Episode 45. Modern Spiritualism and the Church of England

SYNOPSIS

1848, the year which saw the term Christian Socialism coined in England in response to the Chartist agitations, saw another term coined in America in response to less explicable manifestations. Strange rapping sounds were heard in a remote New York State farmstead by two teenage girls, Maggie and Katie Fox, suggesting the innate possession by some (especially women) of occult powers to rouse and communicate with the dead. From such humble beginnings the democratic and potentially lucrative craze of modern “spiritualism” emerged.

Spiritualism took England by storm a few years later at exactly the time when the godfather of Christian Socialism, F. D. Maurice began challenging traditional church teachings about the afterlife. In their different ways, these two approaches undermined historic ideas of death, judgement, heaven and hell; of steady-state theology and an unbridgeable chasm between living and dead. Alternatively mocked or practiced by the public and endorsed or exposed by scientists and intellectuals, spiritualism laid out rival claims to the Church of England. Only the death-toll of the First World War forced a softening of church language as senior clergy borrowed from the consoling formulations of spiritualists with regard to the dead.

GUESTS

Since ordination in 1997, Georgina Byrne has ministered in the dioceses of Lichfield, London and Worcester, in the roles of vicar, bishop’s chaplain, dean of women’s ministry and director ordinands, and most recently as residentiary canon at Worcester Cathedral. She teaches doctrine and theology at the Queen’s Foundation, Birmingham. Modern Spiritualism and the Church of England, 1850-1939 was published by the Boydell Press in 2010.

Georgina’s interview with Simon Machin was recorded online on 4 April 2024.