Spiritualism as a Religion: Beliefs, the Seven Principles and Social History
Spiritualism is an organized religion built on one testable claim: that the dead survive and can be reached. This guide covers the Seven Principles and who wrote them, the Summerland and eternal progress in place of heaven and hell, the Christian and non-Christian branches, the movement's nineteenth-century reform politics, the laws that governed mediums, and how many Spiritualists remain today.
What do Spiritualists actually believe?
Spiritualists believe that the human personality survives bodily death, and that the surviving personality can and does communicate with the living, usually through a medium. Everything else in the religion follows from those two claims. Survival is treated as a fact shown by evidence rather than a doctrine accepted on authority, which is why a Spiritualist service ends with a demonstration instead of a benediction. The dead are not asleep, not waiting for a general resurrection, and not fixed in a final reward or punishment. They continue to learn, work and change in a world sorted by character rather than geography. Because contact is held to be ordinary rather than miraculous, Spiritualism has no priesthood standing between a person and the spirit world, and no requirement that anyone accept a claim they have not tested themselves. The British and American governing bodies both put personal responsibility near the middle of the scheme: no vicarious atonement, no forgiveness that cancels consequence, no hell. What a Spiritualist owes is honesty about evidence and decent conduct toward the living. Past that the tent is wide, and two people in one congregation may disagree about God, Jesus and rebirth without either being out of step.
Outsiders usually arrive expecting a set of hidden doctrines and find instead a short list of principles and a strong dislike of being told what to think. That reticence is historical. The movement grew out of a wave of home circles in the 1840s and 1850s, spread by newspapers and lecture tours rather than by seminaries, and the people running it had no appetite for building another church that could expel them. The result is a religion whose members argue in public. Some hold a warm liberal Protestantism with the resurrection taken out. Some are effectively humanists who accept survival as a natural fact. Some read Spiritualism as the empirical wing of a wider occult revival. The one commitment that reliably separates a Spiritualist from a sympathizer is the second half of the claim: that communication actually happens, repeatably, and that an ordinary person can check it. For the founding events of 1848 and for how the contact itself is described and staged, see Mediumship: How Mediums Describe Contacting the Dead.
What is the difference between a Spiritualist and someone who believes in ghosts?
A Spiritualist holds survival as a religious commitment and treats mediumship as the means of proving it, while a person who believes in ghosts holds an opinion about a phenomenon. Spiritualism adds worship, a moral scheme built on personal responsibility, congregations, ordained ministers and training standards for mediums. Ghost belief carries none of that, which is why survey figures for ghost belief tell you nothing about how many Spiritualists exist.
Do Spiritualists believe spirits can move physical objects?
Most Spiritualists today believe spirit influence is chiefly mental, arriving as impressions, images and words in a medium's mind rather than as moved furniture. Physical phenomena had a large place in the nineteenth century and a much smaller one now, partly because the exposures were damaging and partly because the churches shifted toward mental mediumship. A minority of home circles still sit for physical effects, and they remain a contested corner of the movement.
Is Spiritualism a form of ancestor worship?
Spiritualism is not ancestor worship. The dead in Spiritualist teaching hold no power over the living and receive no offerings, prayers or veneration. A Spiritualist may ask a departed relative for reassurance the way one asks a living friend, but the relationship carries no obligation and confers no protection. Worship in the service is directed to God or Infinite Intelligence, and the dead are addressed as people rather than as powers.
What are the Seven Principles of Spiritualism and who wrote them?
The Seven Principles of Spiritualism are the Fatherhood of God; the Brotherhood of Man; the Communion of Spirits and the Ministry of Angels; the Continuous Existence of the Human Soul; Personal Responsibility; Compensation and Retribution Hereafter for all the Good and Evil Deeds done on Earth; and Eternal Progress Open to every Human Soul. They are the doctrinal basis of the Spiritualists' National Union, the largest Spiritualist body in Britain, and they appear in service books and on the wall of most affiliated churches. Authorship is credited to Emma Hardinge Britten (1823 to 1899), an English trance speaker, editor and organizer who worked on both sides of the Atlantic, founded the Manchester paper The Two Worlds in 1887, and wrote the first substantial history of the movement, Modern American Spiritualism, in 1870. Britten did not present the principles as her own composition. She said they reached her from the spirit of Robert Owen, the Welsh-born mill owner and socialist who had declared himself a Spiritualist in 1853 and died in 1858, and Spiritualist accounts usually date the communication to 1871. That claim matters to how Spiritualists read them, since a set of principles received through mediumship rather than drafted by a committee fits the religion's own account of where teaching comes from.
