The Burned Over District and Four Movements It Left Behind

Upstate New York earned the nickname the Burned over District from evangelist Charles Finney's own image, a region so repeatedly swept by revival fire in the early nineteenth century that no fuel for further religious enthusiasm seemed left to burn. What actually happened was closer to the opposite. Within a few decades the same stretch of countryside produced four separate religious movements that each grew into a lasting American tradition. Joseph Smith's visions near Palmyra, beginning in 1820, became the founding events of Mormonism. The Fox sisters' reported rappings at Hydesville in 1848 launched modern Spiritualism, the movement holding that the living could communicate directly with the dead, which spread nationally within a few years and drew prominent reform minded women into its ranks. William Miller's prediction of Christ's imminent return, when it failed to occur on the date his followers had calculated, did not simply collapse but reorganized into Seventh day Adventism, one of the most durable movements to survive a failed prophecy anywhere in American religious history. And at Oneida, John Humphrey Noyes built a communal society practicing complex marriage, a system of shared intimate partnership among all adult members that made the community as controversial in its own century as any religious experiment in the region.

New York City, meanwhile, grew along an entirely separate track, becoming home to the largest Jewish population outside Israel and one of the most religiously mixed urban populations anywhere, a diversity the Burned over District's homegrown movements never touched.