The Village Enlightenment in America : Science and the Emergence of New Religious Ideas, 1830 - 1860
University of California, Santa Barbara
1996
Ph.D. diss.
Later published by the University of Illinois Press, 2000. "The period between 1830 and 1860 in the United States was a time when popular enthusiasm for science and for new religious ideas was high. In fact, the interaction between religious and scientific ideas during this period was significant and the many attempts at bringing the two together provides an important counterexample to the common notion that religion and science are necessarily in conflict. The new religious movements that began during those years, Mormonism, spiritualism, and mind-cure (later known as New Thought), effectively used popular science and a popular philosophy of science called Baconianism to lend their movements credibility and religious authority. This study focuses on one person in each movement who was especially important in attempting to bring science, philosophy, and new religious ideas together into one conceptual package: Orson Pratt (Mormonism), Robert Hare (spiritualism), and Phineas Parkhurst Quimby (the mind-cure movement). Although each worked on behalf of different movements, Pratt, Hare, and Quimby held a number of fundamental ideas in common. Most important among these was a materialist cosmology that was derived from the traditional Enlightenment pillars of Reason and Nature interpreted in new ways for common folk in America. I propose the rubric of the "village Enlightenment" to describe the ways in which Americans, such as Pratt, Hare, and Quimby, used traditional Enlightenment concepts in new contexts and in new combinations to construct or validate new religious world views. All three men became convinced that their scientific way of looking at religious truth was the key to bringing harmony to every aspect of human life and the cosmos. In addition, they considered the answers that they gave to the problems of science, philosophy, theology, and society to be beyond doubt because the answers were based on scientific demonstration or self-evident truths and not on the "error" and "opinion" upon which traditional Christian views were based." [Author's abstract]