Fits, Trances, and Visions: 

Experiencing Religion and 

Explaining Experience

 from Wesley to James 

by Ann Taves

Princeton University Press:  1999.  449 pages.

Reviewed by A. Josef Greig

Involuntary religious experience has long been a point of contention both within and without Christian churches. Is it a supernatural manifestation of the Spirit of God, or is it the result of disease, a mental disorder, group hysteria, an exhibition of the primitive, or a weakness more observable in the female of the species? 

It is in the various interpretations of religious experiences that Taves finds her subject matter, her primary interest being the “interplay” between those who have religious experience and those who explain it.  Therefore, her work does not follow a traditional history of religions approach, nor is it dedicated to comparing and judging religious experience.

I

Broadly, throughout the periods covered, there is concern: first, about how to understand ecstatic or involuntary religious experience from the point of view of Christian churches worried about out-of-control fanaticism as a departure from a more respectable experiential custom; secondly, for the evaluation of such experience in the context of the secularizing influence initially set in motion by the Enlightenment, and lastly; for the evaluation of religious experience from the perspective of newly emerged religious movements and mental theories of the time, including the psychology of religion.

Accordingly, Taves has organized this work into three parts. Part One, “Formalism, Enthusiasm, and True Religion, 1740-1820,” presents the disputes over religious “enthusiasm” in the context of a variety of attitudes simmering among Anglo-American evangelicals and established churches, and the impact the Enlightenment had on the discussion.  Part Two, “Popular Psychology and Popular Religion, 1820-1890,” discusses the impact of animal magnetism, mesmerism, and new religions, on the interpretation of religious experience, and Part Three, “Religion and the Subconscious, 1886-1910,” directs attention particularly to the rise of the psychology of religion, primarily concentrating on the theory of the subconscious and its role in interpreting religious experience.

Taves’ goal is to depart from the tendency to dichotomize religious experience and explanation, which she feels results in abstract explanation and depreciation of religious experience, and instead place those who experience religion and those who explain it in a continuous narrative, making the interaction between them the focus of the study.

Taves constructs her work around three chains of interpretation.  The first two stand in opposition to each other: one is polemical to involuntary religious experience or religious enthusiasm, seeking to explain it in the 17th century as emotional derangement or the activity of a variety of baser natures, and later, in natural terms by way of mesmerism or hypnosis in relation to secularizing theories of the mind:  such experience is secular, not religious. This also includes the attitudes of modernist Protestants. The second, running from Wesley to the rise of nineteenth century Holiness and  twentieth century Pentecostal movements, embraces religious experience, constituting it in supernatural terms:  such experience is supernatural and not natural.  The third chain of interpretation attempts to mediate between the first two by understanding these religious phenomena as both religious and natural.

Because these discussions involved the subject of true and false religions, Taves also constitutes these three chains as “natural and false,” “supernatural and true,” and “natural and true.” The latter she calls the mediating tradition. This latter chain extends from German Romanticism through the rise of mesmerism and the Spiritualist movement to the arrival of the psychology of the subconscious.

To put flesh on this skeleton: Before the transatlantic awakening some forms of religious experience, pejoratively tagged  “enthusiasm,” were a problem in Europe and Britain for many clerics and non-clerics alike.  These physical demonstrations were considered to be both supernatural and conversely, as abnormal behavior of various descriptions. The phenomena also occurred in America among Congregationalists, Presbyterians and Methodists, particularly the “shout” Methodists.  Some clergy like Jonathan Edwards, attempted to guide people away from the more extreme exercises, explained it in naturalistic, not supernaturalistic terms.

Wesley, more accommodating to religious experience, and believing some forms of it were supernaturally inspired, devised critical tests to gauge ecstatic experience and distinguish between genuine and counterfeit religion, usually by emphasizing the fruits of the Spirit, witness of the Spirit, or evidence of the Christian life, as indicators of the genuine.

Philosophy, particularly the ideas of Locke, Hume, and Descartes, was also engaged to bring clarity to the discussion on enthusiasm. Are these manifestations of enthusiasm absolutely new and different experiences (Locke), the animal spirit working on the brain (Descartes), or simply the result of habit or custom (Hume)?

