Two decades later, all hell was breaking loose. New stand-alone categories—“Jewish,” “Spiritualist,” and “Christian Scientist”—pushed at the seams, and the Tribune simply found it harder and harder to maintain the neat trim of the old Protestant order. Take as one concrete example the “Religious Announcements” for December 17, 1899. At first glance everything looked in good shape for the Christmas season: seventeen listings for Episcopal services, eleven for Methodist, ten for Congregational, nine for Baptist, and nine for Presbyterian. Still placed at the bottom, where it had always been, was the “Miscellaneous” section, but it was now the single largest category by far with forty offerings. A bewildering hodgepodge, it no longer seemed to have functioning Protestant brakes.
A quick review of some of the announced offerings makes apparent how much shakier things looked for the Protestant establishment. At the Second Eclectic Society of Spiritual Culture, a local judge was lecturing on “Infidelity, Belief, Consciousness of Truth,” while the famed reformer Jane Addams was speaking on “Democracy and Social Ethics” at the Society of Ethical Culture. The First Society of Rosicrucians, a not-so-secret brotherhood of mystical adepts, was hearing a reflection on “Thought Intuition,” while the Church of the Soul was attending to the medium Cora Richmond whose discourse was on “Robert G. Ingersoll in Spirit Life.” At the People’s Church, meeting at the grand McVicker’s Theater, the Reform rabbi Emil Hirsch and the questing Unitarian Jenkin Lloyd Jones were teaming up for an interfaith service. Swami Abhayananda, a guru from India, was speaking at a local Vedanta society to Hindu initiates and wannabes, and the Independent Church for Students of Nature was hearing from its pastor, aptly named Mrs. Summers. In all, the number of assemblies for sundry liberals and eclectics roughly equaled the combined announcements for the leading Protestant denominations. Even if that count suggested little about the totals for actual members, it certainly revealed the extent of the ferment on the cosmopolitan side of the religious spectrum.2
Among the better indications of Chicago’s multiplying religious options was another of the small notices under “Miscellaneous” for that same day in December 1899. It read as follows:Church of Yoga, Mrs. Ida C. Craddock, 11 a.m., Bible talk: “Man and Woman as They Were, as They Are, as They Ought to Be.” 3 p.m.: “Object of the Church of Yoga.” 80 Dearborn street, fourth floor.
Ida Craddock had mounted her own congregational venture—an endeavor that looked, if anything, even dicier than her labors as corresponding secretary of the American Secular Union and as a public lecturer on sex worship. That foray into religious organizing proved hazardous indeed—and short-lived. By now, six years after the Danse du Ventre blowup, Craddock had a hard time hanging on for long anywhere, but here in Chicago, for a half year or so in late 1899 and early 1900, she attempted to refashion herself as the pastor of her own Church of Yoga. With visiting swamis, prominent New Thought leaders, traveling Buddhist monks, spiritualist mediums, assorted Theosophists, and Bahá’í messengers all offering their religious wares to the city’s wandering souls, Craddock dreamed up the Church of Yoga amid a whirl of spiritual variety. Evidence of that heady religious atmosphere came in her announcement of two worship services she was offering one Sunday in late February 1900: Craddock herself would lecture in the morning on the “Symbolism of the Lamb,” and in the afternoon an ostensible priest of the Zoroastrian faith, Rev. Otoman Zar-Adusht Hanish of El-Kharman Temple, Persia, would join her to lecture on “Sun Worship Philosophy.”3
Craddock’s Church of Yoga was a cipher: It never amounted to much as a congregational body, but it nonetheless symbolized a weighty religious trend in American culture. The intricacy of Craddock’s spiritual trek—from Methodist holiness to Unitarian individuality right on through spiritualist séances and South Asian traditions—suggested how the evangelical ideal of a Christian America was being subverted, if not coming completely undone. To plot her passage out of Protestant respectability is to track the advance of religious miscellany against the evangelical hope for a redeemed and morally unified nation. In 1874 the prominent Presbyterian minister David Swing had been put on church trial in Chicago to sensational effect for his suspect views on such doctrines as eternal damnation, the Trinity, and justification by faith alone; a quarter century later, the sort of challenge that Swing had posed to Christian orthodoxy looked modest and restrained, if not antiquated. The doctrinal wrangling that had long absorbed Protestant America—all the disputations over what constituted sound evangelical theology—no longer came close to being an adequate measure of religious wayfaring in American culture, all the more in cosmopolitan Chicago. Mixture and medley were undermining the old benchmark of a Christian nation.
