words—that God ‘views all nations as one flesh’. By the end of the century, through initiatives such as the Baptist Forward Movement, Baptists were championing a widening concern with home mission that involved addressing the need for medical care and housing in poor areas. Ministers such as John Clifford also took a leading role in shaping the ‘Nonconformist Conscience’ and Baptists supplied a number of leading Liberal MPs, most notably Sir Morton Peto. Their ambitions to make a difference in the world would peak in the later nineteenth and early twentieth century as their political influence gradually waned thereafter.

The aim of the current article is to show that an important element behind the establishment of evangelical missions to Brazil � particularly during the pioneering stages � was evangelical revival, especially that which occurred in North America during the nineteenth century. Following a brief introduction to the general relationship between eighteenth- and nineteenth century revivals and evangelical missions, I shall endeavour to support historically the commonly accepted, yet often unsubstantiated, correlation between such movements of revival and mission. Firstly, I will show the significant paradigm shift in missional thinking, which took place in the nineteenth century, as North American evangelicals began to regard Roman Catholic countries in Latin America as mission fields. Secondly, I shall argue that the influence of nineteenth-century revivalist evangelicalism (particularly that sourced in North America) on missions to Brazil and Latin America can best be observed in the Brazilian evangelical identity that emerged in the twentieth century, which has, in turn, propelled the Brazilian evangelical church into its own significant involvement in global missions (Noll 2009:10).

I smell a bad word. —Roman Mailloux, four years old There's only one question: Are we the good guys or the bad guys? —Retired Brigadier General, U. S. Marines, at author's 35th anniversary high sch...

Book Review| April 01 2005 "A Question of Balance: Evangelical Revivalism, Calvinist Theology, and Enlightenment Philosophy in George M. Marsden’s Jonathan Edwards: A Life" Jonathan Edwards: A Life, George Marsden. STEPHEN A. WILSON STEPHEN A. WILSON Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Connecticut History Review (2005) 44 (1): 158–162. https://doi.org/10.2307/44369681 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation STEPHEN A. WILSON; "A Question of Balance: Evangelical Revivalism, Calvinist Theology, and Enlightenment Philosophy in George M. Marsden’s Jonathan Edwards: A Life". Connecticut History Review 1 January 2005; 44 (1): 158–162. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/44369681 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressConnecticut History Review Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: REVIEW ESSAYS You do not currently have access to this content.

Instruction in proper gender roles was central to the reforming impulse of North American Protestant missions in the nineteenth century. The delineation of gender was an important corollary of the Protestant missionaries’ religious message, as has been described in various studies focusing on American and Canadian Protestant foreign and domestic missions.1 Adherence to the North Americans’ standards of gender behavior indicated a comprehension of the tenets of personal discipline and responsibility for one’s spiritual destiny at the heart of Protestant evangelicalism. Wherever they observed immigrants at home or the people of India, China, Hawaii, and other mission destinations abroad, American Protestants found women performing manual labor, men with irregular work habits, and both genders engaged in sexual behaviors that pointed to their moral degradation and religious error. Their efforts at conversion, then, were as much an effort to reform habits of daily behavior as they were an attempt to save the soul.

During the nineteenth century, the Holy Childhood Association enrolled thousands of North American Catholic children in a project to save Chinese babies by baptizing them before death. Using archives from Quebec and the United States, this essay builds on recent calls to explore supernatural frameworks in order to broaden which people and societies are included under the rubric of globalization. Excavating the largely forgotten cosmology of Holy Childhood supporters, it therefore sets out, first, to highlight the global commitments of thousands of Catholics with limited objective mobility. Second, it flips North American history to center Quebec as continental hub, through which Holy Childhood supporters imagined their expansive power. It then lingers on the association's evocative, and remarkable, suggestion that dead "pagan" babies became angel guardians of their donors. This study reframes nineteenth-century North American expansionism in a few key ways. It highlights the central role of France, and therefore Quebec, for Roman Catholics while clarifying underlying frictions as North Americans reproduced and contested European power. And it explores the Holy Childhood's baby-saving program as a distinctive kind of "Catholic globalism," which was different from, but also in conversation with, "secular" humanitarianism.

