New religious movements in the United States
[1] Prior to the American Civil War, new movements included Mormonism, led by a prophet; Adventism, which used biblical scholarship to predict the Second Coming of Jesus; New Thought, which promised that mental powers could provide health and success; and Spiritualism, which offered communication with ghosts or spirits.
Tenskwatawa denounced Euro-American settlers, calling them offspring of the Evil Spirit, and led a purification movement that promoted unity among Native Americans.
[15][16] According to court records, Smith said "he had a certain stone which he had occasionally looked at to determine where hidden treasures in the bowels of the earth were; that he professed to tell in this manner where gold mines were a distance under ground".
Miller initially seems to have thought that Christ's Second Coming was still going to take place—that "the year of expectation was according to prophecy; but...that there might be an error in Bible chronology, which was of human origin, that could throw the date off somewhat and account for the discrepancy.
Spiritualism flourished for a half century without canonical texts or formal organization, attaining cohesion through periodicals, tours by trance lecturers, camp meetings, and the missionary activities of accomplished mediums.
Their first lodge was established in San Francisco in 1861, and it remains the oldest Rosicrucian organization in the United States, dating back to the era of the American Civil War.
[citation needed] In addition to his work as a trance medium, Randolph trained as a doctor of medicine and wrote and published both fictional and instructive books based on his theories of health, sexuality, Spiritualism, and occultism.
He wrote more than fifty works on magic and medicine, established an independent publishing company, and was an avid promoter of birth control during a time when it was largely against the law to mention[citation needed] this topic.
[citation needed] In 1873, Russian immigrant Helena Blavatsky came to the United States and became involved in the Spiritualist movement, rising to public attention as a spirit medium.
Blavatsky claimed to have encountered a group of spiritual adepts, the "Masters of the Ancient Wisdom", who sent her to Shigatse, Tibet, where they trained her to develop a deeper understanding of the synthesis of religion, philosophy, and science.
Associating it closely with the esoteric doctrines of Hermeticism and Neoplatonism, In 1880, she and Olcott moved to India, where the Society was allied to the Arya Samaj, a Hindu reform movement.
[citation needed] Although opposed by the British colonial administration, Theosophy spread rapidly in India but experienced internal problems after Blavatsky was accused of producing fraudulent paranormal phenomena.
[70] About 1870, Charles Taze Russell and his father established a group with a number of acquaintances to undertake an analytical study of the Bible and the origins of Christian doctrine, creed, and tradition.
Barbour and John Henry Paton visited Allegheny in March 1876 at Russell's expense so that he could hear their arguments and compare each side's conclusions in their studies.
[citation needed] Russell withdrew his financial support and started his own journal, Zion's Watch Tower and Herald of Christ's Presence, publishing his first issue in July 1879.
In the "Messiah Letters", Wovoka spoke of Jesus Christ's life on Earth and likened the foretold redemption of Native Americans to a biblical Judgement Day.
One scholar of religions, Tom Thatcher, cites James Mooney's Smithsonian-sponsored anthropological report to claim that Wovoka received his first vision while chopping wood for David Wilson in 1887.
[82] Conversely, historian Paul Bailey utilized Mooney's work along with interviews with Wovoka's contemporaries and interpreters to assert that he received the vision after entering a two-day trance, awaking in tears.
[83] Regardless, shortly after receiving the vision and its message, it moved quickly beyond his local Paiute community by word of mouth to Native American tribes further east, notably the Lakota.
As the movement spread across the American West, various interpretations of Wovoka's original message were adopted, notably by the Lakota Sioux living on the Pine Ridge reservation.
Historical evidence suggests that the unconventional practice of Christianity on the part of the Lakota tribe was largely responsible for the tensions between Whites and Native Americans leading up to the Battle at Wounded Knee.
US authorities challenged the theological views of the Ghost Dance movement and arguably sought conflict with the Lakota tribe as a means of condemning these practices.
[91] In 1905, William J. Seymour, the one-eyed 34-year-old son of freed slaves, was a student of well-known Pentecostal preacher Charles Parham and an interim pastor for a small holiness church in Topeka, Kansas.
[citation needed] In 1913 Noble Drew Ali founded the Canaanite Temple in Newark, New Jersey, before relocating to Chicago, where he gained a following of thousands of converts.
[84] Drew Ali taught that African Americans were all Moors, who he claimed were descended from the ancient Moabites (describing them as belonging to Northwest Africa as opposed to Moab as the name suggests).
[citation needed] Drew Ali crafted Moorish Science ideology from a variety of sources, a "network of alternative spiritualities that focused on the power of the individual to bring about personal transformation through mystical knowledge of the divine within".
His approach appealed to thousands of African Americans who had left severely oppressive conditions in the South through the Great Migration and faced struggles adapting in new urban environments.
Detractors accuse him of being a con man who used mystery and charisma to swindle poor Blacks by selling them new Muslim names and stirring up racial animosity.
[citation needed] In October 1947 he wrote to request psychiatric treatment: After trying and failing for two years to regain my equilibrium in civil life, I am utterly unable to approach anything like my own competence.
[115]Beginning in June 1948, the nationally syndicated wire service United Press ran a story on an American Legion-sponsored psychiatric ward in Savannah, Georgia which sought to keep mentally-ill war veterans out of jail.