The union presents the seven as principles rather than as a creed, publishes interpretations instead of a catechism, and does not require assent as a condition of membership. That leaves room for argument, and there is plenty. Fatherhood of God is the sorest point. Many members now read it as naming a creative source rather than a gendered person, and some churches say Fatherhood and Motherhood aloud. Compensation and Retribution Hereafter sounds harsh to modern ears and is usually explained as a self-acting law, closer to consequence than to sentencing, with no permanent penalty attached to it. Brotherhood of Man is taken to rule out racial and national exclusivity, one reason the nineteenth-century movement attached itself so readily to reform politics. American Spiritualists never adopted the seven at all. The National Spiritualist Association of Churches works from a Declaration of Principles adopted in stages: the first six at Chicago in 1899, a seventh and eighth at Rochester in 1909, and a ninth at St. Louis in 1944. It opens with Infinite Intelligence rather than with God the Father and states outright that communication with the dead is a proven fact.
Who was Emma Hardinge Britten?
Britten was the movement's chief organizer and propagandist. She came to it sideways: born in Bethnal Green in east London, she worked as an actress and a music teacher before reaching New York in 1856. Politics arrived with the mediumship, and she stumped for Lincoln's re-election in 1864. She was among the founding members of the Theosophical Society in 1875, then broke with it. Occultists still argue over who actually wrote Art Magic, the volume she published in 1876.
Do all Spiritualist churches use the Seven Principles?
No. The Seven Principles are specific to the Spiritualists' National Union and the bodies that follow it, so a British church outside the union may use a different statement or none. Christian Spiritualist churches use their own creeds naming Jesus. American congregations affiliated to the National Spiritualist Association of Churches use its nine-point Declaration of Principles instead, and independent churches worldwide often write their own.
What does Compensation and Retribution Hereafter mean?
It means that the effects of what a person does follow them into the next world as a condition of their own character, not as a sentence handed down by a judge. Spiritualist teachers describe it as a natural law working the way physical laws do, without malice and without appeal. The important qualifier is the seventh principle: whatever a soul has earned, eternal progress remains open, so nothing in the scheme is permanent.
Is Spiritualism a religion, a philosophy or a science?
Spiritualism claims to be all three at once, and its own definitions say so explicitly. The National Spiritualist Association of Churches defines Spiritualism as the science, philosophy and religion of continuous life, based upon the demonstrated fact of communication by means of mediumship with those who live in the spirit world. Read that as a program rather than a boast. The science is the claim that survival is shown by evidence anyone can examine, in the shape of names, dates and details a medium had no ordinary route to. The philosophy is what follows for conduct once survival is granted: personal responsibility, consequences that travel with you, and progress without a deadline. The religion is the part that gathers people on a Sunday, ordains ministers, conducts weddings and funerals, and calls the source of things God or Infinite Intelligence. Whether the science half survives inspection is the movement's oldest quarrel with everyone else, and the honest position is that no demonstration of mediumship has been reproduced under conditions that would satisfy a working scientist. Legally and socially, though, Spiritualism has been treated as a religion by courts, registrars and census forms for well over a century.
The scientific claim attracted serious scientists early and lost most of them. Alfred Russel Wallace, who arrived independently at natural selection, defended Spiritualism in print from the 1860s and never retracted. William Crookes, the chemist who identified thallium, ran sittings in the 1870s and published favorable reports that cost him standing among colleagues. Oliver Lodge, a physicist central to early radio work, was persuaded by sittings with the American medium Leonora Piper in 1889 and had been arguing in print for survival for years before his son Raymond was killed at Ypres in 1915; the book he then wrote about Raymond made him the most conspicuous public advocate of the case rather than converting him to it. Against them sat the Society for Psychical Research, founded in London in 1882 to examine such claims without prejudice, which produced far more negative findings than positive ones and made itself unwelcome in Spiritualist rooms as a result. Modern skeptics generally explain accurate platform readings by cold reading and statistical guessing, while a minority of researchers prefer thought-transference from the sitter, an argument set out in Telepathy: Claims, Experiments and How Practitioners Describe It. Spiritualists reply that neither explanation covers the specific detail they say they routinely get.