“WE FEEL QUITE AT HOME IN OCEAN GROVE,” Ida Craddock wrote to her friend Katie Wood in August 1877. Ida and Lizzie had gotten “in the habit of spending a few days there every summer,” and in her teenage years at least Ida loved this Methodist enclave on the Jersey Shore, the respite it provided from the stifling, noisome weather of summertime Philadelphia: “Be it understood, Ocean Grove is a most delightful place,” Craddock gushed to Katie in a rare moment of enthusiasm for a vacation taken with her mother. Ida admitted that the “chief attraction” for many attendees, likely Lizzie included, was the prolonged camp meeting, the community’s signature event, but she dwelled in her letter to Katie on the appeal of boating, swimming, and fishing—and, “best of all, the grand, restless ocean.”4
The reputation of Methodist camp meetings gradually shifted after the Civil War from all-out evangelistic fervor—with shouting, clapping, and swooning congregants—to more staid and respectable enterprises, a mix of earnest piety and pleasant recreation. Craddock emphasized the wholesome diversions, the pretty gingerbread cottages, and the sublime setting, but she and her mother nonetheless made themselves comfortable in a community designed to exemplify evangelical holiness. Here even the rolling sea was consecrated to the rhythms of Protestant renewal with evening “Surf-Meetings” that gathered thousands on the beach to sing such favored hymns as “All Hail the Power of Jesus’ Name,” while the crashing waves “played the accompaniment.”5
Few places better embodied the blessed assurance of American evangelicals in the 1870s than the seaside camp meeting at Ocean Grove. Founded in 1869 as a modest six-acre encampment by a few Methodist families seeking a salubrious spot for summer worship, Ocean Grove grew over the next decade into a renowned 230-acre holiness retreat, an evangelical alternative to more fashionable and sin-indulging resorts, “a watering-place where the ‘Lord God Omnipotent reigneth.’” The town was under the government of a Methodist board that imagined this little piece of the New Jersey shore as a distinct holy land, a modern Eden, a sanctified commune where the faithful could meet “with Jesus by the Sea.” No liquor was permitted on the grounds, and the administration enforced strict rules on Sabbath observance.6
Ocean Grove’s very landscape was designed to make plain the holy purposes of the place. The lake that bordered the town to the north was renamed in honor of John Wesley, the eighteenth-century founder of the Methodist movement, while the lake to the south was rechristened to recognize John Fletcher, one of Wesley’s most prominent co-workers, famed in evangelical circles for his experiential piety and holiness. Avenues were named after the itinerant English evangelist George Whitefield and the pioneer American bishop Francis Asbury, and other landmarks reflected the biblical topography of evangelical devotion from Pilgrim Pathway to Beersheba Well to Zion Way. Its creators intended Ocean Grove as a capsule of the evangelical history of redemption, a beacon for the larger consecration of American society. A simple stroll through the grounds was a religious education unto itself.
Craddock’s early memories of religious participation centered on Ocean Grove, a Methodist camp meeting on the Jersey Shore, which she and her mother visited most summers. E. H. Stokes, ed., Ocean Grove, Its Origin and Progress, as Shown in the Annual Reports Presented by the President (Philadelphia: Haddock and So
n, 1874), frontispiece.