Objects and Rituals of Time in the Nineteenth-Century United States Justin T. Clark (bio) Alexis McCrossen, Marking Modern Times: A History of Clocks, Watches, and Other Timekeepers in American Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. xvi + 271 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $29.00. David M. Henkin, The Week: A History of the Unnatural Rhythms That Made Us Who We Are. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021. xix + 288 pp. Appendices, notes, and index. $21.99. Nick Yablon, Remembrance of Things Present: The Invention of the Time Capsule. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. xix + 384 pp. Notes and index. $45.00. Wendy Bellion, Iconoclasm in New York: Ritual to Reenactment. State College: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019. xvii + 280 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $120.00. In studying change over time, historians have tended to pay more attention to the former than the latter. Since the mid-twentieth century, and especially in recent decades, a rich interdisciplinary scholarship has investigated the histories of timekeepers and time standards, diaries, calendars, Sabbath observances, commemorations, "free" and labor time, as well as the science, philosophy, and art of time. Yet instead of establishing an independent identity, the history of time has mostly surfaced across disparate subfields, in the guise of the history of technology, labor, leisure, religion, memory, material and visual culture.1 Conversely, history remains notably less represented than other disciplines in interdisciplinary venues for time studies, such as the Temporal Belongings network and the journal Time and Society. One impediment to a more coherent history of time is the subject's inherent difficulty. Time is a frustratingly fluid and ambiguous concept, even in comparison with other social constructions. Time exists at a multitude of seemingly incommensurate scales, complicating the scholarly synthesis of everyday mechanical timekeeping with more purely ideological temporal conceptions, [End Page 183] such as national or historical time. Nor can historians take something as seemingly straightforward as clock time for granted. Until and even beyond the adoption of national and global time standards in the late nineteenth century, members of the same communities in North America and elsewhere relied on contradictory methods to determine the hour. Interpreting qualitative records of temporal experience is still more challenging. While a diarist's description of a winter as "frigid" can be indexed against climatological records, what are we to make of Americans' persistent observation, from the nineteenth century onward, that time seemed to be "accelerating"? To what does such a description—commonly, if often vaguely, applied to modernity—even refer? Perhaps because of time's plurality, its disparate scales of measurement, and its troublesome subjectivity, its conceptual framework has never been secure. In the mid twentieth century, historians approached time through a vocabulary imported from sociology, anthropology, and critical theory. Lewis Mumford and E.P. Thompson thus described a transition in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries from qualitative, "natural time" to quantitative, "industrial time" and from "task orientation" to "timed-labor orientation," while Benedict Anderson predicated the emergence of national consciousness on Walter Benjamin's notion of "empty, homogenous time." As a whole, these thinkers tended to imagine modern time consciousness as singular rather than plural, shaped and driven to adoption by a dominant social institution: the monastery, for Mumford; the factory, for Thompson; print, for Anderson. Since the 1990s, however, such grand narratives have been criticized for oversimplifying the nature of time and its development everywhere, including North America. Labor in "preindustrial time," as Michael O'Malley has observed, could be just as "regimented, regular, and intense" as in any factory today.2 Time consciousness is more pluralistic than historians once recognized: multiple forms of sacred time, national time, factory time, settler time, and indigenous time co-exist uneasily. Moreover, abrupt shifts and radical interruptions continue to take place within American time consciousness, as exemplified by the recurrent invocations of an exceptional war time.3 In the absence of a grand unifying narrative, the history of time has developed less as a contiguous mass of topics than as an archipelago. Nevertheless, one recurrent theme is the importance of the nineteenth century as a period of transition. Many of the ways in which society has kept and used...

Cunning Distortions: Folk Christianity and Witchcraft Allegations in Early Mormon History

Ministerial training throughout the nineteenth century was dogged by persistent uncertainties about what Dissenters wanted ministers to do: were they to be preachers or scholars, settled pastors or roving missionaries? Sects and denominations such as the Baptists and Congregationalists invested heavily in the professionalization of ministry, founding, building, and expanding ministerial training colleges whose pompous architecture often expressed their cultural ambitions. That was especially true for the Methodists who had often been wary of a learned ministry, while Presbyterians who had always nursed such a status built an impressive international network of colleges, centred on Princeton Seminary. Among both Methodists and Presbyterians, such institution building could be both bedevilled and eventually stimulated by secessions. Colleges were heavily implicated not just in the supply of domestic ministers but also in foreign mission. Even exceptions to this pattern such as the Quakers who claimed not to have dedicated ministers were tacitly professionalizing training by the end of the century. However, the investment in institutions did not prevent protracted disputes over how academic their training should be. Many very successful Dissenting entrepreneurs, such as Charles Haddon Spurgeon, Thomas Champness, William Booth, and Adoniram Judson Gordon, offered unpretentious vocational training, while in colonies such as Australia there were complaints from Congregationalists and others that the colleges were too high-flying for their requirements. The need to offer a liberal education, which came to include science, as well as systematic theological instruction put strain on the resources of the colleges, a strain that many resolved by farming out the former to secular universities. Many of the controversies generated by theological change among Dissenters centred on colleges because they were disputes about the teaching of biblical criticism and how to resolve the tension between free inquiry and the responsibilities of tutors and students to the wider denomination. Colleges were ill-equipped to accommodate theological change because their heads insisted that theology was a static discipline, central to which was the simple exegesis of Scripture. That generated tensions with their students and caused numerous teachers to be edged out of colleges for heresy, most notoriously Samuel Davidson from Lancashire Independent College and William Robertson Smith from the Aberdeen Free Church College. Nevertheless, even conservatives such as Moses Stuart at Andover had emphasized the importance of keeping one’s exegetical tools up to date, and it became progressively easier in most denominations for college teachers to enjoy intellectual liberty, much as Unitarians had always done. Yet the victory of free inquiry was never complete and pyrrhic in any event as from the end of the century the colleges could not arrest a slow decline in the morale and prospects of Dissenting ministers.