Is Spiritualism legally recognized as a religion?
Yes, in both Britain and the United States. British Spiritualist churches register buildings for worship and for the solemnization of marriages, and Spiritualist bodies hold charitable status on religious grounds. American Spiritualist churches ordain ministers, incorporate as churches and are treated as such for tax purposes. Recognition of this kind decides legal questions about property, celebrancy and status, and settles nothing about whether the underlying claims are true.
What evidence do Spiritualists offer for survival?
Spiritualists point to evidential mediumship: statements containing names, occupations, illnesses, family nicknames and household details that a medium is said to have had no way of learning. Deathbed visions and apparitions seen at the moment of a death are cited too, along with cases in which a message was checked afterward and held up. Critics answer that this material is gathered without controls and written down after verification rather than before. That gap is the whole dispute.
Why do most scientists reject the science claim?
Because the phenomena have not been produced reliably under conditions that exclude ordinary explanations, and because the nineteenth-century record contains repeated exposures of fraud. A demonstration in a church cannot control for prior research on sitters, hot reading, leading questions or the audience's willingness to fit a vague statement to a specific person. Spiritualists reply that laboratory conditions suppress the very state mediums work in, which the laboratories treat as an unfalsifiable defense.
What does Spiritualism teach about death, the Summerland and spiritual progression?
Spiritualism teaches that death is a change of condition rather than an ending, that the surviving personality wakes in a world of the same general order as this one, and that it then progresses without limit and without a final judgment. The name most often given to the first stage of that world is the Summerland, a term popularized by Andrew Jackson Davis (1826 to 1910), the Poughkeepsie seer whose harmonial writings supplied the movement with a cosmology before it had churches. Davis described an ascending series of spheres, each less material than the last, through which souls move as they become fit for them. The Summerland is the nearest of these to earth and the most earthlike: landscapes, houses, work, study and reunion with people you loved. Nobody is sent there. Where a person arrives is set by what they have become, which is the sense Spiritualists give to compensation and retribution. A cruel man is not punished so much as left in the company and the capacity he built for himself. None of it is permanent, because the seventh principle promises eternal progress open to every human soul, and the American declaration adds that the doorway to reformation is never closed against any human soul here or hereafter.
The Summerland has traveled well beyond Spiritualism. Theosophy developed its own vocabulary of planes, and Gerald Gardner's Wicca took the word wholesale in the middle of the twentieth century for a resting place between lives, which is why many people meet the term with no idea it came from a nineteenth-century American seer. It also gets confused with a rival cosmology that has nothing to do with it: the Theosophy-derived record of every event described in Akashic Records: What They Are and How People Claim to Access Them is a library, not a destination. What made the Summerland attractive in its own century was subtraction. Calvinist New England had bequeathed a heaven reserved for the elect and a hell for everyone else, and a mother burying a child was told to accept an outcome she could not know. Spiritualism removed the sorting entirely. The description of the spheres rests on the testimony of seers and communicators and has never been tested to any standard, a point Spiritualist writers themselves usually concede.
How long does a soul stay in the Summerland?
Spiritualist teaching gives no fixed term, because movement between spheres depends on the soul's own development rather than on elapsed time. Communicators describe periods of rest and adjustment after death, particularly for people who died suddenly or in confusion, followed by occupation and by service to newer arrivals. Some accounts have souls remaining near the earth sphere for long stretches to help the living. None of it is dated, and Spiritualist writers avoid putting numbers on it.
Do Spiritualists believe the dead can see the living?
Yes, though with limits. Spiritualist teaching holds that the departed can turn attention toward people they loved and are drawn by strong feeling rather than by watching continuously. The common pastoral reassurance is that the dead are not spectators of everything a person does, which is a fear many bereaved sitters bring to a first reading. Distance in the Summerland is described as a matter of sympathy rather than of space.
What do Spiritualists say happens to children who die?
Spiritualist literature holds that children continue to grow and are cared for on the other side, frequently by relatives who died earlier, and that they can be met later as the adults they became. This teaching had obvious pastoral force in a century of high infant mortality, and it directly contradicted Calvinist anxieties about unbaptized infants. Spiritualists present it as testimony from communicators rather than as doctrine argued from any text.
Why did Spiritualism split into Christian and non-Christian branches?
