Christianization

It was the early morning of March 29, 1817. A cool breeze waft ed through the foggy Liverpool air along with an overriding sense of excitement, anxiety, and anticipation. The Reverends William Metcalfe and James Clarke gazed out on their gathered flock, surveying the situation before them. Inspired by the providential timing—it was, aft er all, near the time of the year when the ancient Israelites made their exodus from Egypt—forty-one followers of the fledgling Bible Christian Church boarded the majestic Liverpool Packet . 1 For months church members had discussed rumors of religious freedom and abundant providence in the new American republic. With a radical religious and political spirit that had led to isolation and intimidation in England, Bible Christians saw the nascent American experiment as fertile ground where their independent lifestyle could flourish. The fear of political persecution combined with a burgeoning industrial society pushed Bible Christians westward to Philadelphia.  

The Bible Christians’ decision to leave England for the United States would eventually have larger social and cultural implications than the group could have imagined. The activities of this small band of dissidents would lead to the development of a much larger movement in the United States, focusing on one particular component of the church’s doctrine, the abstention from meat. Proto-vegetarianism—the individuals and groups who would lay the foundations of a vegetarian movement in the United States— began with the arrival of the Bible Christians.  

The group was the first to adopt meatless dietetics at the center of its members’ lives while also advocating for this lifestyle in American society at large. The Bible Christians, however, were not the only group to introduce the principle of meat abstention to Americans in the early years of the republic. Within years of the group’s establishment in Philadelphia, another movement, known popularly as Grahamism, inspired larger groups of interested reformers to abandon their carnivorous practices.  

In the first decades of the nineteenth century, multiple groups and individuals experimented with meatless diets, driven by a desire to create moral, social, and political reform. Proto-vegetarian movements in the United States were marked by outreach to meat-eaters through speeches, publications, newspapers, and public meetings that sought to illustrate the larger social and political implications of dietary choices. These early developments set the stage for a larger movement to mature outside of Philadelphia and eventually gave rise to American vegetarianism.  The Bible Christians migrating to Philadelphia did so with the full support of the movement’s founder, William Cowherd, who preached that it was only possible to live an authentic religious life in an agricultural society.

In 1811, Metcalfe was ordained as a Bible Christian minister. Soon aft er he began looking toward the United States as a new potential home where the group could grow. An increasingly oppressive political environment in England at the end of the Napoleonic Wars led to organized attempts to quell radical reformers. Bible Christians—sympathetic to the Luddite spirit of the times—were, in the words of one church member, “obnoxious not only to the hired minions of power, but also to our relatives.” The notion of emigrating enjoyed significant support among church members, who frequently discussed the opportunities for civil and religious freedom in the United States. What better place than America, Metcalfe argued, to present a nascent, radical religion?  Under the guidance of Metcalfe and Clarke, the Bible Christian immigrants arrived on the shores of the United States on June 14, 1817. The group had survived a difficult seventy-nine-day voyage at sea, presumably made even more objectionable by the liberal consumption of meat and alcohol by the ship’s crew, non–Bible Christian passengers, and even by a few renegade church members.

  Yet the group arrived in Philadelphia well-funded and determined to “stand still and do good” with faith in the notion that “verily thou shalt be fed.” 9  Immediately, however, the group split along ideological lines. Clarke and his followers viewed agriculture as the key to the growth of the church. Metcalfe—cosmopolitan and decidedly more modernist—saw the city as the location with the greatest potential for expansion. In August 1817, Clarke and his family settled in Elkland Township, Pennsylvania, establishing a small church and Sunday school based on the principles of akreophagy, the habitual abstention from meat-eating. However, the agricultural life would not lead to the growth of the Bible Christians as Clarke and Cowherd had planned. In 1823 Clarke and his family—having lost the few followers they had accrued—resettled in Shelby County, Indiana, living out their days tilling their farm, disconnected from the Philadelphia Bible Christians. 10  The path of William Metcalfe and his followers diff ered signifi cantly from that of the Clarke family. Philadelphia originally attracted the group because of its available land and passable roads connecting the church to the rest of the city. 11 Philadelphia was the country’s second most populous city, and the Bible Christians saw it as an ideal location to gain converts amid a growing urban reform spirit. 12 In Philadelphia, popular fears of perceived new dangers including prostitution, pornographic writers, and other corrupting infl uences led older citizens to attempt to guide the younger generation toward moral piety. Through reform institutions, pamphlets, and novels these reformers sought to quell youthful intemperance. 13 Bible Christians’ attempts at converting individuals to a meatless diet fi t seamlessly within the larger reform milieu that took hold in Philadelphia during the early nineteenth  Proto-vegetarianism :: 13 century. Individuals free of the overly invigorating infl uence of meat, Bible Christians believed, were more apt to make morally sound decisions.  

