The Kingdom of Matthias: A Story of Sex and Salvation in 19th-Century America. - book reviews

Having spent decades mapping out the histories of a variety of previously neglected groups, it seems that U.S. social historians are finally beginning to regard seriously one of the most marginalized subgroups in their own mental landscape. Social historians are finally beginning to pay attention to American evangelicals. Focusing their attention on the great age of democratic revivals in America, the First and Second Great Awakenings, historians have begun to coax rich meaning out of both these revivals and the heady brew of social and political ferment they both spawned and grew out of. With a spate of books in the last ten or so years, a number of talented scholars have thus begun to map out what might be called a "New Evangelical History."

Now two of the foremost contributors to this new evangelical historiography have testified to the developing maturity of this field by offering an intriguing text located not on its center but on its margins. For that is where, argue Paul Johnson and Sean Wilentz, the Kingdom of Matthias was located - beyond the edge of religious respectability. While arising in the same reservoirs of religious disquiet that gave birth to the new evangelicals, Matthias' religious vision developed not in harmony with the larger movement, but in opposition. Larger currents of this opposition gave voice to a counter movement of exporters and prophets, some of whom helped to create denominations, such as the Millerites and the Campbellites; other anti-evangelical dissenters, such as the Mormons, launched separate religious movements altogether. Still farther out in the anti-evangelical stratosphere lay the weird, cranky realm of Father Matthias. In this world, Wilentz and Johnson have hung a marvelous tale that not only knits together some of the major interstices of the national scandal it became - salvation, sex, murder - but also reveals much about the sexual and economic underpinnings of nineteenth-century American evangelicalism.

The book reads much like a novel, partly due to the authors' ability to anchor their story in the lives of several central characters. Thus we meet, first of all, Elijah Pierson, who followed a trajectory typical of many of the enthusiastic followers of revivalist Charles E. Finney, before his religious dedication spun him into orbit around a stranger force. Son of a wealthy farmer and strict Calvinist in New Jersey, by his early twenties Pierson had become a prospering young New York City businessman. Like other young entrepreneurs, he increasingly immersed himself in the new evangelical subculture, demonstrating increased levels of commitment to its sabbatarian campaigns, missions to African Americans, Jews and prostitutes, and especially to the feminized strata of the Female Missionary Society. By his thirties, Pierson was a leading crusader in the intensely spiritual, perfectionist circles of New York City's radical evangelical fringe, a position cemented by his marriage to one of the most pious, perfectionist women of them all. Her early death - partly due to her fasting and self-abandoning prayer - shattered Pierson. His public and failed attempt to raise her from the dead further unhinged his precarious mental framework until it was reset, along different lines, by Robert Matthews.

Like Pierson, the future prophet had originated in a rural childhood governed by strict Calvinist patriarchy, and had also gravitated, as a young artisan, toward the more gentle and feminized subculture of the new evangelicals. Yet in contrast to Pierson's gentle demeanor, Matthews' angry, dissolute personality precluded his acceptance in such circles. Stung by his bitter personal attacks and by his reputation for spousal abuse, elders at a prominent Presbyterian church rejected Matthews' application for membership, while opening their arms to his suffering wife and children. For Matthews, this humiliation proved to be the final straw. Playing with the same materials of religious patriarchy that Joseph Smith and Brigham Young would utilize more successfully, in 1832 Matthews arrived in New York City, announcing his new identity as Father Matthias, Prophet of God the Father. In contrast to the pretensions of the smug, evangelical entrepreneurs, the new messiah had come, he screamed, to build the one true church of God.

In the frenzied periphery of metropolitan New York evangelicalism, the new prophet found ready elements necessary for the realization of his vision. Quickly he achieved complete mastery over Elijah Pierson and other troubled souls, and gained a following of fascinating religious enthusiasts that Johnson and Wilentz present in vivid detail: the wily Anne Folger, who would ultimately seduce both the prophet and his patriarchal vision; her cuckolded husband Benjamin, a wealthy evangelical entrepreneur; and perhaps most intriguing, a mystic ex-slave named Isabella Van Wagenen, whom many historians have come to know under a different name and guise. For their own reasons, such individuals were drawn to the prophet's peculiar teachings. As the authors describe it, this teaching was rooted in two thrusts. The new cultic teachings, dress, diet, and other practices expressed a working-class hatred of the materialistic, respectable, commercial ethos of evangelicalism. Matthews' misogynist patriarchy likewise targeted the evangelical elevation of female domesticity, trumpeting instead the commands of proper manhood that Matthews had idealized from his rural childhood.