Spiritualism as a Religion: Beliefs, the Seven Principles and Social History
By DailyDestiny Editorial Team
If you have lost someone and wondered what a Spiritualist church really believes about the dead, this guide explains it gently and honestly. Covers the Seven Principles, the Summerland, the Christian split, reform politics, the law on mediums and numbers today.
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What do Spiritualists actually believe?
Imagine you lost someone you love last year. The grief has softened a little, but some evenings you still talk to them in the kitchen. A friend mentions a Spiritualist church with a Sunday medium, and part of you wants to go while another part feels wary.
The short answer: Spiritualists believe the human personality survives death and can communicate with the living, usually through a medium. Everything else follows from those two claims. It is a real, organized faith, and it asks you to test its claims rather than simply believe them.
Survival is treated as a fact shown by evidence, not doctrine taken on authority, which is why a service ends with a demonstration instead of a blessing. The dead are not asleep, not awaiting resurrection, not fixed in final reward or punishment. They keep learning, working and changing in a world sorted by character, not geography.
With contact seen as ordinary, no priesthood stands between you and the spirit world. British and American bodies both center personal responsibility: no vicarious atonement, no forgiveness that cancels consequence, no hell. A Spiritualist owes honesty about evidence and decent conduct. Beyond that the tent is wide; two members may disagree about God, Jesus and rebirth.
If grief feels heavy, a grief counselor or doctor can walk beside you too, whatever you decide about Sunday.
People often expect hidden doctrines and find a short list of principles and a strong dislike of being told what to think. That is historical. The movement grew from home circles in the 1840s and 1850s, spread by newspapers and lecture tours, not seminaries, and its leaders had no wish to build another church that could expel them.
So members argue in public. Some hold a warm liberal Protestantism without the resurrection, some are effectively humanists who accept survival as natural fact, and some see Spiritualism as the empirical wing of a wider occult revival.
What reliably separates a Spiritualist from a sympathizer is the second claim: that communication actually happens, repeatably, and an ordinary person can check it. For the founding events of 1848 and how contact is 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 way to prove it; a ghost believer holds an opinion about a phenomenon. Spiritualism adds worship, a moral scheme built on personal responsibility, congregations, ordained ministers and training standards for mediums. That is why surveys on ghost belief tell you nothing about how many Spiritualists there are.
Do Spiritualists believe spirits can move physical objects?
Most today see spirit influence as chiefly mental: impressions, images and words in a medium's mind, not moving furniture. Physical phenomena loomed large in the nineteenth century and much less now, partly because exposures were damaging and partly because churches shifted to mental mediumship. A minority of home circles still sit for physical effects, a contested corner of the movement.
Is Spiritualism a form of ancestor worship?
No. The dead hold no power over the living and receive no offerings, prayers or veneration. You might ask a departed relative for reassurance the way you would a living friend, but it carries no obligation and gives no protection. Worship goes to God or Infinite Intelligence, and the dead are addressed as people, not powers.
What are the Seven Principles of Spiritualism and who wrote them?
If you walk into a British Spiritualist church, you will probably see these seven lines on the wall:
1. The Fatherhood of God 2. The Brotherhood of Man 3. The Communion of Spirits and the Ministry of Angels 4. The Continuous Existence of the Human Soul 5. Personal Responsibility 6. Compensation and Retribution Hereafter for all the Good and Evil Deeds done on Earth 7. Eternal Progress Open to every Human Soul
They are the doctrinal basis of the Spiritualists' National Union, Britain's largest Spiritualist body, printed in service books and on most affiliated church walls.
They are credited to Emma Hardinge Britten (1823 to 1899), an English trance speaker, editor and organizer on both sides of the Atlantic, who founded the Manchester paper The Two Worlds in 1887 and wrote the movement's first substantial history, Modern American Spiritualism, in 1870.
Britten said they came not from her but from the spirit of Robert Owen, the Welsh-born mill owner and socialist who became a Spiritualist in 1853 and died in 1858. Accounts usually date the message to 1871. For believers that matters: principles received through mediumship fit the religion's own account of where teaching comes from.
