Overview:
All of the sectarian movements that we have examined were different, yet all shared certain characteristics. Like sects in general, they were voluntary societies of committed people who guarded the boundaries between themselves and others very closely. Claiming experiences of conversion to a life of love and law, members of the sects could be compared to the Radical Reformers of the sixteenth century in their zeal for the restoration of true Christianity, their stress on right living, their general indifference toward politics, and their millennialism. Not "also-rans" among the Protestants, they embodied a religious vision of their own, imbuing each detail of ordinary life with their sense of its extraordinary religious quality. At the same time, like their Protestant neighbors, sectarians reflected the American expe- rience. Their religious experiments were graphic expressions of the American experiment, emphasizing newness and human possibility with millennial themes. It was no accident that restorationism and millennialism were also important to many evangelical Protestants.
In terms of the degree of their separation from the rest of society, sectarian movements ranged along a continuum. More accommodating movements -- like Mormonism, Seventh-day Adventism, and Christian Science -- did not demand total community from their members. Their respective histories led them closer and closer to mainstream denominationalism. At the other end of the continuum, communistic movements like those of the Shakers, the Oneida Perfectionists, and, in the twentieth century, the Branch Davidians enjoined a style of life in which member participation was total and all-embracing. They found the institutions of private property and conventional marriage divisive of community and worked to replace both.
With their concern for the line that separated them from others, all of the sectarian movements were examples of the continuing concern for boundaries in the pluralist United States. At the same time, whatever their Americanness, sectarians had responded to their situations in religious terms, concerned to mark the boundaries that established their existence in this world, concerned to observe those boundaries, and concerned about how and when to cross them to what they believed lay beyond. Their blends of ordinary and extraordinary religion were not the only ones that could have been created, but their blends often worked effectively, even if a potential danger always lurked and sometimes emerged. In every case, for good or ill, sectarians exhibited the religious combinativeness that has continued to characterize American culture.
Others, however, would find the combinativeness of the nineteenth-century
sectarians not expansive and encompassing enough. Some would look, instead,
to the metaphysical movements that also fed the manyness. It is to these
religious groups that we now turn.
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