Suburbs for a Labor Elite

Reviewed by: Painting Indians and Building Empires in North America, 1710–1840 Rebecca M. Lush Painting Indians and Building Empires in North America, 1710–1840. By William H. Truettner. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. 159 pages, $39.95. William Truettner, a senior curator with the Smithsonian American Art Museum, presents a fascinating look at portraits of North American Indians by white artists from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The monograph’s main argument examines the changing relationship between portraits of Indians and political issues surrounding empire and imperialism. In particular, Truettner examines the shift from the “Noble Savage” painting campaign to what the author dubs the “Republican Indian”; thus, the book examines changing political and [End Page 313] imperial conditions from English colonization to the early republic. Truettner argues that “Noble Savage” paintings emphasized the sitter’s ability to navigate white and indigenous culture in a colonial context where Native allies were key to English success against other European colonizers. “Republican Indian” paintings often highlighted the incompatibility of white and Indian cultures in the early United States, eventually marking Native peoples as a vanishing race. The author situates his analysis of a wide array of paintings within the political contexts of the time period, noting the inclusion of important items of material culture such as medallions and peace medals in the creation of a genre of paintings he refers to as “portrait diplomacy” (5). In Noble Savage paintings, Truettner identifies the importance of cross-dressing where the Indian sitter wears clothes and accessories from both indigenous and European cultures and how this cross-dressing enables a fluid political affiliation for patron and sitter. Additionally, the Noble Savage painting campaign often borrows from aristocratic and classical artistic conventions and incorporates iconography that emphasizes the elite status of the Indian sitter who was treated as a diplomat or delegate of his tribe. Truettner argues that the portrait archetype of the Noble Savage, often produced during formal sittings in artists’ studios, was frequently employed in connection to the Mohawks and other tribes of the Iroquois Confederacy, due in part to the political prestige these tribes held with British colonial officials. The Republican Indian campaign includes paintings of Plains tribes (such as the Osage, Mandan, Sioux, Blackfoot, and Crow) from the first four decades of the nineteenth century when artists increasingly journeyed west to paint Indians, thus lending a more ethnographic approach. Republican Indian portraiture emphasized the sitter’s tribal affiliation and even branched out to include scenes of typical Plains Indian life such as buffalo hunts. One of the most significant contributions of the book is its linking of the British trans-Atlantic world to that of the early national period of the United States. Truettner notes how the shift from colonies to nation ushered in the need for a new perspective on Indians to accommodate the burgeoning imperialistic westward movement of white Americans. The book’s consideration of the vacillating representation of Indians as “savage” and “civil” complements the relatively recent discussion of the racialization of Natives in works from scholars across disciplines, such as historian Joyce Chaplin and literary scholar Gordon Sayre. Despite the fascinating commentary and historical context provided, there are, however, two main drawbacks to the monograph. The first is the scant attention given to representations of Native women. Truettner offers a cursory glance at a handful of fascinating portrayals of Indian women from the Republican Indian campaign and notes that these images have more in common with the Indian Princess mode. A more developed discussion of how the Indian Princess mode connects to the seemingly male-dominated categories of Noble Savage and Republican Indians would have been instructive. Furthermore, the book does not fully articulate the origins of the Noble Savage or Republican [End Page 314] Indian campaigns; situating these formalized portraits within a more detailed discussion of the widely circulated engravings and water colors of North American Indians by white artists from the sixteenth century would have helped create a more comprehensive macronarrative. Truettner discusses two key approaches to rendering Native subjects and has deftly arranged a dizzying number of reproduced portraits into a coherent narrative. Most of the included images are reproduced in full color...