The union calls the seven principles, not a creed. It publishes interpretations, not a catechism, and does not require agreement for membership. That leaves room for argument.
Fatherhood of God is the sorest point. Many members read it as a creative source, not a gendered person, and some churches say Fatherhood and Motherhood aloud. Compensation and Retribution Hereafter sounds harsh, and is usually explained as a self-acting law, closer to consequence than sentencing, with no permanent penalty. Brotherhood of Man is taken to rule out racial and national exclusivity, one reason the nineteenth-century movement joined reform politics so readily.
American Spiritualists never adopted the seven. The National Spiritualist Association of Churches uses 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, not God the Father, and states outright that communication with the dead is a proven fact.
Who was Emma Hardinge Britten?
The movement's chief organizer and promoter. Born in Bethnal Green in east London, she worked as an actress and music teacher before reaching New York in 1856. Politics came with the mediumship, and she campaigned for Lincoln's re-election in 1864. She was a founding member of the Theosophical Society in 1875, then broke with it. Occultists still argue over who actually wrote Art Magic, the book she published in 1876.
Do all Spiritualist churches use the Seven Principles?
No. They belong to the Spiritualists' National Union and bodies that follow it, so a British church outside the union may use another statement or none. Christian Spiritualist churches use their own creeds naming Jesus. American congregations in the National Spiritualist Association of Churches use its nine-point Declaration, and independent churches worldwide often write their own.
What does Compensation and Retribution Hereafter mean?
That what you do follows you into the next world as a condition of your own character, not a judge's sentence. Spiritualist teachers describe it as a natural law, like gravity, without malice and without appeal. The key qualifier is the seventh principle: whatever a soul has earned, eternal progress stays open, so nothing is permanent.
Is Spiritualism a religion, a philosophy or a science?
You may be wondering whether this is faith or something you could check. Spiritualism says both, and more. The National Spiritualist Association of Churches defines it 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, not a boast.
The science is the claim that survival is shown by evidence anyone can examine: names, dates and details a medium had no ordinary way to know.
The philosophy is what follows for conduct once survival is granted: personal responsibility, consequences that travel with you, and progress with no deadline.
The religion gathers people on Sunday, ordains ministers, conducts weddings and funerals, and calls the source of things God or Infinite Intelligence.
Whether the science holds up is the movement's oldest quarrel with everyone else. Honestly, no demonstration of mediumship has been reproduced under conditions that would satisfy a working scientist. Legally and socially, though, courts, registrars and census forms have treated Spiritualism as a religion for well over a century.
The scientific claim drew serious scientists early and lost most of them. Alfred Russel Wallace, who reached natural selection independently, 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.
Oliver Lodge, a physicist central to early radio, was persuaded by sittings with the American medium Leonora Piper in 1889 and argued for survival for years before his son Raymond was killed at Ypres in 1915. His book about Raymond made him the most visible advocate; it did not convert him.
The Society for Psychical Research, founded in London in 1882 to examine such claims without prejudice, produced far more negative findings than positive and was unwelcome in Spiritualist rooms.
Modern skeptics usually explain accurate platform readings by cold reading and statistical guessing. A minority of researchers prefer thought-transference from the sitter, as set out in Telepathy: Claims, Experiments and How Practitioners Describe It. Spiritualists reply that neither covers the specific detail they say they routinely get.
Is Spiritualism legally recognized as a religion?
Yes, in Britain and the United States. British Spiritualist churches register buildings for worship and marriages, and Spiritualist bodies hold charitable status on religious grounds. American Spiritualist churches ordain ministers, incorporate as churches and are taxed as such. That settles questions of property, celebrancy and status, and nothing about whether the claims are true.
What evidence do Spiritualists offer for survival?
Evidential mediumship: names, occupations, illnesses, family nicknames and household details a medium is said to have had no way of learning. They also cite deathbed visions, apparitions seen at the moment of a death, and messages checked afterward that held up. Critics answer that this is gathered without controls and written down after verification, not 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 rule out ordinary explanations, and the nineteenth-century record holds repeated exposures of fraud. A church demonstration cannot control for prior research on sitters, hot reading, leading questions or an audience willing to fit a vague statement to a specific person. Spiritualists say lab conditions suppress the state mediums work in, which labs treat as an unfalsifiable defense.