 In America, among clerics and laity within the normative Protestant order, there was a growing sense of ecstatic experience not only as being inappropriate to public worship, but also as a threat to social order. Ecstatics and visionaries were numerous in New England in the mid 1840's, and it is in this context that Taves discusses religious trances and visions, and the people who had them, including Ellen (Harmon) White.  (I will leave the discussion of Ellen White until the end of the review.)  But it is also in the context of religious experience, explaining experience, and deciding what should be retained as valuable in religious exercises, that Pentecostalism arises.

Methodism would eventually lose its ecstatic attributes, due to the rise of a Methodist middle class, the quest for respectability, and the theological reinterpretation of sanctification based on the promises rather than the witness of the spirit as a sign of assurance. Methodism became a quiet religion, unlike its “shout” Methodist ancestor, or at least religious kin.

Contrary to the assessments of those who considered religious experience supernatural, with the introduction of the ancient art of pathetism, animal magnetism, or more fittingly, mesmerism or hypnosis, detractors sought to debunk the ecstatic phenomenon as purely secular.  Others who were more open to involuntary religious experience attempted to explain it in both secular and religious contexts. The application of more modern theories of mind soon followed with the same goals: to debunk religious experience, or accommodate it.

Mesmerism had demonstrated that these religious phenomena could be induced naturally.  Spiritualism, emerging in the nineteenth century out of a matrix of animal magnetism or trance states, and belief in the spirits of the dead, pressed for a consensus of legitimacy, arguing that religious experience could be understood scientifically and naturally because there was an empirical base for it grounded in psychology rather than theology. Animal magnetism provided experiential data supporting the claim that a door between the spirits of the dead and the living existed and could be opened. This gave the movement a form of validity in the context of the religious, scientific, and popular psychological considerations of the time.

Several other movements emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century including Theosophy, New Thought.  Various healing groups, such as Christian Science.  Spiritualism, Theosophy, and New Thought universalized religious experience, while Christian Science, like evangelical Christianity, did not.  Theosophy had its roots in Spiritualism and continued to anchor its world view in mesmerism.  New Thought, like Christian Science, had its beginnings in the ideas of a healer, Phineas P. Quimby. While skeptical of Spiritualist claims that trance was a means of accessing the spirit world, he derived his own healing powers from mesmerism. The Theosophical Society was founded by former Spiritualists who, while agreeing with Quimby on trance, retained ties with Spiritualism and animal magnetism.  Christian Science, founded by Mary Baker Eddy, likewise rejected Spiritualist claims for trance, but Eddy’s own ideas of higher consciousness supernaturally awakened simulated the function of trance.

The birth of the psychology of religion, especially as developed by William James, engaged discussion about the existence of secondary selves, alternating personalities, and most importantly, the subconscious or subliminal consciousness. James explained religious experience as the result of the incursion of the subconscious into the conscious. Although the existence of a subliminal self or of a subconscious was contested by many, others saw it as a new way of establishing a scientific link with religious experience through psychology.  Those who rejected this concept ridiculed the idea that the lower or more base subconscious could be the means by which divine communication could take place.

Taves submits that, although James’ psychology of religion conjoining religious experience and psychological explanation was more sophisticated and academically respectable than the popular psychologies of the day, his psychological approach to religious experience is to be understood as being of the same genre as the newly emerged universalistic religions: Spiritualism, Theosophy, and New Thought.  Spiritualism is the background source against which these other religions are to be understood. What all these new religious movements have in common is the attempt to ground religious experience, in its various forms, in a non-physical way that did not contradict contemporary naturalistic theories.

The psychology of religion was subject to numerous attitudinal changes regarding its subject and methodology. James’ idea of the subliminal self or subconscious met with less acceptance among younger psychologists who were guided by evolutionary thought and were laboratory focused.  This also paralleled the decline of the influence of the Society for Psychical Research.  In the eyes of the new generation of psychologists, involuntary religious experience was a characteristic of the primitive, or defective, of woman, but not of the evolved rational man.

James’ idea of the subconscious as subliminal, although taking many different forms in psychology, was retained as a vital popular force for many both within and without Protestantism, and he continued to have considerable influence on the understanding of Protestant religious experience. But the subconscious as primitive, argued by Davenport and Coe, also engaged the Protestant view of religious experience.  Thus we again have the interplay of these two assessments in Taves’ narrative.