Reviewed by: History's Shadow: Native Americans and Historical Consciousness in the Nineteenth Century Maureen Konkle (bio) History's Shadow: Native Americans and Historical Consciousness in the Nineteenth Century. By Steven Conn. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Pp. xii, 276. Illustrations. Cloth, $35.00.) Steven Conn's book serves as an overview of the disciplining of Native peoples in the nineteenth-century United States: he describes how, by the close of the century, knowledge about Native peoples had been confined to anthropology, and Native peoples themselves confined to realm [End Page 518] of culture and excluded from history. His narrative account of the movement of knowledge about Indians from the missionaries, travelers, and government officials who produced it in the late eighteenth century to the certified university-ensconced anthropologists who took hold of it in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is especially useful. But his interpretation of the material falls flat, betraying his lack of expertise in Native history. It's common in literary studies for a scholar to write a book about Indians without sustained experience in the field, less so in history. Conn so scrupulously limits his analysis on the one hand, and rests his arguments on mistaken assumptions about Native history on the other, that the book becomes less than the sum of its parts. Conn freely admits that he is "no historian of Native America," and that his book is not about the representation of Indians. It is rather, he writes, an intellectual history of those who studied Indians that, he insists, can reveal how that study "shaped the American mind" and more particularly "[defined] American science and social science, and "shaped conceptions of the nation's history" (5). He makes three principal claims: that Native peoples "posed fundamental challenges to the way EuroAmericans understood the world"; that the emergence of natural science rather than the Bible as an explanation for the existence of Native peoples "shaped the transition from a sacred world view to a secular one"; and that the necessity of explaining the existence of Native peoples influenced the changing definitions of history itself (5). Thus, Conn is interested in history as a discipline rather than the history of Native peoples in the United States. He surmises that "intellectual encounters" with Native peoples caused EuroAmericans to separate history from myth and from culture and also "from the realm of the past" (6). Over the nineteenth century, Conn argues, EuroAmericans excluded Native peoples from history itself. The book includes an introductory chapter on images of Indians in nineteenth-century art as exemplifying the transformation of Native peoples from historical figures to representative manifestations of cultures; subsequent chapters on the study of Native languages, archaeology, and anthropology; and a concluding chapter on Native peoples and U.S. historiography in the era. The most fundamental problem with the book is Conn's insistence that history as a discipline and the history of Native-EuroAmerican relations can be separated such that those "intellectual encounters" have little or nothing to do with political relations. Historians in this book are sincere if ethnocentric people who try very hard to understand Indians; [End Page 519] the possibility that they might be part of a larger system of thinking about and managing Native peoples, justifying and maintaining white authority, receives little or no attention. This absence of attention to the politics of knowledge might explain—at least in part—Conn's simply wrong assertion that Native peoples are gradually removed from history over the course of the nineteenth century. Conn observes that in the early nineteenth century, EuroAmerican writers like James Fenimore Cooper "included" Indians in their historical accounts of America, but with the emergence of professional historians of the United States like George Bancroft in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, Indians began to be shifted out of U.S. history into ethnology and then anthropology. Conn argues that this "inclusion" of Native peoples in the history of the United States is in itself evidence of the historicizing of Indians, and thus Cooper's last of the Mohicans can be said to be a historical Indian, since Cooper used John Heckewelder's work to describe his...

Joseph Smith Jr. found himself in court many times throughout his life. Historians argue that his problematic relationship with the law began in 1826 when he faced disorderly person charges in Bainbridge, New York. According to the pretrial sources, some of Josiah Stowell's family members charged that Joseph Smith claimed to have supernatural powers: Horace Stowell and Arad Stowell claimed that he used seer stones to see lost, stolen, and hidden things and to seek treasure.1 An additional disorderly person hearing followed in 1829 in Lyons, New York. In 1830, a disorderly person charge brought Joseph Smith back to court in Bainbridge, New York. In the same year, a final disorderly person charge took him to court in Colesville, New York.2 Since these events, there has been a vigorous discussion over whether Smith's implication in these practices should disqualify his prophetic claims. This framing of the charges has sometimes overshadowed the legal debates.3Previous attempts to understand these legal events have assumed that these cases were built upon early examples of anti-fraud legislation.4 The basis of this interpretation is the use of the word "pretended" and allegations of "juggling," or sleight-of-hand, which appear in both New York's 1813 disorderly person statute and the accounts of Joseph Smith's court proceedings. However, reading these cases in terms