In July 1817, the Bible Christians established a day school and informal worship space, inviting Philadelphia’s churchgoing public to join. Metcalfe’s entreaties were based on the desire to “not form a sectarian church, deriving their doctrines from human creeds.” Instead, the Bible Christians promised to “become more efficiently edified in Bible Truths” and “the literal expressions of Sacred Scripture.”  A meatless lifestyle, the Bible Christians believed, was the true heavenly inspired diet, present in the garden of Eden and promised during the messianic era. At the heart of the Bible Christian ideology was the notion that biblical truths were to be revealed to humanity progressively over time. Only through dedicated study of the Bible’s tenants could individuals truly understand divine providence. Under Metcalfe’s guidance, the group preached that Jesus himself was a vegetarian and that any stories of his eating meat were misinterpretations. 

The group rented a back room in a schoolhouse at 10 North Front Street, providing daily schooling along with Sabbath morning services that featured intensive text study. The church’s space quickly became too expensive, however, particularly aft er a handful of founding members perished during a yellow fever epidemic in the fall of 1818. With dwindling membership and an unpopular philosophy of meat and alcohol abstention, Metcalfe sought to reinvent the Bible Christian Church while holding on to its core principles of pacifism and meatless dietetics

Meanwhile, orthodox Christianity was saved from

the embarrassing inadequacies of the Diluvial Theory

by the French geologist, naturalist, and member of

the Académie des Sciences, Baron Georges Cuvier

(1769-1832). To explain the progressive sequences of

fossils found in rock sediments, Cuvier proposed

a series of catastrophes, each of which had totally wiped

out animal and plant populations (thus producing the

fossils), followed by a period of calm during which

God restocked the earth with new (and improved)

species, The Noachian Flood was just one of these.

The Catastrophe Theory was a great balm to many

troubled minds. Adam Sedgwick, a geologist at

Cambridge University and a teacher of Charles Darwin, 

expounded the theory thus: 'At succeeding periods

new tribes of beings were called into existence,

not merely as progeny of those that had appeared

before them, but as new and living proof of creative

interference; and though formed on the same plan,

and bearing the same marks of wise contrivance, of-

tentimes unlike those creatures which preceded them,

as if they had been matured in a different portion of the

universe and cast upon the earth by the collision of

another planet.'

In formulating the Catastrophe Theory, Cuvier rou-

tinely took for granted an extreme rapidity of changes

in times past as compared with the present, but con-

ceded that perhaps a little more than six thousand

years was required. So, following the example of his

countryman, Comte Georges de Buffon (1707-1778),

he added eighty thousand years on to the age of the

earth. According to calculations of members of the

Académie, made after Cuvier's death, there had been

twenty-seven successive acts of creation, the products

of each but the last being obliterated in subsequent

catastrophes, thus providing a geological 'clock'. An

Englishman, William Smith (1769-1839), raised the

number of strata to thirty-two.

Opposite: This fossil

crocodile, illustrated in

Cuvier's book, The

Animal Kingdom (1830),

is obviously related to

present-day species

and it was such finds

that posed a problem to

the proponents of the

Diluvial Theory.

Baron Georges Leopold

Cuvier, the French

comparative anatomist,

explained away the

progressive sequences

of fossils found in strata

by proposing a series of

catastrophes, the Flood

being just one of these.