All those summer days at Ocean Grove notwithstanding, the piety of Methodist holiness did not sink in with Ida. If she were ever attracted to the possibility of deeper evangelical engagement, as her mother would be through the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, few signs of any allure, or even ambivalence, survive: no lament of a missing conversion experience, no lingering dread of hell or Satan, no veneration of Protestant exemplars of holiness and self-denial. Craddock never suffered from wistfulness for the old-time religion; there was no melancholy in her heart for a receding sea of Christian faith. Her interior journey displayed none of the recognized signposts of the evangelical saint’s progress to heaven; she walked along Pilgrim Pathway in Ocean Grove more as a summer tourist than an expectant devotee. After describing at some length a sermon she had recently heard, she confessed to her friend Katie, “I suppose these thoughts are all familiar to you,—you seem to know so very much more about the Bible than I do.” Day-to-day engagement with God’s holy writ was an evangelical hallmark; Craddock never managed it nor did she care much to strive after it. From early on, she had other plans for literary achievement and mastery.7
One feature of Methodist devotion did endure with Craddock, however: the ardent piety that focused on Jesus as “the Bridegroom of the Soul.” Years later she still remembered singing the hymn, “Jesus, Lover of my Soul, Let me to thy Bosom fly!” at one of these Jersey Shore revival meetings—a gathering organized, in this case, especially for young women and presided over by an evangelist famed for reaching that target audience. “When the enthusiasm flagged,” Craddock recalled, “and his hearers were slow in responding to his appeals to ‘come to Christ,’ [the preacher] started the above hymn, and the ardor of his fair congregation was at once kindled, girl after girl rising to publicly give herself to Christ.” Unlike so many of her young companions, though, Ida had self-consciously resisted the evangelist’s invitation to walk the sawdust trail to the altar.8
Even as she stood apart from the religious crowd, Craddock readily admitted that the camp-meeting preacher had been onto something in teaching youthful evangelical women “to aspire to the Divine through the symbolism of earthly affection.” He had shown a “keen insight into human nature,” Craddock concluded; indeed, he had been “instinctively true to the teachings of the innermost truth of all religion,” the deep entwining of Eros and Psyche. The gap Craddock saw between herself and evangelical Protestant devotion remained obvious in this memory of Ocean Grove—she was the observer of other girls at the revival meeting, not a yearning participant—and yet “Jesus, Lover of My Soul” stayed with her. No bride of Christ, Craddock had nonetheless gotten a taste of that kind of intimate relationship through being part of a Methodist revival. From the fervent piety of the camp meeting, she well knew the connection between bodily ecstasy and heavenly ascent.9
The young Craddock clearly had a hard time connecting with many of her peers at Ocean Grove—with the girls who were keen on receiving Christ as their savior, or who knew their Bible chapter and verse—but she felt much stronger affinities with her classmates at the Quaker school where she studied. Indeed, Craddock often suggested that the strongest spiritual leaven in her early life came not from the Methodists, but the Religious Society of Friends. Though there is no record of her ever being a formal member of a Quaker meeting, Craddock was involved in the Friends’ Social Lyceum, a Philadelphia fellowship that pulled her into wider Quaker circles beyond those at her alma mater, Friends’ Central.10
Quakers were a divided lot in the late nineteenth century, some looking for inspiration from the teachers of evangelical holiness, others emphasizing their orthodox commitment to the old ways of plain dress and strict community discipline. Craddock’s Quaker affinities did not depend on either of those factions, but instead on a wing of denominational liberalizers, still known by the antebellum sectarian label of Hicksites. The Hicksite party controlled Friends’ Central School and had gained substantial sway within the wider Quaker world in Philadelphia. This segment of the Society of Friends would prove an important inspiration for various religious vagabonds in the period: Walt Whitman, for example, had grown up admiring the preaching of Elias Hicks, the “very mystical and radical” founder of this liberalizing offshoot.11
Craddock saw the Hicksite educational milieu at Friends’ Central as having left a deep mark on her spiritual character, but, fittingly enough, she rarely described that influence in institutional terms. Instead, her Quaker connection had bequeathed to her a love of direct and spontaneous expression. When, for example, Craddock narrated her own moments of insight in her diary, she sometimes prefaced her account with the phrase: “It was ‘borne in upon me,’ as the Quakers say,” a religious diction of sudden prompting that worked for her far beyond any Friends’meeting. Likewise, in explaining to a freethinking audience in 1891 why she was never bashful about speaking her mind, she returned to the Quaker environment of her youth as a decisive influence:Those who know me best, know that I am never “ashamed” of letting any of my opinions, upon any subject whatsoever, be known. I was educated at a Quaker school, where the Quaker principle of “bearing testimony for the truth” permeated the entire moral atmosphere; and at this moment, I know no motto which I would prefer for my inspiration to those splendid words of Lucretia Mott:—“Let us have truth for authority, not authority for truth.”