Spiritualism split over Jesus, and the division was present from the movement's first decade. One camp read the phenomena as the fulfillment of the New Testament, with the apostolic gifts restored and Christ still at the middle of everything. The other read them as proof that the churches had been wrong about nearly everything, and wanted a religion with no Bible in it. Both camps built institutions that still exist. In Britain the Spiritualists' National Union, incorporated in 1901 out of a national federation of churches formed at the start of the 1890s, took the non-Christian line: its Seven Principles name God but never name Christ, and members may hold whatever view of Jesus they like. The Greater World Christian Spiritualist Association, founded in London in 1931 as the Greater World Christian Spiritualist League by the journalist Winifred Moyes on teachings she attributed to a guide called Zodiac who first spoke at her home circle in 1921, took the other line and asks its churches to accept Jesus as Master and Teacher. The Spiritualist Association of Great Britain, founded in 1872 as the Marylebone Spiritualist Association and carrying its present name since 1960, has stayed broadly non-denominational. American practice runs the same way, with the National Spiritualist Association of Churches opening on Infinite Intelligence while Christian Spiritualist bodies keep the cross on the wall.
A third stream is easy to miss from Britain. The Black Spiritual Church movement in the United States traces to Mother Leafy Anderson, who founded the Eternal Life Christian Spiritualist Church in Chicago in 1913 and relocated to New Orleans around 1920. Its congregations combined Spiritualist mediumship with Pentecostal worship, Catholic imagery and, in New Orleans, devotion to the Sauk leader Black Hawk, whom Anderson named as her own guide. Hans Baer's The Black Spiritual Movement: A Religious Response to Racism, first published in 1984, is the standard scholarly treatment. These churches used the word Spiritual rather than Spiritualist, kept Christ firmly in place, and were largely ignored by the white national organizations of the period. Elsewhere the dividing line hardened over rebirth as much as over Jesus, since the French Spiritist tradition founded on Allan Kardec's work made reincarnation compulsory while Anglo-American bodies refused to legislate on it and still refuse. What the two traditions share and where they part company is covered in Reincarnation: How Different Traditions Describe Rebirth.
What is the difference between the SNU and the Greater World?
Jesus is the difference. The Spiritualists' National Union works from the Seven Principles, which name God but never Christ, and admits members of any religious background or none. The Greater World Christian Spiritualist Association asks its churches and its members to accept Jesus as Master and Teacher. Both bodies run churches, train mediums and hold public demonstrations. What a visitor notices first is the hymn book and the wording of the prayers.
Do Christian Spiritualists believe in the resurrection?
Christian Spiritualists generally affirm the resurrection of Jesus while reading it as the strongest recorded instance of survival rather than as a unique breach of natural law. On that reading the empty tomb and the appearances belong in the same category as modern spirit manifestation, which is precisely the interpretation that mainstream churches reject. Bodily resurrection at the end of time carries little weight, since Spiritualist teaching has souls continuing immediately.
Do mainstream churches accept Spiritualism?
No. The Catholic Church prohibits consulting mediums, and most Protestant denominations discourage it, usually citing the prohibitions in Deuteronomy and Leviticus. The most interesting exception is a Church of England committee appointed by Archbishop Cosmo Gordon Lang in 1937, whose majority report of 1939, signed by seven of its ten members, was broadly sympathetic to Spiritualist claims. Neither the majority nor the minority report was published at the time, and the majority text reached the public in 1948 through the Spiritualist paper Psychic News.
How did Spiritualism connect to abolition, temperance and women's suffrage?
Spiritualism grew up inside the American reform movement and shared its people, its halls and its newspapers. Ann Braude's Radical Spirits, published in 1989, argued that Spiritualism formed a major and perhaps the major vehicle for spreading women's rights ideas in mid-nineteenth-century America, and the mechanism was practical: a woman speaking in trance was understood not to be speaking on her own authority, which let her hold a platform that no pulpit and few lecture circuits would have given her. Hundreds did exactly that. Cora L. V. Scott was filling halls in her teens. Achsa W. Sprague of Plymouth Notch, Vermont, born in 1827, lectured across the northern states until her death in 1862 at thirty-four, mixing spirit messages with abolition and prison reform. Abolitionists were present from the first year, including Amy and Isaac Post of Rochester, Hicksite Quakers who took the Fox sisters into their house in 1848 and helped arrange the first public demonstrations in the city. Amy Post was among the signers of the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments that same summer; Isaac Post became a medium himself and published Voices from the Spirit World in 1852. Sojourner Truth lived from 1857 to 1867 at Harmonia, a Quaker and Spiritualist village outside Battle Creek, Michigan. Paschal Beverly Randolph, born free in New York City in 1825, lectured as a Spiritualist trance medium, helped recruit Black soldiers for the Union army, and taught freedpeople in Louisiana. Temperance ran through the same circuits, often arriving as advice from the other side.