of fraud may result from a cultural misunderstanding between modern researchers and their nineteenth-century subjects. For instance, Dan Vogel noted that Justice Neeley, who oversaw the 1826 case, was interested in allegedly pretended powers not economic deception.5This article proposes that Joseph Smith's early trials were about "pretended witchcraft and magic"6 and the related thoughtcrime of "pretended religion," categories of crime generated during the Enlightenment to categorize unorthodox religious traditions as witchcraft while negating their claims to miraculous or supernatural powers. Smith's defense that he really was a seer was irrelevant because the legal system categorized the spiritual practice of treasure seeking as pretended witchcraft and magic.To understand Joseph Smith's interactions with New York's 1813 disorderly person statute, historians must evaluate the historical and cultural trends associated with the legislative precedent that contributed to the 1813 statute. This comparative method has been a standard in witchcraft studies for decades.7 Throughout the analysis of these laws and charges, I use evidence from Joseph Smith's life outside the courtroom to demonstrate that fear of witchcraft motivated these charges while expressions of that fear were suppressed in the later narratives of these legal persecutions. Evidence outside the courtroom demonstrates that the conspiracies and persecutions endured by Joseph Smith were echoes of the witchcraft belief exemplified more than a century earlier in Salem, Massachusetts.The New York disorderly persons statue belongs to a specific legislative history aimed at magic and witchcraft. Legislation aimed at policing treasure seeking, the use of seer stones, and finding lost and stolen items through a gift from God or other supernatural means was meant to curb the influence of "the cunning-folk."8 Cunning-folk were folk-Christian healers whom religious authorities conflated with "diabolical witches" in early modern Europe, an imaginary category of people who were alleged to renounce their baptism and swear loyalty to the devil and his war on Christendom.9 Folk-Christian beliefs covered a range of magical practices. The King Henry Witchcraft Act of 1542 marked the earliest Anglophone legislation aimed at curbing treasure seeking. Queen Elizabeth's Witchcraft Act of 1563 repealed and replaced King Henry's Act and was subsequently superseded by the King James Witchcraft Act of 1604.10 All three intended to control the diabolical witch, but their language reveals their intent to penalize the cunning-folks' spiritual practices. This was also true of other acts passed throughout the British Isles.11 In 1692, the Massachusetts colony passed a witchcraft act based on the King James Act of 1604, explicitly targeted cunning-folk practices, including treasure seeking.12 This was the cornerstone upon which all Anglophone witchcraft legislation was founded, including the pretended witchcraft legislation of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries.The cultural conversation around demonology informed this legislation's development. Early modern demonologies began in a Roman Catholic environment obsessed with controlling heresy.13 These works fused ideas from the Bible, Patristic writings of the early church, the Lives of Saints, Greco-Roman literature, and classical poetry to construct a historical foundation of the "witch" stereotype. This stereotype combined with diabolized depictions of popular fairy belief, folk-Christianity deemed superstitious by religious authorities, heresy, and popular concerns about maleficium. Continental believers' demonologies targeted the folk-Christian observances of the cunning-folk as examples of superstition and a living tradition of witchcraft.14 This tool could be abused against a wide variety of people regardless of the content of their beliefs and practices. For example, demonologist Nicholas Rémy claimed that a woman whose practices were completely orthodox could still be guilty of witchcraft, that witches were guilty of imitating Elijah and Elisha, and that witches were guilty of using religion to mask their alleged diabolism.15 Thus folk-Christian practices were easily distorted into diabolical witchcraft by religious and legal authorities.English demonologies appeared in the decades after the English Reformation when religious leaders led "a Henrician assault on popular religion."16 Fear of cunning-folk carried over to North America, where Cotton Mather attributed the rise of witchcraft in New England to the arrival of Quakers, cunning-folk, and Native American shamans.17 When Richard Boulton wrote one of the last significant believers' demonologies in England, paraphrasing Exodus 22:18, he asserted, "wise Women are not fit to live," without elaboration.18 He fully expected his eighteenth-century audience to understand that the cunning-folk were the witches targeted in English demonology and anti-witchcraft law. At the beginning of the Second Great Awakening, Ezra Stiles would preach a sermon conflating cunning-folk activities and Native American spiritual practices with witchcraft. He did so to "lay this whole Iniquity open, that all the remains of it might be rooted out."19 Concerns over the diabolical witch and the cunning-folk would continue in the Anglophone world into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.20Belief in the "diabolical witch" was the orthodox position between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, but there were also detractors. The Dutch physician Johann Weyer argued that the devil took advantage of imbalances in the humor of black bile to produce a mental illness (melancholy). He argued that the devil did so to generate illusions that deceived people into believing that witches were real