Spiritualist churches
Spiritualist churches belongs to the Metaphysical, New Thought and Swedenborgian family of churches.
Governance: association.
Spiritualist churches reports 63 congregations in the United States (RCMS 2020 (ARDA national table), National Spiritualist Association of Churches, 2020).
Many independent Spiritualist churches belong to no association.
The churches of the movement that began with the Fox sisters in 1848 — hymns, healing, and messages from the departed, organized since 1893.
Heritage
Modern Spiritualism dates its beginning to 1848 at Hydesville, New York, where the Fox sisters reported communications with a spirit — an event that launched a vast nineteenth-century movement. Its churchly wing organized as the National Spiritualist Association of Churches in 1893, and the camp community of Lily Dale, New York remains its best-known center.
Theological family
Spiritualism describes itself in its Declaration of Principles: belief in Infinite Intelligence, the continuity of personal existence after death, communication with the so-called dead as proven fact, and personal responsibility under natural law. Some Spiritualist churches use Christian forms and language, others do not; trinitarian bodies differ with Spiritualism over its central claims, a difference reported here without adjudication.
Who decides what
Association: autonomous churches, chiefly within the National Spiritualist Association of Churches, with ordained ministers, certified mediums and commissioned healers credentialed by the association; many independent Spiritualist churches belong to no association at all.
What a first-time visitor would find
A Sunday service can look surprisingly familiar — hymns, prayer, a lecture — followed by what no other tradition offers: a healing service, and a message service in which a medium relays greetings believed to come from the departed.
What it has always cared about
Evidence of survival as the movement's reason for being; healing; and, historically, reform — nineteenth-century Spiritualist platforms were early friends to abolition and women's rights, and gave women a public religious voice.
Its gift to the wider church
Whatever one holds of its central claim — trinitarian churches do not share it — Spiritualism forced grief into religious conversation and gave nineteenth-century women some of American religion's first pulpits.
Commonly confused with
With Spiritist (Kardecist) centres, a related but historically distinct movement; with New Age practice broadly, which the organized churches predate by more than a century; and with Christian Science and New Thought, unrelated metaphysical families.
Range of views inside it
Churches vary widely in how Christian their framing is, in affiliation, and in practice; the NSAC's principles are the nearest thing to a shared platform, and many churches stand outside it.
A note from the mapmakers: Nothing here may be asserted of a specific church, including whether it is NSAC-affiliated — many Spiritualist churches belong to no association. RCMS 2020 counts 63 Spiritualist congregations in the United States; the true number of independent churches is not captured by that figure. Sentences drawn from this record yield to the church's own materials.
Sources: National Spiritualist Association of Churches — Declaration of Principles (NSAC) · Encyclopedia of American Religions (J. Gordon Melton, Gale) · 2020 U.S. Religion Census (ASARB)
More of the Metaphysical, New Thought and Swedenborgian story · Find these churches on the map