Suffrage and Spiritualism overlapped through individual biography rather than formal alliance, and the overlap eventually cost both sides. Victoria Woodhull, elected president of the American Association of Spiritualists in 1871 and the first woman to run for the United States presidency in 1872, used the Spiritualist platform to argue for free love as well as for the vote. The scandal that followed drove respectable members out, helped break the national organization, and gave suffrage leaders a reason to put distance between themselves and the movement. Isabella Beecher Hooker, one of the era's prominent suffragists, remained an active Spiritualist through it all. In Britain the politics were Owenite and secularist before they were feminist: Robert Owen announced his conversion in 1853 at the age of eighty-two, and Alfred Russel Wallace combined Spiritualism with land nationalization and support for votes for women. For how trance lecturing was performed and what became of the practice, see Channeling: How It Works, Famous Cases and How to Assess Claims.
Was every Spiritualist an abolitionist?
No, and the movement's reform reputation flattens a messier picture. Spiritualism spread into the American South and into conservative households as readily as into reform circles, and plenty of sitters wanted comfort rather than politics. What is fair to say is that the movement's leadership, its papers and its lecture circuit leaned heavily antislavery, and that Southern clergy attacked it partly for that reason.
Which suffrage campaigners were Spiritualists?
Victoria Woodhull and Isabella Beecher Hooker are the clearest cases, both active in Spiritualist organizations while campaigning for the vote, and Amy Post of Rochester belongs on the list as a signer of the Seneca Falls declaration who hosted the earliest public sittings. Many other suffrage figures attended sittings without joining anything. Attributing Spiritualist membership to leaders who merely sat at a table once is a common and avoidable error.
How did temperance fit into Spiritualist practice?
Temperance reached Spiritualism twice over. It came through the reformers who joined, and through the messages themselves, which regularly counseled abstinence. Some circles taught that alcohol coarsened the sensitivity a medium needs, and that drunkenness left a soul earthbound and still attached to its old appetites after death. Spiritualist halls doubled as temperance meeting rooms across the northern states, and the two causes shared subscribers and speakers for decades.
What laws have governed Spiritualist practice, and what changed in 1951 and 2008?
British law prosecuted mediums under statutes written for other purposes until 1951, and has handled them under consumer law since 2008. The Witchcraft Act of 1735 abolished the crime of witchcraft and replaced it with the offense of pretending to exercise witchcraft, sorcery, enchantment or conjuration, wording that prosecutors were still using against mediums two centuries later. Section 4 of the Vagrancy Act of 1824 was the commoner tool: professing to tell fortunes or using subtle craft to deceive made a person a rogue and vagabond, and a paid clairvoyant fitted the description. The Fraudulent Mediums Act of 1951 repealed the 1735 Act, cut back the 1824 wording so it no longer reached spiritualistic mediums, and put in their place a narrower offense aimed at anyone who fraudulently purported to act as a medium or to exercise telepathy or clairvoyance, but only with intent to deceive and only for reward. Sincere belief became a defense, which is what Spiritualist campaigners had wanted for decades. The 1951 Act was itself repealed in 2008, when the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations came into force and folded mediumship into general rules against misleading commercial practice.
The practical effect of the 2008 change caught the movement off guard. The Fraudulent Mediums Act had required prosecutors to prove dishonest intent, a high bar that made convictions rare and made the statute feel protective. The consumer regulations that replaced it turn on whether a commercial practice misleads an average consumer, with no need to show the trader knew the claim was false, and they moved enforcement from the police to trading standards officers. Spiritualist organizations protested, and some mediums began attaching notices describing demonstrations as being for entertainment purposes only, wording the Spiritualists' National Union disliked precisely because it concedes the point the religion exists to assert. United States law never had a single statute of this kind. Municipal ordinances against fortune telling were the usual instrument, and Spiritualist churches frequently obtained exemption as religious bodies. In 1985 the California Supreme Court struck down the city of Azusa's ban in Spiritual Psychic Science Church of Truth v. City of Azusa, 39 Cal.3d 501, holding that fortune telling does not forfeit the free speech guarantee of the state constitution merely because it is paid for.