and that magic was efficacious.21 Weyer still targeted cunning-folk practices and conflated them with necromancy, but he denied their efficacy. English skeptic Reginald Scott argued that the sorcerers of the Bible, the religious authorities of the pagan world, Catholic priests, and cunning-folk—whom he called "cozening witches"—all utilized sleight of hand and deception, not actual demonic powers, to lead people into idolatry or to deceive them.22 These skeptical demonologists described the beliefs and practices of pagan religions, Catholicism, Christian enthusiasts, and the cunning-folk as false prophecy, legerdemain, juggling, and pretended powers. They remained a vocal but marginalized position within demonology throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.By the eighteenth century, skeptical demonology replaced believing demonology as the dominant view, and unorthodox spiritual practices came to be defined as pretended by those in power. In the Anglophone world, this included the practices of cunning-folk, gypsies, Catholics, and Indigenous peoples. However, it also included the beliefs and practices of charismatic Christians pejoratively labeled "enthusiasts." For example, Reverend Francis Hutchinson cited the beliefs and practices of radical Protestants known as the French Prophets as pretended. In his book on this religious minority, he consistently defined charismatic Christian claims to spiritual power as enthusiasm, pretended, legerdemain, and juggling.23 The King George Witchcraft Act of 1735 ended diabolical witchcraft as a legal category in England and Scotland and made "pretended" the legal standard in Enlightenment England.24The King George Witchcraft Act of 1735 developed within a broader legal environment that had produced similar statutes throughout Europe.25 The first of these was the French Edict of 1692, which reclassified witchcraft into crimes like poisoning, sacrilege, and pretended powers. Notably, a similar law produced in the same environment defined Protestantism as a pretended religion and penalized Protestant leaders for advocating pretended religion.26 In colonial America, the state used anti-vagrancy legislation to control religious deviants like Jesuits, Quakers, and Enthusiasts by labeling them vagabonds and disorderly persons, then penalizing them for breaking vagrancy law.27Skeptical witchcraft legislation continued to be developed in the American colonies and then the United States into the nineteenth century.28 When New York drafted the 1813 disorderly person statute, it continued this trend by utilizing the language of early European witchcraft legislation. The relevant portion of the law addresses vagrancy and defines a disorderly person as "all jugglers [those who cheat or deceive by sleight of hand or tricks of extraordinary dexterity], and . . . all persons pretending to have skill in physiognomy, palmistry, or like crafty science, or pretending to tell fortunes, or to discover where lost goods may be found."29 This statute had much in common with the anti-vagrancy and pretended witchcraft legislation of the Anglophone world of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, a product of a larger legal environment that employed the King George Witchcraft Act of 1735 as a model.30 This model preemptively defined religious and spiritual unorthodoxy as pretended witchcraft, magic, or religion. By categorizing people's beliefs and practices as pretended this legislation allowed the state to discriminate against unorthodox spiritual traditions by deliberately conflating them with criminal deception.Legislation based on skeptical demonology continued in nineteenth-century England with the 1824 Act for the Punishment of Idle and Disorderly Persons, and Rogues and Vagabonds, in that Part of Great Britain called England.31 This act criminalized "every person pretending or professing to tell fortunes, or using any subtle Craft, Means, or Device, by Palmistry or otherwise, to deceive and impose."32 According to Owen Davies, the clause was "widely used in prosecuting rural cunning-folk."33 Throughout the British Empire and its former colonies, the government used anti-vagrancy legislation and skeptical witchcraft legislation to categorize people's genuine beliefs and religious practices as "pretended" as late as the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.34Besides Joseph Smith, only one other well-known example of disorderly person prosecution for treasure seeking in early America employs the word "pretended" to describe alleged supernatural gifts—the disorderly person charges against Dr. Luman Walters.35 Walters's case is only known due to newspaper articles discussing a documented case in New Hampshire.36 Because the notes from Luman Walters's trial are not available, it is impossible to explore how the court used "pretended" in disorderly person trials in the nineteenth century. But through Walters's alleged conviction in New York we can see how this legislation was used to penalize Walters for cunning-folk practices.37 Later allegations that Walters was a necromancer reveal the underlying religious bias which conflated cunning-folk with witches.38Although it is tempting to read "pretended" as fraud, there is reason to be cautious. According to Lynne Hume, in Anglophone witchcraft legislation "'pretends to exercise' means something else. The presumption is that people are not able to do these things and therefore whoever says they can is acting in a fraudulent manner."39 In previous generations, legal authorities and religious authorities superseded the cunning-folks' beliefs and practices by presuming that the cunning-folk were diabolical witches. After the Enlightenment, the same psychological process allowed Anglophone legal authorities to recategorize genuine belief and practices