Out of the Ashes
My love of stories goes way back. Sunday afternoons, age 3 and not reading yet, I’d herd my mother to the sofa, lean against her and insist she read to me. Pregnant with my younger sister, she’d often drowse off before finishing. But she never explained. And I wanted the rest of the story. So, I’d punch her in the side to wake her. Still getting a handle on pronouncing “R’s,” I’d shout, “Wead, wead, wead” at her. Tiny hands, so I probably didn’t hit very hard. But children can be relentless, and my determination also goes way back. When my mother died, over 60 years later, my brother and I schlepped her ashes in rental cars across western and central New York State. Last family road trip, we called it. Growing up, we spent a lot of time in cars, getting from Point A to Point B and not dawdling to sightsee. These were never vacations. Summers were my dad’s primary baseball work time. And I started making up stories around what I spied out the car window.
The Burned Over District’s Unconventional Flame
Much of the territory we traversed was in what’s known as “the Burned Over District,” between the Finger Lakes and Lake Erie. Sounds like it goes back to a catastrophic fire. Right? Wrong. This refers to a different kind of heat, intense evangelizing fervor that washed over the area in the 1830s and 1840s. Frances Fitzgerald, in Cities on a Hill(c1982,1983) compared what happened in that small corner of the very new nation (Constitution only adopted in 1789) to the 1960s, when people/folks in my generation stripped away previous identities, reinvented ourselves, experimented to varying degrees with “sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll” and took the culture along for the ride. Fitting then that we’d have the maternal ashes strapped in the backseat.
The Tapestry of Reform Movements
I know that area well, grew up on the threshold, later lived in various communities there before moving south. And I still can’t fathom how a region that now appears bland, white-bread, and economically left behind could once have flamed that incandescently. Even more surprising that it could erupt into an astonishing array of religious/spiritual/social/sexual improvisations, adventures, experimentation and creativity. If Buzz Feed put together one of its lists ranking most fertile locales for generating new religions, the deserts of the Middle East would have to be on top, with three world faiths—Judaism, Christianity, Islam. But the rolling green hills of Western New York State wouldn’t be far behind, as shown by the lengthy roster below, along with their non-standard permutations: Mormons(polygamy); Millerites/Adventists (awaiting Second Coming in 1844, which failed to come off); the Spiritualist Fox Sisters (table knocking seances); Shakers (celibacy) who ran a communal farm and workshop-based small manufacturing; the Utopian Oneida Movement (free love, group marriage) who ran workshop-based small manufacturing; the Ebenezer Colonies, another Utopian group, that later moved to Iowa and became the Amana Colony, with workshop-based manufacturing. And, as if those weren’t enough, the area also gave rise to all the major reform movements of the 19th century: Abolition, Temperance, Feminism (the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention), Missionary Bible Societies (domestic and eventually reaching as far as China).
The Art of Storytelling and Collective Imagination
Starting a religion in the desert makes sense, plenty of space to go off to into the void to contemplate timeless mysteries. But was there an equivalent in pastoral New York State? And where did all the energy come from back then and how, where, and when did it go? Was it like a switch flipped? I’ve worked in economic development and given lots of thought to community motivation, will and morale. In his book Sapiens (c2015), Yuval Noah Harari described how “Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths…that exist only in people’s collective imagination….” My mother’s small city addressed contentious labor relations by developing a collective-bargaining method that became a national best-practice model, but then the issue turned moot as manufacturing jobs moved offshore. And because there weren’t many well-paid jobs, we had access to good, affordable, assisted living in her final year. Cascade effects ripple through local economies and change communities and the people in them.
Anthropological Perspectives on Cultural Distortions
Harari says the trick is to tell a compelling story people can believe and commit to. The founding fathers believed a new country into being, and infused it with visionary, utopian elements—something new and special in the world. Fitzgerald took her title from Pilgrim leader John Winthrop’s words to his community on their way to Plymouth Rock. And the founding prophets continued in that vein, believing whole new faiths into being and convincing others to join. They often favored isolating and keeping separate from the rest of the world, saved versus unsaved. These days, we lack such common/shared language. So, is there anything to learn from the district, as we strive to understand and navigate our own unsettled times?
The Dynamics of Transition in the 1830s and 1840s
The 1830s and 1840s were transitional times for the new country. It was the Age of [President Andrew] Jackson, as universal male suffrage toppled eastern elites from national leadership, and of the Second Great Awakening of ecstatic and emotional evangelical revivals and camp meetings swept across the almost entirely white and Protestant nation. The Burned Over District, still at the trailing edge of the frontier, had gone from self-sufficient family farms to boom economy as the new Erie Canal (Albany to Buffalo) connected and made it a breadbasket for coastal cities. That left a population of young men, displaced when farms specialized, often prone to drinking and “ruffianly” behavior. Local leaders, seeking to assert social control, brought in revival preachers to reach out to young people. New Light Theology proclaimed the reformed/reborn could attain godliness in this world, then join together to save others. With demand high and ordained, professional clergy still scarce, self-taught, lay evangelists like the prophets stepped forward.
Reimagining Beginnings in Contemporary Times
Fitzgerald applied anthropologists’ theories on social change that still resonate 40 years later. Anthony F.C. Wallace recognized the stress placed on individuals and communities by “disruption or disintegration of a more or less stable cultural system.” And he found “cultural distortions” arising when people’s mental images of society and culture also fall apart. Victor Turner coined the term “liminal or threshold states,” for times when existing systems may seem unworkable, broken, and individuals living within them consequently lose a strong sense of identity. Call it a kind of vertigo and consider those young men who lost their places on family farms. Important to remember too that the district had recently been a frontier area. And frontiers represent borders between known and unknown. Robert J. Kaiser described borderlands as performative “spaces of becoming” through which “socio-spatial categories or signifiers (e.g., identity, place, scale) materialize as things in the world, as essences ‘out there.’“ I picture the new prophets, beginning to find their voices, converting family members first, gathering other followers, materializing their creations in the world. And being a prophet could be risky. Joseph Smith, the Mormon prophet, was murdered on the way west. The Millerite founder was excommunicated, the Oneida founder prevented from preaching.
Fitzgerald questioned “why certain ideas that now seem bizarre or eccentric might have had equal weight with ideas that now seem to be truly prophetic or mainstream.” By prophetic and mainstream, she meant those serious reforms that started in the district and changed the country forever and for better. But 40 years later, it strikes me that bizarre and eccentric are in the eyes of the beholder and the times. So, much once considered outlandish has become mainstream, like vegetarianism, yoga, Buddhist practices. And to tell the truth, I find many of the details far less interesting than the district’s remarkable energy and confidence, that intrepid spirit of exploration, invention, beginner mind. We could use some of that in these times when so many of our existing systems are tired and dysfunctional. And perhaps we might begin with something like a “buzz session” approach, just letting ideas flow from anyone who wants to join in. Some might stick, others may not. And, judging by what happened in the district, who knows where new beginnings might take us?