Taves carries her investigation of the influence of various views of the subconscious on New Thought and emerging mind cure as well as psychotherapy groups. Mind cure, although mediating between science and religion, eventually posed a problem for spirituality in the churches which accommodated it. A response to this was the Emmanuel Movement which saw its work as laying hold of psychic powers for healing through religious faith and exact science. Once again we see the attempt to mediate between science and religion, often by employing the idea of the subconscious and depicting what was in some traditions considered supernatural as natural and religious.  As seems inevitable, after considering the subconscious as some kind of contact point with the divine, it becomes a doorway to the Universal Spirit, and not only is religion universalized but the world religions are equalized.  As one would expect, this movement received the same polemical interpretation by its critics, who sought to discredit it as mesmerism, hypnosis, and a devolution to the primitive.

Taves also integrates her discussion of the Emmanuel Movement with the way it was perceived by Christian Science, New Thought, and the public at large. While Christian Science sought to distinguish itself from the Emmanuel Movement, New Thought saw the movement’s views as promoting its own.  However, the reputation the Emmanuel Movement got from the lack of training among its leaders, bad press, and ministers who considered it a menace, gradually led to its demise.

The influence of the subconscious eventually made its way into the theological schools, largely through the academic fascination with mysticism. When mysticism is explained by the idea of the subconscious, Edwards’ idea of “the indwelling of the Spirit” and Wesley’s “witness of the Spirit” are turned from a supernatural understanding of religious experience to one of “normal Christian mysticism.” The lower region of the unconscious becomes the place of the Holy Spirit’s activity, and the subliminal consciousness the locus of Deity in the incarnate Christ.  Scholars eventually criticized these ideas, decrying the idea that the way of God to man lay in the subconscious.

The effect of the new religious movements was also felt in Pentecostalism, although initially Charles Parham, one of the founders of Pentecostalism, considered them counterfeits. He decried their influence which threatened churches he felt lacked spirituality, largely due, to their departure from a literal reading of scripture and adherence to biblical doctrine. However, the nature of true spiritual experience was also of concern to him, and this lay in non-fanatical physical manifestations.

Parham thought the members’ behavior inappropriate.  The forms were fanatical, and  people had “fits” and spoke in gibberish instead of real tongues. Parham was quick to identify this behavior with mesmerism and hypnosis, and employed modern psychological analysis to discredit it.   Authentic experience, Parham argued, was due to the supernatural operation of the Holy Spirit on the subconscious. In his critique, he also employed ideas from New Thought, not to credit it, but to illustrate what he considered authentic in religious experience.

The Keswick movement, a development of the Reformed tradition, also departed from the usual Pentecostal understanding of consecration as bodily possession. Consecration was not identified by the quantity of expressed emotion but by obedience and surrender to God. That is, consecration was primarily located in a “mental” act.

 A more tolerant attitude to the wilder forms of religious experience could be found at the Azusa St. Mission in Los Angeles.  While Parham was structuring his understanding in these novel ways, the Azusa movement was busy shaping religion according to older traditions such as the camp-meeting tradition, divine trance, and religious experience following the typology of the tabernacle.

Typological exegesis was a standard of theological methodology in evangelical Protestantism, but in the Pentecostal  movement it served to affirm that the fulfillment of the older types was in the act of speaking in tongues. The dangers of excess were obviously forthcoming. One threat to typological exegesis came from higher criticism which its detractors said, knew nothing of biblical typology and was predisposed to naturalism.  In time, however, among some adherents of Protestantism, the historical critical approach dominated, and with it came a decline in bodily expressions of religious experience.

Taves identifies two factors for this change:  (1) historical critical deconstruction of typological exegesis, and (2) religious education, rather than the conversion experience, providing a new model for ministry.  Concerning the latter, churches with the greatest interest in religious education were those with roots in revivalism and the conversion experience. Churches historically grounded in ritual were less affected.