as pretended witchcraft. In both cases the legal system deliberately conflated unorthodox spiritual traditions with another crime to enable the policing of unorthodox spirituality. This tells us more about the beliefs of those in power than it does about the traditions these legal categories were designed to punish.Despite legal skepticism, belief in diabolical witchcraft continued into Joseph Smith's lifetime and beyond.40 The nineteenth-century repeal of Ireland's 1586 witchcraft statute inspired the publication of the anonymous pamphlet Antipas, which conflated Catholicism and Dissenters with witchcraft and urged Parliament to restrict both groups' religious activities. The pamphlet would have had a broad audience. As Andrew Sneddon has explained, "for the vast majority of those placed lower down the social ladder, especially those living in small, close-knit rural areas, the existence of the malefic witch continued to be regarded as a threat to their property and persons in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The same holds true for North America."41The diabolical witch doctrine still had its believers in Joseph Smith's early nineteenth-century environment, although the law no longer recognized diabolical witchcraft as a reality. Smith's critic Alexander Campbell argued for a synthesized demonology that allowed for pretended necromancy and diabolical necromancy to coexist as two different kinds of witchcraft.42 Campbell's use of necromancy charges in witchcraft allegations was a standard pattern within the Second Great Awakening.43 Likewise, treasure seeking became a primary target of witchcraft fear and belief during this period.44 People who feared cunning-folk, alleged false-prophets, Catholics, Atheists, non-white spiritual practices, and religious movements like the Quakers, the Shakers, and the Wilkensonians saw the practices they feared most as both pretended and diabolical, often describing these groups as practicing necromancy.45 In the early nineteenth-century environment of legal skepticism and the common suppressed belief that diabolical witches existed, one would expect to find the categories of pretended witchcraft and diabolical witchcraft used to label Joseph Smith's folk-Christian practices of treasure seeking in 1826 as well as charismatic expressions of Christian belief in 1830.When Joseph Smith, a young treasure seeker, had his first visionary experience, local religious leaders reacted negatively in ways that Smith family members considered surprising.46 At the age of fourteen, an unnamed assailant fired a bullet at Joseph Smith as he returned home.47 In 1823, Joseph Smith experienced an envisioned visitation of an angel, who declared that Smith would be a prophet and uncover a buried scripture. Within a year of this experience, rumors began to circulate that someone had disinterred and dissected his older brother Alvin's body.48 Dan Vogel and Michael Quinn believe that these were allegations of utilizing part of Alvin's body to acquire the golden plates. These rumors portrayed the act of acquiring the golden plates as a form of necromancy.49 These allegations may have been an initial, failed, attempt to charge Joseph Smith with a crime. As William Morain points out, "violating a grave" was "a felony offense for which, in 1824, he could have been incarcerated in the New York state prison for five years."50 A year later, in 1825, Josiah Stowell heard about Joseph Smith's gift for using his seer stone, perhaps tied to rumors of Joseph's 1823 vision of an angel who led him to the gold plates. Josiah Stowell requested that Joseph reside at his home as a farmworker who would aid Stowell in his treasure seeking. Joseph's parents agreed, perhaps to remove him from a dangerous environment. However, trouble followed Joseph Smith Jr. to Bainbridge, New York. In 1826, Stowell's nephew took Joseph Smith to court as a disorderly person.51Allegations of witchcraft continued after the trials as well, with some ascribed to Joseph's life in the 1820s. In 1834, testimonies ascribed to Smith's neighbors appeared in the anti-Mormon book Mormonism Unvailed.52 The affidavits in this book describe Smith's activities through the paradigms of pretended and diabolical witchcraft. In one of these affidavits, discussing a period between the 1826 and 1830 hearings, Sophia Lewis, who also served as Emma Smith's midwife, reported that Joseph and Emma's child died horribly deformed at birth. Her affidavit is notable because the diabolical witch's doctrine and folklore viewed deformed births and stillbirth as evidence of witchcraft.53 Shortly after Alvin's death, Emma Smith returned to her parents' Methodist church in Harmony. When Joseph Smith attempted to attend, it sparked a controversy that included church members' allegations of necromancy and other witchcraft practices. In the 1879 remembrances of these events, Emma's relatives made it clear that those involved in this controversy believed Joseph Smith "was a conjurer" and "a sorcerer," clarifying that these were forms of "witchcraft."54 This same Methodist congregation later threatened violence against Joseph Smith, which forced him to move to the home of Peter Whitmer Sr. in Fayette, New York.55Beginning in 1830, Joseph Smith's restorationism utilized the example of the Christian curses used by Old Testament Prophets, as well as Jesus and the Apostles in the New Testament. Joseph instructed his missionaries and followers to employ ritualized dusting of feet and clothing as a testament against those who persecuted them and rejected their message. This practice continued into the 1890s and would have provided ample material for those who believed that Joseph Smith and his followers were witches.56 Allegations of witchcraft continued in February 1831 with Alexander Campbell's publication