Abstract: Grainger assesses the contributions of Cross’s Burned-over District to the study of American religious history, focusing on the concept of “ultraism,” which Cross defined as “a combination of activities, personalities, and attitudes creating a condition of society which could foster experimental doctrines.” Grainger connects ultraism to the longer history of enthusiasm in western Christianity to argue that Cross mistakenly reads the period of ultraism’s influence as short lived, falling into decline after the mid-century. Had Cross written his work twenty years later, Grainger argues, he may have come to rather different conclusions. From the vantage of the 1940s, Mormonism may have appeared the most significant religious invention of the Burned-over District. In contrast, Grainger argues for the importance of Spiritualism, which garners significantly less attention in Cross’s work. While Spiritualist denominations remained small compared to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, these formal metrics fail to account for Spiritualism’s transformative impact as a diffuse cultural force. This includes its influence on the movement for women’s rights, popular views of heaven, and a range of new religious movements, including Theosophy, which was a significant influence on the New Age movement of the 1970s. Ultimately, ultraism’s impact on American cultural life may be felt most in the surge of popularity in “spiritual but not religious” which has led Americans to search for spiritual meaning outside of religious institutions, an outcome that Cross could not have imagined from his early 20th-century vantage point.
Brett Grainger (Fri,) studied this question.