What does Spiritualism teach about death, the Summerland and spiritual progression?
If you are grieving, this is probably the part you came for. Spiritualism teaches that death is a change of condition, not an ending. The person wakes in a world of the same general kind as this one, then progresses without limit and without a final judgment.
The first stage is most often called the Summerland, a term popularized by Andrew Jackson Davis (1826 to 1910), the Poughkeepsie seer whose harmonial writings gave the movement a cosmology before it had churches. Davis described rising spheres, each less material than the last, which souls move through as they become fit for them. The Summerland is the nearest to earth and the most earthlike: landscapes, houses, work, study and reunion with people you loved.
Nobody is sent there. Where you arrive is set by who you have become, which is what Spiritualists mean by compensation and retribution. Think of it less like a courtroom and more like a garden that grows whatever you planted. A cruel man is not punished so much as left with the company and capacity he built.
None of it is permanent. 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 far beyond Spiritualism. Theosophy built its own vocabulary of planes, and Gerald Gardner's Wicca took the word wholesale in the mid-twentieth century for a resting place between lives. So many people meet the term with no idea it came from a nineteenth-century American seer.
It also gets confused with something unrelated: 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 so appealing in its own century was what it took away. Calvinist New England had left a heaven 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. Can you imagine the relief?
The description of the spheres rests on the testimony of seers and communicators and has never been tested to any standard, as Spiritualist writers themselves usually admit.
How long does a soul stay in the Summerland?
No fixed term, since movement between spheres depends on the soul's growth, not elapsed time. Communicators describe rest and adjustment after death, especially for people who died suddenly or confused, followed by work and service to newer arrivals. Some accounts have souls staying near the earth sphere for long stretches to help the living. None of it is dated, and Spiritualist writers avoid numbers.
Do Spiritualists believe the dead can see the living?
Yes, with limits. The teaching holds that the departed can turn their attention toward people they loved, drawn by strong feeling, not watching constantly. The common reassurance is that the dead are not spectators of everything you do, a fear many grieving sitters bring to a first reading. Distance in the Summerland is described as a matter of sympathy, not space.
What do Spiritualists say happens to children who die?
Spiritualist literature holds that children keep growing and are cared for on the other side, often by relatives who died earlier, and can be met later as the adults they became. This comforted many in a century of high infant mortality and directly contradicted Calvinist fears about unbaptized infants. Spiritualists present it as testimony from communicators, not doctrine argued from a text.
Why did Spiritualism split into Christian and non-Christian branches?
Raised Christian and wondering if you would feel at home? It depends on the church, because Spiritualism split over Jesus within its first decade.
One camp read the phenomena as the New Testament fulfilled, the apostolic gifts restored and Christ still at the center. The other saw proof that the churches had been wrong about nearly everything and wanted a religion with no Bible in it. Both built institutions that still exist.
Spiritualists' National Union: incorporated in 1901 out of a national federation of churches formed in the early 1890s. Non-Christian: its Seven Principles name God but never Christ, and members may think what they like about Jesus.
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. It asks its churches to accept Jesus as Master and Teacher. This is the one for you if faith in Christ matters to you.
Spiritualist Association of Great Britain: founded in 1872 as the Marylebone Spiritualist Association, named as now since 1960, and broadly non-denominational.
In America, the National Spiritualist Association of Churches opens 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 moved to New Orleans around 1920. Its congregations blended 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 study. 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 time.
Elsewhere the line hardened over rebirth as much as Jesus. The French Spiritist tradition founded on Allan Kardec's work made reincarnation compulsory, while Anglo-American bodies refused to legislate on it and still do. For where the two traditions meet and part, see Reincarnation: How Different Traditions Describe Rebirth.
What is the difference between the SNU and the Greater World?
