Spiritualism attempts to communicate with the dead through mediums.
It has been a feature of British life since Victorian times. The evolutionist Alfred Russel Wallace compiled a semi-textbook Miracles and Modern Spiritualism (1874). And the novelist Sir Arthur Conan Doyle proclaimed The New Revelation (1918).
But is it possible that the Spiritualist movement itself is not long for this world? Two traumatic events in 2010 suggested a crisis.
Final issue
One day in July 2010, subscribers to the weekly newspaper Psychic News, founded in 1932, were shocked to learn without warning that this was the final issue. Subscribers, who had, before WW2, numbered 28,000, were down to 4,000. In its last year or two, the newspaper had been a lively mirror of the psychic realm; indeed some of its candid stories did not reflect well on the movement. The paper’s closure evoked angry reactions, not least from its creditors — staff, subscribers, advertisers, suppliers of all kinds. An unedifying struggle has ensued between Spiritualist bodies as to who owns the title and associated assets.
The trauma of this event might be compared to, say, Methodists suddenly learning that The Methodist Recorder had been closed, without any chance to raise money to save it. A newspaper is one way a community keeps in touch with themselves; without it, group consciousness and awareness are greatly impaired.
HQ closes
The second shock came in December 2010, and again without public warning. The Spiritualist Association of Great Britain (SAGB) announced it was vacating its headquarters in Belgravia, and would move to charitable accommodation near Victoria Station. No proper explanation has been given. When the SAGB moved to Belgrave Square over 50 years ago, this was seen as a coming of age for organised Spiritualism — no more meetings in side streets. Spiritualism was, as a best-selling book claimed, the coming world religion.
What is going on here? We can scarcely say that interest in the paranormal has diminished in society.
Profits
A clue is found in a news story in the Jewish Chronicle for May 13 2010. A famous Jewish medium has started High Court proceedings against his former management company, claiming he has not received a fair share of profits. The medium, who appears on Cable TV and at theatres at home and abroad, has retained a celebrity lawyer. The sum claimed is £1 million. (The aggrieved medium said: ‘Although I’m a good psychic, I never saw this one coming’!)
In a front page story in the January 2011 Psychic World, a less successful medium asked: ‘Quite recently sums of £8,000 and £10,000 for appearances by well-known television mediums were quoted for a 75-minute demonstration of clairvoyance. Wow! That’s over £100 a minute. Why? Is this the progress we want?’
What is happening is that people who might have made a modest living as mediums in Spiritualism can now do much better in the wider entertainment milieu. They may no longer be available to bodies like the SAGB. Moreover the public, by preference, consumes psychic material through television, human interest paperbacks, and in well-appointed theatres.
Let’s return to the comparison with the Methodists. The early Spiritualists recruited many leaders from Methodism, which is believed by some to be the UK’s fastest declining denomination. (Another group, the Unitarians, from whom the Spiritualists also drew, is already facing extinction.) There is a much smaller body, however, the Greater World Christian Spiritualist League, which has seen its churches decline since World War II, from in excess of 500 to 70.
Interestingly, a more militantly anti-Christian body, the Spiritualists National Union has retained its numbers much better. With 340 churches, and a well-organised building fund, the SNU is not about to disappear, though research indicates considerable turnover of membership.
Continued warnings required
What are the evangelistic implications of all this? It was once necessary for Christians to produce a steady stream of literature warning specifically about the dangers of Spiritualism. In recent years this has widened into concern about the seductions of the New Age. Organised Spiritualism, like organised Theosophy, being Victorian in origin, was not adjusting well to the modern world. The technology was sometimes being embraced — psychic ‘readings’ by the internet, for example, though the use of infra-red to establish what mediums were doing in the dark has encountered resistance!
But the literature and presentation of Spiritualism remained old-fashioned.
Human nature does not change, and our situation is still as outlined by Paul in the opening of the Epistle of the Romans. The human appetite for the spurious and the marvellous is ever present. The decline of organised Spiritualism does not mean that the underlying realities are different. Indeed, the dangers may be greater, as new cults, more adjusted to the ungodly spirit of the age, emerge, and false prophets exploit celebrity culture.
The remedy, then as now, is preaching the gospel with power, with some general awareness among Christian workers of trends in the psychic market place.