 In the seminaries, the psychology of religion entered the theological curriculum, and instead of James, who accommodated religious experience, the psychology of Coe, who had little sympathy for the mystical, dominated.  Belief in supernaturalism gave way to a commitment to the controlling power of the human spirit, and in this fashion the psychology of religion became so important that it almost eclipsed theology as an academic discipline in some divinity schools. Psychology of religion, in the view of some, had become the mortal enemy of theocentric religion.

Although the modernist view eventually filtered down to the parish and naturalistic explanations of biblical events and miracles infiltrated Sunday school lessons and preaching, it must not be supposed that this influence was universal. Those committed to earlier traditions, and the New Thought hybrids, still flourished. Pentecostalism remains vital and today is making inroads into traditional Protestant churches, while Protestant modernism is one of the most beleaguered of the traditions.

Once again we must recognize that as Taves creates this narrative of religious experience, she is interested in the interplay of the different interpretations, in the process, not the question of right or wrong or exclusivism.  She is willing to let each tradition voice its understanding of experience, rather than discredit one from the perspective of another.  With this in mind, we will now focus on  Ellen G. White and the rise of Seventh-day Adventism within the context of the discussion of religious enthusiasm, mesmerism, Spiritualism, and the rise of psychology of religion.

II

Taves discusses Ellen (Harmon) White along with La Roy Sunderland because both emerged from the "shout" Methodist tradition, but in turn reconstituted it, although in very different ways.  Sunderland sought to describe his earlier Methodist experience in terms of psychology. He later became a Spiritualist and eventually died a skeptic. Ellen White transformed the earlier Methodist tradition by her belief in the Second Coming. White was disengaged from Methodism by her insistence on the role of the imminent second coming of Christ as the final goal of sanctification, rather than merely the experience of sanctification. In both cases, Taves argues, the reconstitution of the tradition was mediated through the new psychology of animal magnetism; that is, each viewed the tradition differently due to the presence of this new factor.

White’s "shout" Methodist connections are demonstrated in the trial record of an arrested radical Adventist minister, Israel Dammon. Ellen White gave testimony at this trial and described Dammon’s Spirit-induced behavior in the language of the "shout" tradition. Not only does the transcript place her at this meeting, she is described by other witnesses as being in a trance (vision), often lying on the floor, and at times with her head in James White’s lap.

White was only one of many visionaries in Maine in the 1840's, and is classified by Taves as a “radical adventist visionary” along with William Foy, Emily Clemons, Dorinda Baker, Phoebe Knapp, and Mary Hamlin. As with other visionaries, she was considered by some to have been mesmerized, a charge which she rejected, relegating mesmerism to the work of the devil.  Taves also places the early White among the “fanatics” of the time, pointing out that, according to Ellen White herself,  “nominal adventists” not only considered her a fanatic, but the “leader of the fanatics.” 

 In contrast to this picture of the early Ellen White is a later one where she sought to distance herself from fanaticism, iand in the process eliminated earlier references to Dammon in her “Experience and Views.” The earlier portrait of Ellen White is also quite a different from the one popularized by the Seventh-day Adventist Church, where White was described as an almost solitary visionary figure receiving authoritative messages from God, examined by composed rational onlookers, and who was the antithesis of fanaticism from the very beginning.  Taves considers this picture to be an institutional Adventist portrait, even if the account is that of Ellen White herself. Again, we must be sensitive to Taves’ narrative of interpretation and reinterpretation and the way it demonstrates how earlier traditions are reconstituted and changes in understanding are formed. 

As mentioned earlier, mesmerism contributed both positively and negatively to religious tradition. When used in a negative application, it was the way some discredited the visionary and challenged the authority of the message by naturalizing it.  Ellen White distanced herself from the fanatics and gained authority over them by accusing them of trusting every impression, and laying aside reason and judgment. Fanaticism, she contended, was of the devil.  But she condemned mesmerism as coming from the same source, citing a vision from God to back up the charge.  Demonizing fanaticism and mesmerism is the way she explained these experiences, and this was crucial to the way she understood her own visions.  It is also important to note that when Ellen White was submitted to mesmerism, she could not be brought under the power of the mesmerizer.  It appeared that mesmerism had nothing to do with her visions, and she continued to affirm their supernatural source.

