For years, self-appointed prophets have attempted to upend the American way of life. Do they ever succeed?
Most people have never heard of Cyrus Teed, which is a shame. He was born in Trout Creek, New York, in 1839. As a boy, he worked along the Erie Canal, experiencing some of the worst labor conditions that nineteenth-century America had to offer. As Adam Morris recounts in a new book, “,” Teed soon became a staunch anti-capitalist, and he spent much of his life trying to abolish wage labor entirely. This didn’t prevent him from pursuing a number of business ventures.
Wilkinson denounced war and slavery, and her burgeoning flock was largely led by women. Her public image was helped by the fact that she was a skilled horseman, physically indomitable as she ventured into Revolutionary War zones to proclaim the nearness of the End Times.
It’s true that America was shaped by extreme religious movements. Every November, we celebrate the seventeenth-century Puritans who arrived at our shore seeking religious liberty. We tend to forget that these Puritans weren’t oppressed because they were religious; they were oppressed because they were fanatics. They fled Europe to build a “city upon a hill,” a new and “primitive” Church in which equality reigned and private property was abolished.
Early in his career, Father Divine was arrested in rural Georgia. He refused to give his real name and was booked as “John Doe, alias God.” This soon became his joke on everyone. After declaring himself “fully attuned to the Christ Consciousness,” Divine started driving around in a Cadillac, accompanied by young women who scribbled down everything he said.
Father Divine died in the mid-nineteen-sixties, but not before a student minister from the highly segregated state of Indiana came calling. The power, the people hanging on Divine’s every word—the future founder of Jonestown liked what he saw. This may be Father Divine’s most damning legacy: he gave us the Reverend Jim Jones.
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