Jesus. The Spiritualists' National Union uses the Seven Principles, which name God but never Christ, and admits members of any religion or none. The Greater World Christian Spiritualist Association asks churches and members to accept Jesus as Master and Teacher. Both run churches, train mediums and hold public demonstrations. A visitor notices the hymn book and the wording of the prayers first.
Do Christian Spiritualists believe in the resurrection?
Generally yes, but they read Jesus' resurrection as the strongest recorded case of survival, not a unique break in natural law. That puts the empty tomb and the appearances in the same category as modern spirit manifestation, exactly the reading mainstream churches reject. Bodily resurrection at the end of time carries little weight, since souls are taught to continue immediately.
Do mainstream churches accept Spiritualism?
No. The Catholic Church prohibits consulting mediums, and most Protestant denominations discourage it, usually citing Deuteronomy and Leviticus. The interesting exception is a Church of England committee appointed by Archbishop Cosmo Gordon Lang in 1937, whose 1939 majority report, signed by seven of ten members, was broadly sympathetic. Neither report was published then; 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?
If you picture Spiritualism as dim parlors and nothing else, this may surprise you. It grew up inside the American reform movement, sharing its people, halls and newspapers.
Ann Braude's Radical Spirits, published in 1989, argued that Spiritualism was a major, perhaps the major, vehicle for women's rights ideas in mid-nineteenth-century America. A woman speaking in trance was understood not to speak on her own authority, which gave her a platform no pulpit and few lecture circuits would. Like a borrowed microphone, the spirit let her be heard.
Hundreds did it. Cora L. V. Scott filled 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.
Amy and Isaac Post of Rochester, Hicksite Quaker abolitionists, took the Fox sisters into their house in 1848 and helped arrange the first public demonstrations there. Amy signed the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments that summer; Isaac became a medium 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 trance medium, helped recruit Black soldiers for the Union army and taught freedpeople in Louisiana. Temperance ran through the same circuits, often as advice from the other side.
Suffrage and Spiritualism overlapped through individual lives, not formal alliance, and in the end it cost both. 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 the vote. The scandal drove respectable members out, helped break the national organization, and gave suffrage leaders reason to keep their distance. Isabella Beecher Hooker, a prominent suffragist, stayed an active Spiritualist through it all.
In Britain the politics were Owenite and secularist before feminist. Robert Owen announced his conversion in 1853 at 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 it, see Channeling: How It Works, Famous Cases and How to Assess Claims.
Was every Spiritualist an abolitionist?
No, and the reform reputation flattens a messier picture. Spiritualism spread into the American South and conservative homes as easily as reform circles, and many sitters wanted comfort, not politics. What is fair to say is that its leaders, papers and lecture circuit leaned heavily antislavery, and Southern clergy attacked it partly for that.
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. Amy Post of Rochester belongs too, as a Seneca Falls signer who hosted the earliest public sittings. Many other suffrage figures attended sittings without joining. Calling leaders Spiritualists because they sat at a table once is a common and avoidable mistake.
How did temperance fit into Spiritualist practice?
Twice over: through reformers who joined, and through the messages, which often counseled abstinence. Some circles taught that alcohol dulled the sensitivity a medium needs, and that drunkenness left a soul earthbound, still tied to its old appetites after death. Spiritualist halls doubled as temperance meeting rooms across the northern states, and the causes shared subscribers and speakers for decades.
What laws have governed Spiritualist practice, and what changed in 1951 and 2008?
Thinking of booking a paid reading? It helps to know what protects you. British law prosecuted mediums under statutes written for other purposes until 1951, and has handled them under consumer law since 2008.
Witchcraft Act 1735: abolished the crime of witchcraft and replaced it with the offense of pretending to exercise witchcraft, sorcery, enchantment or conjuration. Prosecutors were still using that wording against mediums two centuries later.
Vagrancy Act 1824, Section 4: the more common tool. Professing to tell fortunes or using subtle craft to deceive made you a rogue and vagabond, and a paid clairvoyant fitted.