Was anyone actually convicted under the Witchcraft Act in the twentieth century?
Yes. The best known case is the conviction of the Scottish materialization medium Helen Duncan at the Old Bailey in 1944, which produced a nine-month prison sentence and became the campaigning cause behind the 1951 reform. A second medium, Jane Rebecca Yorke of east London, was convicted under the same statute later that year and fined. The trial, the wartime context and the evidence are set out in Mediumship: How Mediums Describe Contacting the Dead. Prosecutions under the older statute were unusual by then, which is part of why this one caused an outcry.
Can a medium be prosecuted in Britain today?
Yes, though not for mediumship as such. A medium who takes payment while making claims that mislead an average consumer can be pursued under the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations, and one who obtains money by deliberate deception can be charged with fraud under the Fraud Act 2006. Sincere practice offered honestly is lawful. Enforcement in practice concentrates on people who target the bereaved or the seriously ill.
Why do mediums use entertainment-only disclaimers?
Because a disclaimer is the cheapest available answer to consumer law, telling a paying audience that no factual claim is being made and therefore that nothing can be misleading. Spiritualist bodies dislike the wording, since a religion whose central assertion is that communication genuinely occurs undercuts itself by calling the demonstration entertainment. Church services generally avoid the phrase, while commercial theater tours and psychic fairs use it routinely.
Why did Spiritualism decline after its peak, and how many Spiritualists are there now?
Spiritualism shrank from a mass enthusiasm to a small denomination over roughly a century, and is now counted in tens of thousands rather than millions. Peak-era numbers were never properly counted. Contemporary claims ran from a few tens of thousands to eleven million American adherents, the largest figures attached to the late 1860s and 1870s rather than to the first decade, and they were pushed by advocates and by hostile clergy for opposite reasons. None of them rest on anything a statistician would accept. The shape of the curve is clearer than the figures: rapid growth through the 1850s, damage from fraud exposures and the free-love controversy in the 1870s, a sharp revival after the First World War and the influenza pandemic of 1918 as the bereaved arrived in enormous numbers, then steady contraction from the 1930s onward. Present size is easier to state, at least in Britain. Roughly thirty-nine thousand people wrote in Spiritualist on the 2011 census of England and Wales, one of the larger entries outside the main world religions. On the 2021 census the figure was 33,134, a drop of about fifteen percent over a decade in which the population grew. That entry also carried the oldest median age of any of the larger write-in groups, fifty-four years, fourteen above the population as a whole, which tells you as much about the movement's prospects as the headline number does. The Spiritualists' National Union supports around three hundred affiliated churches and centers, most of them small. In the United States the National Spiritualist Association of Churches, formed in 1893, still lists member churches and summer camps but publishes no membership total, so the American figure cannot be stated with confidence. The historic camps at Lily Dale in New York, whose association bought its ground in 1879, and Cassadaga in Florida, incorporated in December 1894 by the medium George P. Colby, still run summer seasons.
Four things drained the movement, and only one of them is the fraud everybody remembers. The first is institutional weakness by design: a religion that refuses creeds, distrusts hierarchy and locates authority in the private circle has little to hold a second generation with. The second is competition for its own ideas. Theosophy from 1875, New Thought after it, and eventually the New Age absorbed the audience for spiritual experiment while offering more elaborate systems, and Pentecostal churches offered healing and direct contact with the divine inside Christianity. The third is that the war-widow surge was situational. Congregations that swelled in 1919 emptied as those mourners died, and no equivalent shock replaced them. The fourth is that the question was professionalized away. Once psychical research moved into laboratories and statistics, the church demonstration stopped counting as evidence in anyone's eyes but its own, and Spiritualism lost the scientific standing its self-description had been built on.
When was Spiritualism at its largest?
Two peaks stand out, and the first was the larger. Through the 1850s and 1860s American home circles spread faster than anyone could count, carried by a Spiritualist press that reached well past the congregations: the Spiritual Telegraph in New York from 1852, edited by Samuel Byron Brittan and Charles Partridge, and the Banner of Light in Boston from 1857, which ran for roughly half a century. The second peak, from about 1916 to the mid 1920s, was smaller but far better organized. It built the institutions. The first built the ideas.