This can be contrasted to the visionary Mrs. M’Reading, who submitted to mesmerism, had her vision duplicated, thus understood her vision as natural, and ceased being a visionary. Taves notes that the charge of mesmerism lodged against Ellen White becomes the point of  transition from her being merely an adventist visionary to the “Adventist Prophet.”  But Taves’ argues that, even though Ellen White rejected mesmerism outright, in so doing she established it at the center of the SDA world view. By this Taves no doubt means that Ellen White’s visions became the authoritative interpretation of reality.  Certainly, according to Taves, Adventists went beyond endowing one visionary with revelatory authority; they interpreted Ellen White’s visions as an authoritative guide to the scriptures.

Taves reasons that Ellen White better met the needs of the movement, in terms of both content and timing, and that James White, believing in her visions, was a forceful promoter. Even though by the late 1840's or early 1850's Ellen White was the only visionary active in adventism, the fact that sabbatarian adventists were uncertain about the significance of her visions was unsettling to James White and instrumental in his decision not to include her visions in the paper he published for the movement. The situation only changed when a new editor reintroduced accounts of her visions.  Taves reasons that this reflected the gradual acceptance of Ellen White’s authority by sabbatarian adventists, who had made the decision to proceed with a prophet rather than without one.  Without this consent, Taves speculates, Ellen and James White could not have co-founded the Seventh-day Adventist church.

The picture of Ellen White presented by Taves will seem threatening to many Seventh-day Adventists, but that is because that picture has been subjected to a historical methodology which attempts to explain “our” experience in a different way, and thereby reconstitute it positively or negatively.  However, one must remember that Taves is intent on doing several things:  (1) discovering what the historical narrative she has developed, constructed as it is around religious experience and explaining experience, says about involuntary religious experience; (2) explaining experience in relation to the interplay between theory (theology) and practice; (3) demonstrating that religious experience is a construct, that many factors affect it, and thus there are different ways of looking at it both positively and negatively; and (4) showing that religious experience cannot be abstracted from the communities of discourse and practice that gave rise to it without it becoming something else.

The experience of M’Reading’s losing her visionary capacity is an example of this. One cannot use “colonizing” discourse (that is, descriptions that are loaded with assumptions embedded in “outsider” traditions) without subsuming the experience of another into that colonizing discourse. Every analytical term applied to religious experience by those outside it is freighted with foreign meaning and can lead, as it did in the past, to accusations of naturalism, weak mindedness, or capacities that are psychopathic, primitive, or associated with the psychology of women.

Following this, “Ellen White’s religious experience” is not to be understood from an external prospective, but from within the cultural, religious, and supernaturalist tradition and practice that constituted her as prophet.  But also, her experience is not the major issue.  The larger point is what we learn from the interplay between her experience and the ways her experience was and is explained, seeking to understand religious experience in the context of a larger process of experience.  This would involve all within the church.

Taves’ position is that treating our concepts as constructs lessens the chance that colonization of experience will take place. Historians, in order to access the experience-in-practice, need to enter into the
“first person” narrative of an individual or community. Third person narratives are farther removed but rework first person narratives. The application of any kind of theory to religious experience is further removed and fragmenting, yet participates in the making and unmaking of tradition at the level of narrative.

Taves favors making creative sites for dialogue where our experiences, ideas of experiences and experiences of others are discussed in a flow of experience which is constituted and reconstituted in the temporal process. She wishes to take us beyond the usual academic categories of judging experience as secular/religious, or natural/supernatural, and with James, define modern religious experience as something “generic,” something that informs religion in general instead of informing any tradition in particular. This response mediates between Protestant supernaturalist and secular scientific assessments of religious experience.  In this respect, it is important to look at how Taves understands the constitution of experience.

III

In the first endnote of her work, Taves credits Wayne Proutfoot, J. Samuel Preuss, and Joan Scott with contributing to her preferred ideas on the subject. Scott argues that experiences are produced by the historical processes that “through discourse” produce them. Thus, experience is not the origin of our explanations or evidence of what we know, rather, it is what we seek to explain. While Taves admits her approach is similar to Scott’s, she prefers locating agency in subjects rather than history, and cites Anthony Giddens as support, arguing that “subjects simultaneously constitute their experience and are constituted by it.”