Within this growing temperance environment the Pennsylvania Society for Discouraging the Use of Ardent Spirits was founded in 1827.  The name of the organization says much about its methodology, its attempt to discourage the use of alcohol through lectures, pamphlets, and education rather than advocating for the ban of spirits through legislation. Fear of alcohol abuse, including its medical, spiritual, and social eff ects, was widespread among members of Philadelphia’s medical elite, who saw the abuse of spirits as the primary cause of mortality and poverty in the 1820s and 1830s.

 Though reticent to legislate absolute prohibition, the society worked with 19 local magistrates to prosecute public drunkenness, gambling, and Sabbath violations.  The group warned against the destructive lives of both the “habitual drunkard” as well as the equally pernicious “occasional drunkard.”  The society advocated for stiff punishments under existing laws and believed in the need for internment in hospitals, almshouses, and prisons to reform alcohol abuse. In addition to its published reports, the Pennsylvania Society aimed to curb alcohol consumption through a network of agents and lecturers sent out to spread the gospel of sobriety, temperance, and clean living.  

In June 1830, Sylvester Graham set out to reach the masses, lecturing throughout Pennsylvania connecting alcohol consumption with both physical and spiritual debasement. Graham peppered his speeches with compelling evidence, anecdotes, and scientific reasoning, all under the umbrella of religious imagery. This methodology was part of Graham’s attempt to avoid “mere declamation against drunkenness” and instead provide his audiences with “the reasons why they should not use intoxicating drinks.” During this period Graham became fascinated with studying human physiology, connecting physical health with ethical development. Not surprisingly, given his existing preoccupation with the connections between alcohol and physiology, Graham eventually turned his attention to dietary habits.  

While Graham lectured throughout Philadelphia in 1830, he was introduced to members of the Bible Christian Church, beginning a correspondence with William Metcalfe that continued for most of their lives. Graham later claimed that his dietary decisions were “neither . . . founded on, nor suggested by, the opinions of others who have taught that vegetable food is the proper aliment of the human species,” though this was more a rhetorical device aimed at building personal credibility. The growing Bible Christian movement undoubtedly infl uenced Graham’s own dietary conversion, given his connection to Metcalfe. 

Graham’s specious claim that his vegetable diet was based purely on experimentation refl ected his methods as a lecturer, emphasizing rational science rather than loyalty to a mere philosophy.  Graham’s time working solely on temperance was short-lived, and he resigned from his post aft er just six months. But his life as a public reformer and lecturer was established. By the spring of 1831, Graham began delivering a series of lectures at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia on what he labeled “the Science of Human Life,” including instruction on meat-free living, temperance, and the dangers of masturbation. Despite these other concerns, Graham’s philosophy of healthy living hinged on the adoption of a meatless diet; of the twenty-four lectures included in the Lectures on the Science of Human Life , fourteen focused on food, digestion, and the benefits of avoiding flesh foods. At the core of this lecture series—which Graham delivered in New York City immediately after lecturing in Philadelphia— was the notion that the human body could be controlled and maximized through the mechanism of deep self-awareness. In this sense Graham’s lectures offered a democratic notion of personal health care, arguing that it was the individual’s responsibility to understand how the human body functioned and to react by initiating the healthiest path of living.  

Graham presented a vegetable diet as “ the diet of man,” proven by a combination of anatomical and historical study. The fact that most Americans lived omnivorous lives was not proof of the dominant diet’s validity; rather, it reflected a general disconnect between humans and their natural, physiological state. Graham recognized the potentially controversial nature of his dietetics. A vegetable diet was not antireligious, he assured his audiences. Rather, there was “the most entire harmony between the Sacred Scriptures, and the dietetic and other principles” that he advocated.  While Graham’s ideas about meat were radical, the traditional awareness of the need to keep the humoral body in balance provided some familiarity and legitimacy to Graham’s dietary dictates, as he claimed that meat overheated the body.  

In the Science of Human Life lectures Graham presented the first unified theory of a meatless diet to general audiences, expunging the notion from the purely religious and placing it within the temporal and physical. Even though Graham’s dietary principles were controversial, they offered practical advice and reasoning on how to improve day-to-day life. Connecting the benefits of a vegetable diet to a variety of social changes, Graham successfully exploited the social reform spirit of the 1830s.

