Spiritist (Kardecist) centres
Spiritist (Kardecist) centres belongs to the Metaphysical, New Thought and Swedenborgian family of churches.
Governance: association.
Arguably not Christian at all; recorded here rather than in "other religion" because the strings sit among Christian entries.
Study centres in the tradition of Allan Kardec — strongest among Brazilian-American communities, organized around study, healing passes and charity.
Heritage
Spiritism was codified by the French educator Allan Kardec, whose book The Spirits' Book (1857) systematized communications attributed to spirits into a body of teaching. The movement became a major religious presence in Brazil, and Kardecist centres in the United States have grown chiefly with Brazilian immigration, coordinated loosely by federations such as the United States Spiritist Federation.
Theological family
Spiritism describes itself as a doctrine of moral consequence and progress: the immortality and reincarnation of the spirit, communication between the living and discarnate spirits under moral discipline, and charity as the supreme law. It reveres Jesus as the greatest moral exemplar; it does not describe itself in the terms of trinitarian Christianity, and whether it is a Christian body at all is answered differently by different observers — this record reports the range and adjudicates nothing.
Who decides what
Association: autonomous centres, typically lay-led, cooperating through national and regional federations.
What a first-time visitor would find
A visitor to a centre finds study meetings around Kardec's works more than worship services — lectures, discussion, healing passes (a laying-on of hands practice), and organized charity; Portuguese is the working language of many US centres.
What it has always cared about
Study as devotion; charity organized as obligation; and the disciplined, unpaid mediumship that distinguishes Kardecist practice from popular spiritualism.
Its gift to the wider church
The Spiritist centres carry into American religious life one of Brazil's most significant religious movements — and their charity-first discipline is recognized even by observers who share none of their doctrine.
Commonly confused with
With Spiritualist churches, the older Anglo-American movement — related in subject, different in history, literature and practice; and with Santeria or other Afro-Brazilian traditions, with which Kardecist Spiritism is not to be conflated.
Range of views inside it
Centres vary in language, in federation affiliation, and in how much Christian vocabulary frames the teaching.
A note from the mapmakers: This record is deliberately brief, and its classification is held loosely: Spiritism sits in this taxonomy's metaphysical family because its centres appear among Christian entries in our data, not because this record asserts it is a Christian body. No US congregation count is published in RCMS 2020, and none is offered here. Nothing may be asserted of a specific centre; sentences drawn from this record yield to the centre's own materials.
Sources: The Spirits' Book (Allan Kardec, various editions) · Encyclopedia of American Religions (J. Gordon Melton, Gale)
More of the Metaphysical, New Thought and Swedenborgian story · Find these churches on the map