of "Delusions," an anti-Mormon article in his periodical the Millennial Harbinger.57 In this article, Campbell uses familiar skeptical tropes and employs demonology to compare Joseph Smith and Mormonism with false prophecy, enthusiasm, and witchcraft. He directly compared Joseph Smith to Simon Magus and Elymas, the sorcerers of the Bible.58 Campbell leaves no room for equivocation: "I have never felt myself so fully authorized to address mortal man in the style in which Paul addressed Elymas the sorcerer as I feel towards this Atheist Smith."59 During the same year, mobs pursued Joseph Smith's followers as they left New York for Ohio.60 In 1832, Campbell's was as a In anti-witchcraft violence can be in the that Joseph Smith and in this Joseph Smith that these which he as a to their As a of a by Smith may have of Joseph Smith to Simon they Joseph Smith, the attempted to his to therefore or Joseph the it . . . us his They attempted to a of into his Joseph claimed that the not to but they would . . . All were and one man on and body with his like a Smith had to the from his to more The easily use of has In the nineteenth century, the was believed to be a means of a witch's powers and was a common of anti-witchcraft of witchcraft belief continued later into Joseph Smith's life. In 1834, the would the affidavits in his Mormonism This like a of skeptical and believers' describing Smith's alleged folk-Christian activities through the pretended and diabolical witchcraft As late as Smith of Campbell's continued witchcraft The year, Joseph Smith's last treasure ended with a that his to the more and of this For there are more than one for in this This treasure took in Salem, that the that had followed Smith to this in could be through a of early American witchcraft belief and In Smith's Joseph of to He claimed that Smith, the of had two who of when they the of the false and to their and are that they were not left to the power of the devil and Smith, to their with a crime so would appear that many of Smith's him of witchcraft and magic throughout his early life and to the by and there are three of in witchcraft The first and most of court and of The is These that the these often the beliefs and of the historians of witchcraft these by controlling for allegations of into these accounts by their The category are In Joseph Smith's 1826, and 1830 disorderly person only the court into the category of do not have the trial notes or sources, only of the used to the 1826 pretrial are known as the and the The only in articles to the pretrial The first of these articles appeared in with in and The is by William as a of his alleged as at the 1826 was in for the 1830 there are accounts by Joseph Smith, his and other a in witchcraft An additional related to the 1830 disorderly person cases is a ascribed to Justice of the George who oversaw the disorderly person of As with all sources, these accounts should be read events they describe may not took in They may also or of these As in all accounts of witch we must for the of in of Joseph Smith's alleged accounts of the 1826 disorderly person pretrial evidence that they into the larger pattern of In the there is evidence about Joseph his and his folk-Christian The Joseph Smith as a a for cunning-folk who compared to Old Testament The addresses the cunning-folk practice of utilizing seer also that these were Stowell and as believed As an the claims that Josiah Stowell's and two . . . or to of Joseph Smith's of his seer stones folk-Christian practices. claims that after a vision of a stone, Joseph Smith to find his seer stone, and the significant about how he the after he found This is when one the writings of a modern Dutch In his book on his folk-Christian practices, provided a for the of miraculous stones to God and for upon the This a larger pattern of Joseph Smith his other seer stones, as by This may be a of Joseph his first seer The also the powers within a folk-Christian that when Joseph had the stone, one of the of an an earlier of Joseph Smith's alleged as a seer as an According to this Joseph Smith Sr. his alleged gift and many of his finding hidden and stolen and that he that both he and his were that this power that God had so him should be used only in of or its in and with a he his to his was to this power. He that the of would some the of the and enable him to see testimonies of Smith's powers were a in the The was Josiah who the testimonies of Joseph Sr. and Joseph examples of the Joseph Smith's Stowell many other not to that Smith the he and many to his The then that Justice Stowell's belief in Joseph Smith's alleged as a treasure I believe says I believe it is not a of I it to be claims Joseph Smith his treasure that the treasure not be by by after with and they to the by These are a of the folk-Christian utilized by treasure of which Joseph Smith Sr. is believed to have According to both the and these were to a placed on the treasure by the person who buried When their attempts to acquire the treasure the at the folk-Christian for the treasure a against the devil over the of seeking from some five feet in had been without a of war against this of was and they that the of or of some mental was the of their between folk-Christian and for Joseph Smith's and depictions of these practices as When demonologists argue against of cunning-folk beliefs and practices, they described the common that practices were by the Christian would then attempt to by that folk-Christian practices were forms of false an with the For those who believed demonologists than evidence of folk-Christian was evidence of the is on this of the 1826 it Joseph Smith's seer use and treasure seeking, it does not a of power he ascribed these to that would us to compare his alleged practices to the In of these it Joseph Smith's and activities