Mormons: The "Christians" Of The Burned Over District

We’ve had a couple of posts about the Church of Latter Day Saints, and conversation has naturally turned to the founder, Joseph Smith. He’s a fascinating character, by turns a con man and a sincere prophet. But to understand Joesph Smith requires understanding the world he was born into. That means understanding one of the oddest and most influential regions in American religious history: the Burned Over District. 

The Burned Over District is a nickname given by 20th Century historians to western and central New York. It comes from a quote by Charles Finney, the father of American revivalism, who explained in the 1870′s that the region had seen so many revivals in the previous decades that it no longer had any more “fuel” (the unconverted) to “burn” (convert). 

…Many of these pioneers were still in an in-between state amid the medieval world and the Enlightenment.  As one historian put it, they were “literate but not learned,” and they possessed many superstitions and beliefs in what we would now label as “occult.”

--VorJack

Few areas of the United States have seen the flowering of as many diverse enthusiasms and social and moral reforms as blossomed along the old Mohawk Trail and the early Erie Canal in New York State in the nineteenth century. As settlers poured into what had been the traditional lands of the Iroquois Nation, experiments of all kinds of a religious and of a social nature found a haven in these new lands. At one religious extreme were the celibate Shakers at Sodus Bay at Lake Ontario and then in Groveland in the valley to the east of the Genesee River, or the semi-celibate followers of Jemima Wilkinson, the purported re-incarnation of Christ in female form. At the other end of the social, religious, and moral scale was the creation of the Perfectionist Oneida Community where a form of free-love was established under the control of a Committee of Elders. 

In between these extremes, the religious effervescences gave the name of "The Burned Over District" to western New York. Just as a forest fire can sweep all before it, the religious and reforming urges swept their way across the Ontario Plain between Albany and Lake Erie, changing the religious and social approaches to life. There was, for example, Charles Grandison Finney who led the emotional religious revivals which affected town after town and village after village in the 1820s and 1830s. Next were the followers of Charles Miller who accepted his reading of the Bible to look forward to a day in October of 1843 when Jesus would re-appear and the End of Time would be at hand. Although time did not end in 1843, a new Adventist group of sects did develop from this prediction, and they continue to expect the imminent coming of the Day of Judgment in our own times. 

Another aspect of the religious impulse made manifest was the advent of the Mormon faith when the semi-literate Joseph Smith was told by the angel Moroni to unearth the golden plaques buried on a hill outside of Palmyra, New York, plaques which he claimed he deciphered from the "Reformed Egyptian Alphabet" to create a new religion. On a more secular note, outside of Rochester two young girls announced that they could communicate with the dead through knockings on the tables or the walls or the floors of the room in which their séances were held, a discovery which would lead to the Spiritualist Movement, now centered in Lily Dale in western New York. A form of Perfectionism inspired various groups to become as perfect as their Father in Heaven. On one hand this lead to the religious conversions at church or camp meeting revivals, or, at another extreme, to John Humphrey Noyes, the founder of the Oneida Community, who realized that he was free of sin and he and his disciples could never sin again, come what may, and thus they were free to enter into Complex Marriage where all in the Community were free to express their sexual love for one another.

--John H. Martin