Lucretia Mott, the woman whose words Craddock so admired, was a Hicksite preacher, an abolitionist, an originating advocate of women’s rights, and a peace activist. Taking Mott as a paragon spoke volumes about the strand of Quaker piety and politics with which Craddock identified.12
Mott was also a good role model for Craddock because of her extensive ties to Unitarian dissenters who talked up the importance of “Free Religion” in the spirit of the National Liberal League and the American Secular Union. Always disclaiming agnosticism and atheism, Craddock would identify, for most of her adult life, as a member of the Spring Garden Unitarian Society—likely, she boasted, the most liberal church in Philadelphia. America’s quintessentially heterodox denomination, Unitarianism had initially crystallized in the 1820s and 1830s as the fashionable religion of liberal Boston. Soon it was leavened as well by the Transcendentalist yeasts of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Theodore Parker, and company. Long before the World’s Parliament of Religions unfolded in Chicago in 1893, Unitarianism had already established itself as the country’s leading broker of a cosmopolitan religious spirit.13
Exactly when Craddock joined the Unitarians is unknown, but she was certainly on board by the time she hooked up with Richard Westbrook to run the American Secular Union in 1889. “I am a Liberal Unitarian,” Craddock specified in a newspaper report at the time, “with a very well defined belief.” It would be easy now to deride this as an oxymoronic claim—a Unitarian with a well-defined belief system?—or a redundant one: a liberal Unitarian, what other kind is there? But Craddock’s terse religious identification was nonetheless revealingly specific, for the “Liberal Unitarian” tag signaled a self-conscious withdrawal from Protestant theological conventions, including basic propositions about the divinity of Jesus, scriptural authority, and Original Sin. Unlike the Quaker moniker, this one necessarily meant that she was actively at odds with the world of evangelical devotion. Safe to say, Ocean Grove’s Camp Meeting Association was not going to find much common ground with Boston’s American Unitarian Association. 14
For Craddock, the “Liberal Unitarian” affiliation was definitely not a dull, upper-crust Bostonian affair. At the heart of her adopted faith was a spiritual openness and theological elasticity, a consecration of individual liberty, independent thinking, and creative aspiration. Emersonian wayfarers had no need of the Westminster Confession, the Book of Common Prayer, or the sacraments, and, as for the Bible, it was simply another sheaf of literature in a world filled with inspiring poetic visions. As Craddock’s own pastor, Frederic A. Hinckley, boldly claimed in a sermon in 1890, liberal Unitarians profes
sed “a religion which says to the Bible, to Savior, to institution, to every form of belief however venerable, to every custom or ceremony however sacred, stand here to be judged by me.” Under such free-spirited conditions, churches themselves could still present hearty forms of fellowship, but they had to remain permeable, ready to turn pilgrims loose as much as hold them inside. “Unbiased, unhampered, unrestrained, the mind must be free to think, the heart to feel, the soul to aspire,” Hinckley exhorted.15
Frederic A. Hinckley, the pastor of Spring Garden Unitarian Church, led the congregation during much of the time of Craddock’s membership. The most liberal wing of the Unitarian movement, for which Hinckley was a prominent spokesman, deeply marked her religious ideas. Unitarian Universalist Minister Files, bMS 1446, Andover-Harvard Theological Library, Harvard Divinity School, Harvard University.
Hinckley and Craddock were obviously an excellent match. As a spiritual guide, he could hardly stop effusing about Emerson’s endless seeking or about art’s transcendental possibilities: “The Poet-Vision, dear friends, may it be your redeemer and mine.” Politically, too, Hinckley made the Spring Garden congregation a good fit for Craddock. A devoted advocate of women’s suffrage and a frank proponent of sex reform—including the emancipation of women from “the serfdom of enforced sexual relations” within marriage—Hinckley saw the church as a hub for social and political activism. In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, this Unitarian society’s pulpit provided a platform for one reformer after another. Suffragists Susan B. Anthony, Rachel G. Foster, Mary Grew, Mary Livermore, and Anna Shaw all spoke there; Booker T. Washington raised scholarship money for the Tuskegee Institute and lectured on race politics; and representatives of the Knights of Labor gained a supportive hearing. Politically and spiritually, Craddock had found her church home.16
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