What happened to Spiritualism after the First World War?
It boomed, then thinned out. Bereaved families filled halls across Britain, Arthur Conan Doyle and Oliver Lodge gave the movement respectable public faces, and new churches opened in industrial towns. The surge also drew commercial operators and a wave of exposures that hardened press hostility. By the 1930s attendance was falling, and the churches founded in those years became the small, aging congregations that make up much of the movement today.
Are Spiritualist churches still opening?
A few, though closures outnumber them in Britain, where many congregations own aging buildings and have memberships in the dozens. Growth now tends to happen outside church structures altogether, through independent mediums, online demonstrations and psychic fairs, which reach far more people than a Sunday service does. Whether that counts as the religion surviving or dissolving into a general market is argued inside the movement itself.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do Spiritualists believe in God?
Most Spiritualists believe in God, though the movement leaves the definition open and admits members who would not use the word. The Spiritualists' National Union names the Fatherhood of God as its first principle, usually explained as the creative source of everything rather than as a personal father figure. American practice prefers Infinite Intelligence, the phrase that opens the National Spiritualist Association of Churches declaration, chosen partly to accommodate members whose picture of divinity is impersonal. No Spiritualist body requires assent to a doctrine of God as a condition of membership.
Do Spiritualists believe in heaven and hell?
Spiritualists reject heaven and hell as places of permanent reward and punishment. Their afterlife is graded rather than divided: a person arrives in the condition their character has produced, stays free to change it, and moves upward as they do. Suffering after death is treated as the natural result of what a person did, felt as self-knowledge rather than imposed as a sentence, and none of it is final. The American declaration puts the point directly, affirming that the doorway to reformation is never closed against any human soul here or hereafter.
Do Spiritualists believe in reincarnation?
Spiritualists are divided on reincarnation, and their main organizations deliberately decline to rule on it. The Seven Principles say nothing about rebirth, so a British Spiritualist may accept it, reject it or ignore it without conflict with the union. French and Brazilian Spiritism, which grew from the same phenomena, made reincarnation a doctrinal requirement, and that is the sharpest single difference between the two traditions. Communicators themselves are reported to disagree, which Spiritualist writers treat as evidence that nobody on either side has settled it.
Is Spiritualism the same thing as spirituality?
Spiritualism and spirituality are different things that share a root word. Spiritualism is a specific organized religion with churches, ordained ministers, printed principles, training standards for mediums and a founding period in the nineteenth century. Spirituality is a general disposition toward meaning and inner life that requires no membership, no doctrine and no institution. A person can be deeply spiritual and reject every Spiritualist claim, and a Spiritualist may treat the religion as a matter of demonstrated fact rather than of feeling. The capital S is doing real work.
Do Spiritualists have a holy book or scripture?
Spiritualism has no scripture and no canonical text, which is a deliberate position rather than an oversight. Authority in the religion rests on present evidence, so a book counts only as far as its contents can be checked. A few books are treated as near-classics without binding anyone: Andrew Jackson Davis on the spheres, Emma Hardinge Britten's histories of the movement, and various volumes of teaching received by nineteenth-century automatic writers. Christian Spiritualist churches use the Bible, while non-Christian bodies may quote it without granting it authority.
Was Arthur Conan Doyle a Spiritualist?
Arthur Conan Doyle was a committed Spiritualist and the movement's most famous public advocate. He had sat at tables and read psychical research since the 1880s but declared himself publicly in 1916, after which he wrote The New Revelation in 1918, The Vital Message in 1919, The Wanderings of a Spiritualist in 1921 and a two-volume History of Spiritualism in 1926, and lectured on the subject in Australia, the United States and South Africa. He spent much of his last fifteen years and a great deal of his own money on the cause, and his defense of mediums whom conjurers had exposed cost him credibility with admirers of Sherlock Holmes.
Why is Spiritualism sometimes called Modern Spiritualism?
Modern Spiritualism names the movement that began in upstate New York in 1848, distinguishing it from the far older belief that the dead can be contacted. Spiritualists use the qualifier to concede that spirit communication is ancient while claiming their own version is new in method: organized, repeatable, open to anyone and offered as evidence rather than as revelation. Emma Hardinge Britten fixed the usage with her 1870 book Modern American Spiritualism, and British union documents still use the phrase in formal contexts today.
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