Fraudulent Mediums Act 1951: repealed the 1735 Act, trimmed the 1824 wording so it no longer reached spiritualistic mediums, and created a narrower offense: fraudulently claiming to act as a medium or to use telepathy or clairvoyance, but only with intent to deceive and only for reward. Sincere belief became a defense, which campaigners had wanted for decades.
2008: the 1951 Act was repealed when the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations came into force, folding mediumship into general rules against misleading commercial practice.
The 2008 change caught the movement off guard. The 1951 Act had required proof of dishonest intent, a high bar that made convictions rare and the law feel protective. The new regulations ask whether a commercial practice misleads an average consumer, with no need to show the trader knew the claim was false, and moved enforcement from the police to trading standards officers.
Spiritualist organizations protested, and some mediums began labeling demonstrations as for entertainment purposes only. The Spiritualists' National Union disliked that wording precisely because it concedes the point the religion exists to assert.
United States law never had a single statute like this. Municipal bans on fortune telling were the usual tool, and Spiritualist churches often won 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 lose the state constitution's free speech protection just because it is paid for.
Was anyone actually convicted under the Witchcraft Act in the twentieth century?
Yes. The best known is the Scottish materialization medium Helen Duncan, convicted at the Old Bailey in 1944 and jailed for nine months, which became the rallying cause behind the 1951 reform. Jane Rebecca Yorke of east London was convicted under the same law later that year and fined. Mediumship: How Mediums Describe Contacting the Dead covers the trial, its wartime context and the evidence. Such prosecutions were unusual by then, which is partly why this one caused an outcry.
Can a medium be prosecuted in Britain today?
Yes, though not for mediumship as such. A paid medium whose claims mislead an average consumer can be pursued under the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations, and one who gets money by deliberate deception can be charged under the Fraud Act 2006. Sincere practice offered honestly is lawful. Enforcement focuses on people who target the bereaved or seriously ill.
Why do mediums use entertainment-only disclaimers?
Because it is the cheapest answer to consumer law: it tells a paying audience no factual claim is being made, so nothing can mislead. Spiritualist bodies dislike it, since a religion built on the claim that communication genuinely happens undercuts itself by calling it entertainment. Church services usually avoid the phrase; commercial theater tours and psychic fairs use it routinely.
Why did Spiritualism decline after its peak, and how many Spiritualists are there now?
If you visit a Spiritualist church today, you may find a small, older congregation. Over about a century the movement shrank from a mass enthusiasm to a denomination counted in tens of thousands.
Peak numbers were never properly counted. Claims ran from a few tens of thousands to eleven million American adherents, the biggest tied to the late 1860s and 1870s, pushed by advocates and hostile clergy for opposite reasons. None would satisfy a statistician.
The shape is clearer: fast 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 1918 influenza pandemic as grieving families poured in; then steady decline from the 1930s.
Britain is easier to measure. About 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. In 2021 it was 33,134, down about fifteen percent while the population grew. Its median age, fifty-four, was the oldest of the larger write-in groups and fourteen years above the population, which says as much about its future as the headline number.
The Spiritualists' National Union supports around three hundred churches and centers, most small. The American National Spiritualist Association of Churches, formed in 1893, lists churches and summer camps but no membership total. The historic camps at Lily Dale in New York, whose association bought its land 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 is the fraud everyone remembers.
First, weakness by design. A religion that refuses creeds, distrusts hierarchy and places authority in the private circle has little to hold a second generation.
Second, competition for its own ideas. Theosophy from 1875, then New Thought, and eventually the New Age drew the audience for spiritual experiment with more elaborate systems, while Pentecostal churches offered healing and direct contact with the divine inside Christianity.
Third, the war-widow surge was tied to its moment. Congregations that swelled in 1919 emptied as those mourners died, and nothing replaced them. Like a river after a flood, the water went back to its old banks.
Fourth, the question was professionalized away. Once psychical research moved into laboratories and statistics, church demonstrations stopped counting as evidence to anyone but believers, and Spiritualism lost the scientific standing its self-description was built on.
When was Spiritualism at its largest?