Just as Graham claimed that the benefit of a vegetable diet was scientifically observable, his new followers attested to the natural life’s ability to ward off disease. These stories—often similar to Graham’s own account of his moral and physical ascension—presented common narratives of the evolution from darkness to light, all thanks to a meatless diet. They used language similar to that of the conversion narratives of born-again evangelicals swept up in the period’s Second Great Awakening. The difference was that the Grahamites’ conversions occurred at the table, rather than at a revival meeting or church.  

These narratives outlined a timeline of sickness, transformation, and finally conversion that led the individual to advocate for a Grahamite diet. Nicholas Van Heyniger, a promoter of Grahamism, explained: “For some time previous to my adopting your plan of living, my health was a good deal impaired; and I was afflicted with many bodily pains; and particularly troubled with impaired sight.” Conversion stories connected a wide variety of physical maladies with meat consumption, while a meat-free diet was claimed to produce instantaneous improvements. Van Heyniger adopted a Graham diet and reported that his “bodily pains are gone, and my sight is perfectly restored, so that I can read all the evening without the least inconvenience.” 

Asenath Nicholson presented her own conversion story, recounting that until age sixteen she consumed tea, coffee, meat, and alcohol to the extent that her “nerves became so completely unstrung that the sight of a book put me in an universal tremor.”  After attending a Graham lecture Nicholson was overcome by an almost spiritual rapture. She wrote that she “heard and trembled: the torrent of truth poured upon me, effectually convinced my judgment, and made me a thorough convert.” A regimen of fresh air, Graham bread, and vegetables cured Nicholson, making her “entirely exempt from pain or weakness.” In the process, everything from her sleep to her singing voice improved. Nicholson believed her life was saved: “Nearly four years have passed, and not the slightest indisposition, except a trifling cold, has ever returned, to remind me I was mortal. Good bread, pure water, ripe fruit and vegetables are my meat and drink exclusively.”  

Conversion narratives were oft en published in volumes of Graham’s writings. In the closing pages of A Defence of the Graham System of Living, a series of testimonials from “respectable individuals” is offered, all following the pattern of the conversion narrative. Years of abuse and woe were followed by multiple visits to doctors who did little to alleviate their suffering. But the adoption of a Graham diet cured all ills. Lavinia Wright, a teacher in New York’s rough Bowery neighborhood, reported the end of “physical and mental lethargy” caused by “the injustice and cruelty of destroying animal existence” and “the injurious eff ects produced by the undue stimulation resulting from the use of animal food.” 

Amos Pollard, a medical doctor, said that after living meatless for five years “my health is much better, and my strength far greater, than when I used a mixture of animal food.” Pollard used his personal example to encourage the universal adoption of a vegetable diet to benefit all of mankind. William Goodell, an influential abolitionist, suffragist, and early temperance reformer, claimed a vegetable diet cured him from chronic diarrhea that no doctor ever alleviated. Goodell also said that his “wife is relieved from her headaches, my child from summer complaints, and all of us in a good degree, from nervous irritability.”  An early conversion testimonial from December 13, 1834, came in the form of a letter that called for “a total abstinence from all artificial stimuli. . . . The general adoption of a vegetable diet would tend, in a remarkable degree to meliorate the condition of mankind, both physical and moral.” Included in the group of thirty-one cosignatories was Horace Greeley, who that year met his wife Mary Chency while living in the Beekman Street Grahamite boardinghouse in New York City. 

While much changed about movement vegetarianism during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, one constant feature was the use of the conversion narrative in order to justify the diet. Conversion narratives simultaneously reached out for converts and created a sense of community among dietary reformers. The conversion narrative also reflected the dedication and self-righteousness felt by Grahamites, compelled to share their personal stories of change. Grahamites also faced external social forces that reinforced feelings of inferiority, forcing meat abstainers to justify their life choices in order to gain credibility and create self-confidence.  

These competing forces of self-rectitude and external mockery pushed Grahamites to seek each other out, build communities, and formulate a common lifestyle around meat abstention. With boardinghouses in place in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, Grahamites created supportive, localized communities. It was the printed word, however, that expanded the community of Grahamites beyond the local and into a larger movement throughout the United States.