Lydia Maria Child and the Eclectic Church of the Future

By Leigh E. Schmidt |  Edited by Gosia E. Sklodowska

As a nineteenth-century social reformer and writer, New Englander Lydia Maria Child (1802–1880) covered a lot of ground: woman’s equality, abolition, prison reform, historical fiction, children’s literature, and domestic advice. Expansive in her literary and political pursuits, Child brought that same range to her religious inquiries. Empathetic and cosmopolitan in her sensibilities, she wanted American Protestants to approach the various religions of the world with openness and appreciation, so much so that the church itself would be reconfigured in pluralized form. Once made aware of the harmonies discoverable within religious multiplicity, Christians would come to see other faiths as on an equal level with their own; spiritual insight could come as easily from the Buddha, Zoroaster, or Confucius as from Jesus. The Eclectic Church of the Future, she prophesied in 1871, “shall gather forms of holy aspiration from all ages and nations, and set them on high in their immortal beauty, with the sunlight of heaven to glorify them all.”[1]

Child was an exemplar of the Transcendentalist seeker. “The stern old faiths have all pulverized,” Ralph Waldo Emerson observed in a lecture on “Worship” in 1860. “‘Tis a whole population of gentlemen and ladies out in search of religions.”[2] Child shared in that wayfaring much of her life. Reared within Congregational orthodoxy, she drifted away from her family’s theological inheritance as a young woman. Her brother Convers Francis expressed his alienation from Calvinism by becoming a Unitarian minister and later joining the meetings of the Transcendental Club; if anything, his sister outdid his dissent. Unitarianism, she once remarked, had become for many “a mere half-way house, where spiritual travelers find themselves well accommodated for the night, but where they grow weary of spending the day.” Her religious exploration, like Emerson’s, would burst the bounds of Unitarian churchgoing.[3]      

Early in her religious investigations Child was mostly content exploring the mystical edges of Protestant piety, including sustained engagement with the visionary Emanuel Swedenborg. But seeing the ecclesiastical boundary-keeping emergent among some of Swedenborg’s most dedicated followers, Child eventually moved on. It was in the early 1840s, when editing the National Anti-Slavery Standard in New York City, that she became more fully aware of religious variety. “Almost without effort, one may happen to find himself, in the course of a few days,” Child remarked of the city, “beside the Catholic kneeling before the Cross, the Mohammedan bowing to the East, the Jew veiled before the ark of the testimony, the Baptist walking into the water, the Quaker keeping his head covered in the presence of dignitaries and solemnities of all sorts, and the Mormon quoting from the Golden Book.” When Child visited a Methodist meeting that brimmed with ecstasy, the Black evangelist Julia Pell moved her to tears. Even as Pell’s preaching entranced her, Child admitted that she preferred a “quiet mysticism.” “Religion has always come to me in stillness,” she observed in an Emersonian chord, but in the city’s streets and tabernacles religion did not present itself as noiseless and unobtrusive. Living in New York compelled Child to face religion’s clamorous multiplicity. Out of those encounters she began to imagine a grandly ecumenical future, one in which a “World’s Convention” of religions would show the way to transcending clan and sect.[4]

Within a few years Child was attempting to expand her initial impressions of metropolitan religious diversity into learned exhaustiveness on a global scale. For the better part of a decade, she engrossed herself in composing a massive three-volume history of religions, entitled The Progress of Religious Ideas, Through Successive Ages (1855). The project was nothing if not ambitious. As she navigated vast areas of research, Child positioned herself as at odds with both Christian provincialism and Enlightenment skepticism. Those who held onto the superiority of their own faith as well as those who thought they could explain away religion in naturalistic terms were anathema to her intellectual project of providing a comprehensive account of all religions, respectful and open-minded, desirous of sympathetic understanding. Child had hoped to reach a popular audience with her comparative tomes, but they proved too heterodox to be generally appreciated and too weighty to be widely read. Her three-volume history lacked the appeal of her fiction, her domestic advice, or her epistolary renderings of life in New York City. Though she picked occasional fights along the way—against theology as a desiccating blight upon religious feeling, for example—her irenic approach to religious history blunted the sharp edge of immediate conflict that drew readers to her work on abolitionism and woman’s rights.[5]

Child would return to the themes that had absorbed her in The Progress of Religious Ideas after the Civil War. As the comparative work of fellow New Englander James Freeman Clarke gained the limelight, Child wanted to bring her own efforts back into focus as an alternative. She turned to The Atlantic Monthly, a familiar outlet for her and for Clarke. Her essay on “The Intermingling of Religions” appeared in its pages in October 1871, the same year Clarke published his Ten Great Religions, the high regard for which stemmed in part from its assurance of “the superiority of Christianity.” The everlasting Gospel, Clarke could declare with offhanded confidence, “fills up the dreary void of Buddhism with a living God.”[6] Child took a different tack. Presenting mixture and borrowing as both the bedrock of religious history and an impetus to spiritual growth, she closed The Atlantic essay with a bold augury of the Eclectic Church of the Future. “From all parts of the world,” she pronounced, “come increasing manifestations of a tendency toward eclecticism,” a religious porosity she considered a thing of beauty, not dilution or displacement. Clarke, a fellow traveler among Transcendentalists, clearly had the safer and more palatable approach; the publishing success of Ten Great Religions proved that. Child nonetheless stuck to her principles of equitable reverence and vivid eclecticism.[7]