When Taves constructs her interconnecting narrative of experience that traces the interaction of chains of interpretation, she seems to be favoring the work of William Dean who suggests that reality itself may be constructed from chains of historical interpretations.  Suddenly, the world seems more malleable or more like an indefinite field of possibilities than we might have thought it to be.

Thinking of experience, as something we seek to explain instead of privileging it with epistemological primacy, is a considerable departure from the naive empiricism and literalism that is foundational to many religious groups that blend a “direct realism” with an authoritative understanding of reality derived from divine inspiration.  Nevertheless, that we do this is essential to understanding Taves’ non-judgmental attitude to ecstatics and visionaries, Spiritualism, New Thought, and the variety of hybrids that developed during the period she discusses. Each is seeking to explain experience, whether to affirm, discredit, or mediate, and it is in this process Taves would have us find our better task. That is to say, we have to go beyond the categories that sparked these controversies, and consider religious experience as generic, as something that informs religion in general rather than any particular tradition, whether supernatural or secular-scientific.

Taves, interested in how experience is constituted and reconstituted by all of these factors, commends James for his interest in comparing religious and non-religious experience. Extending this interest to her narrative of experience, and being interested in how experience is constituted and reconstituted by all of these factors, takes our attention away from religion per se to concentrate on the process.  As we have seen, the definition of religion cannot be abstracted from experiences, and these being many and varied, are subject to dispute.

 If we were to apply Taves’ approach to the ministry of Ellen White, we would have to move beyond White’s visionary role contributing to authentic as contrasted to unauthentic religion (a question contested both within and without any religious tradition) and, as Taves suggests, widen our study beyond the study of religion to the study of “everything.” 

I thought a long time about whether Taves’ perspective reflects more of a post-modernist position (equalizing all traditions) or a feminist approach (the resolution of conflict within competing traditions). I suspect that it is responsible to both, but would I be wrong to say the latter seems more directive?

 IV

Several parallels suggest themselves between attempts to explain experience as religious and natural and the modern interest in the dialogue between science and religion. Having recently read in the writings of David Bohm, John Polkinghorne, and Philip Clayton, where they discuss the rationally unknowable “infinite background source” of the universe (Bohm), the integration of the “anthropic principle” into a religious context, and the implication of "information” theory for theological discourse (Polkinghorne), and the implications of the theories of supervenience and of top-down causation for divine causality (Clayton), I detect a similar holistic concern for the focus on the interplay and dialogue between traditions that transform and reconstitute, not one but both traditions, into something they were not before. If this is the nature of scientific discourse, it would also seem applicable to religious discourse.

Taves’ book also provides a fertile field of suggestions for research into the writings and times of Ellen G. White.  One study that could be done, if it has not already been done, is to describe her Millerite typological understanding of the sanctuary, along with other contemporary typological expressions of the tabernacle, to illuminate how the Second Coming is the final phase of the cleansing of the sanctuary rather than signifying the mere experience of sanctification. Also, Ellen White's concept of the “will,” which she calls a “kingly” and “the deciding power working in man” capable of bringing the emotions along with, would provide an immensely interesting study in view of the contemporary theological and philosophical discussions. Furthermore, when considering White’s and Adventism’s rejection of the existence of an immortal  “soul” and the denial of a spirit world of the dead, one is led to ask how much influence (beyond the testimony of the New Testament) Spiritualism had on the radical elimination of this avenue of communication between God and humanity, this spiritual idea of persisting personhood, to leave a concept of “soul sleep” and the restoration of personhood only by a supernatural material resurrection. Lastly, how does Ellen White’s understanding of the Bible and nature as two books of revelation reflect the discussion of that subject within Spiritualism, where for some Spiritualists nature was the sole source of revelation, for others the Bible was a subsidiary source, while for the most conservative Spiritualists, the Bible and spirit communications were the exclusive fountain of revelation?

Errata:  P. 8, garbled sentence. Substitute “which” for “much” and “much as” later; P. 63, “Herrnhut” for “Herrnnut;” P.154, “so on” for “son on;” P. 201, “such as” Stanley Grimes, for “such Stanley Grimes;” P. 319, delete “a” from “a psychological healers.”  Finally, J. Samuel Preus does not appear in the Index.