Two peaks stand out, and the first was larger. Through the 1850s and 1860s American home circles spread faster than anyone could count, carried by a press reaching far past the congregations: the Spiritual Telegraph in New York from 1852, edited by Samuel Byron Brittan and Charles Partridge, and Boston's Banner of Light from 1857, which ran about half a century. The second, roughly 1916 to the mid 1920s, was smaller but better organized. The first built the ideas; the second built the institutions.
What happened to Spiritualism after the First World War?
It boomed, then thinned. Bereaved families filled halls across Britain, Arthur Conan Doyle and Oliver Lodge gave it respectable public faces, and new churches opened in industrial towns. The surge also drew commercial operators and a wave of exposures that hardened the press against it. By the 1930s attendance was falling, and those churches became the small, aging congregations that make up much of the movement today.
Are Spiritualist churches still opening?
A few, though in Britain closures outnumber them; many congregations own aging buildings and count members in the dozens. Growth now mostly happens outside churches, through independent mediums, online demonstrations and psychic fairs, which reach far more people than a Sunday service. Whether that is the religion surviving or dissolving into a general market is argued inside the movement itself.
Questions people ask
Do Spiritualists believe in God?
Most do, though the definition is left open and members who avoid the word are welcome. The Spiritualists' National Union's first principle is the Fatherhood of God, usually explained as the creative source of everything, not a personal father figure. American practice prefers Infinite Intelligence, the opening phrase of the National Spiritualist Association of Churches declaration, chosen partly for members who see the divine as impersonal. No Spiritualist body requires belief in God for membership.
Do Spiritualists believe in heaven and hell?
Not as places of permanent reward and punishment. The afterlife is graded: you arrive in the condition your character produced, stay free to change, and rise as you do. Suffering after death is the natural result of what you did, felt as self-knowledge, not a sentence, and never final. The American declaration says the doorway to reformation is never closed against any human soul here or hereafter.
Do Spiritualists believe in reincarnation?
They are divided, and the main organizations deliberately do not rule on it. The Seven Principles say nothing about rebirth, so British Spiritualists may accept, reject or ignore it. French and Brazilian Spiritism, grown from the same phenomena, made reincarnation required doctrine, the sharpest difference between the two. Communicators are reported to disagree too, which Spiritualist writers take as a sign nobody has settled it.
Is Spiritualism the same thing as spirituality?
No, they only share a root word. Spiritualism is an organized religion with churches, ordained ministers, printed principles, training standards for mediums and a nineteenth-century founding. Spirituality is a general leaning toward meaning and inner life, with no membership, doctrine or institution. You can be deeply spiritual and reject every Spiritualist claim, and a Spiritualist may see the religion as demonstrated fact, not feeling.
Do Spiritualists have a holy book or scripture?
No, and on purpose. Authority 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 volumes of teaching received by nineteenth-century automatic writers. Christian Spiritualist churches use the Bible; non-Christian bodies may quote it without granting it authority.
Was Arthur Conan Doyle a Spiritualist?
Yes, its most famous public advocate. He had sat at tables and read psychical research since the 1880s and declared himself publicly in 1916. He wrote The New Revelation (1918), The Vital Message (1919), The Wanderings of a Spiritualist (1921) and a two-volume History of Spiritualism (1926), and lectured in Australia, the United States and South Africa. He gave much of his last fifteen years and his own money to the cause, and defending mediums exposed by conjurers cost him credibility with Sherlock Holmes fans.
Why is Spiritualism sometimes called Modern Spiritualism?
It names the movement begun in upstate New York in 1848, as distinct from the far older belief that the dead can be contacted. The word admits spirit contact is ancient while claiming a new method: organized, repeatable, open to anyone and offered as evidence, not revelation. Emma Hardinge Britten fixed the usage with her 1870 book Modern American Spiritualism, and British union documents still use it formally.
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Related topics: what do spiritualists believe, seven principles of spiritualism, is spiritualism a religion, spiritualist beliefs about the afterlife, summerland spiritualism, spiritualism and women's suffrage, fraudulent mediums act