Hoping to materialize her shimmering image of the Church of the World, Child went on to compile a miscellany of sacred scriptures, maxims, and parables, entitled Aspirations of the World: A Chain of Opals (1878). Transcendentalists had long shown a fondness for this kind of project: Emerson and Thoreau had initiated it with their “Ethnical Scriptures” series in The Dial from 1842 to 1844, and the peripatetic Moncure Daniel Conway had recently perpetuated it with his Sacred Anthology: A Book of Ethnical Scriptures in 1874. Child embraced the genre with enthusiasm, offering Aspirations as an Eclectic Bible for the Eclectic Church. A practical embodiment of her resplendent vision at the end of “The Intermingling of Religions,” her new holy book served as a guide for those moving beyond Christianity into a heterogeneous future. Should the new eclecticism prove disorienting to wayfarers, Child foregrounded commonality as the stabilizing foundation of religious variety. “The primeval impulses of the human soul,” she assured, “have been essentially the same everywhere.” Seen properly, the “antique gems” and “modern pearls” she gathered displayed a shared luster. Child was looking for “the best portions” of all religions, and her organizing rubrics suggested what counted as such for her: prayer, inward light, benevolence, inspiration, moral courage, honesty, brotherhood, forgiveness, and the like. If, for example, a “Buddhist Commandment” or “Buddhist Scripture” demonstrated one of these essential religious values or sentiments, then Child eagerly included it. If not, it very likely fell by the wayside.[8] 

That Child read Buddhism (and other traditions too) through the lens of her own liberal faith was clear enough. Her selective slivers were a mirror of her own inclusive and egalitarian principles: “It is like water which washes and purifies all alike,” her excerpted Buddha says of his core teaching. “It is like the sky, for it has room for all; for men and women, boys and girls, rich and poor.” Child imagined the progress of interreligious rapport with a millennial hopefulness, that “the barriers of race and creed” would give way to shared spiritual aims without any obvious cost to indigenous cultures. For an activist who repeatedly called for the immediate abolition of slavery and who roundly critiqued the injustices of settler colonialism, Child could sound like a political innocent when adumbrating the Church of the World. Her religious cosmopolitanism, after all, grew amid a host of imperial projects that were anything but benevolent and fraternal. She saw her embrace of eclecticism as an antidote to racial inequality and religious exceptionalism, an interreligious and interracial balm to apply to the presumed supremacy of White Christian civilization. She did not see the ways in which her Eclectic Church could itself become an Orientalist conceit, an embodiment of a hackneyed and appropriative universalism. Still, Child remained a sharp social critic and a consistent equal-rights proponent. She was extolling curiosity, solidarity, and opalescent beauty, not underwriting expansionist empires. She advocated mixing, religious and racial; she subverted both creedal and color lines.[9]

If New England Protestantism continued to constrain Child’s imagination of religion’s future, she was in good company. At the end of his infamous Divinity School Address in 1838, Emerson had heaped praise on the recognized customs of Sabbath observance and pulpit-based preaching; in revitalized form, he presented them as crucial supports of the new dispensation of bardic inspiration he had joltingly pronounced. Likewise, Child analogized her religious revolution to a church, an all-too-familiar institution dotting the New England landscape, not to an open road or a diverse metropole. Even so, Child joined Emerson, Thoreau, Bronson Alcott, and company on the front edge of Transcendentalist inquirers who were poring over the cabinet of mystic lore in search of something more than Protestant Christianity. In the April 1843 issue of The Dial, in a brief essay right before Emerson and Thoreau gave a name to their “Ethnical Scriptures” project, Child had asked, “What Is Beauty?” In answer she presented the Divine Union of Love and Wisdom, the pair imagined in “radiant marriage-vesture,” as the spiritual source of Beauty. She anticipated the time when “glancing revelations” of “occasional union” would give way to a perfect and eternal union, “a prophecy of the Divine Harmony.” It was a philosophical portent of the religious aspirations that she would later articulate with like expectancy and delight. “We shall not live to see it,” Child had admitted in 1871 about her Eclectic Church of the Future, like a prophet resigned to waiting. She had, though, glimpsed its outline on the horizon, a foreshadowing of that mélange of spiritual seekers and theosophic inquirers who intermingled in the century ahead.[10]

[1]  Lydia Maria Child, “The Intermingling of Religions,” The Atlantic Monthly 28 (October 1871): 395. The precise phrase “that Eclectic Church of the Future” appears in an adaptation of this 1871 passage in Lydia Maria Child, Aspirations of the World: A Chain of Opals (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1878), 48.  In 1871 she called it both the Eclectic Church and the Church of the Future.  

[2] Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Conduct of Life (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1864), 177.

[3]  Lydia Maria Child, Letters of Lydia Maria Child (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1883), 189.

[4]  Lydia Maria Child, Letters from New-York (New York: Francis, 1843), 24, 56, 67. 

[5]  The place to start for placing Child’s works on religion within the density of her life and times is Carolyn L. Karcher, The First Woman in the Republic: A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994). Karcher devotes a chapter to situating The Progress of Religious Ideas within the thick of Child’s personal relationships, financial struggles, reform networks, and wider literary pursuits (356–83). She does the same for Aspirations (573–607). 

[6]  James Freeman Clarke, Ten Great Religions: An Essay in Comparative Theology (Boston: Osgood, 1871), 169.

[7]  Child, “Intermingling,” 395.

[8]  Child, Aspirations, 1–3, 101, 151.

[9]  Child, Aspirations, 47–48, 169.

[10]  Lydia Maria Child, “What Is Beauty?” The Dial 3 (April 1843): 491–92; Child, “Intermingling,” 395.