Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Kingdom of Matthias, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Patriarchy, Family, and Society
Religion, Perfectionism, and Insanity
Race, Prejudice, and Resilience
Rural Life and Urban Culture
Desire, Relationships, and Sexual Freedom
Summary
Analysis
It’s a little odd that Elijah Pierson ends up joining Matthias’s cult, because Elijah is an avid Finneyite, who celebrates the progressive agenda of ensuring personal freedom for all people. However, when Elijah’s wife, Sarah, dies, his faith takes a darker turn. Before that, Pierson is born in 1786, and he grows up in New Jersey. He comes from a family of colonists (who arrived in the Americas in 1666) known for spreading American Puritanism in the northeastern United States.
The story shifts to describe the life story of Elijah Pierson, the first man to join Matthias’s cult. Based on Elijah’s loss of his wife, this passage hints that a person’s personal struggles can lead them to adopt a more pessimistic or even dysfunctional approach to religion. Elijah’s religious trajectory is also surprising given his Puritan upbringing. New England Puritans placed more emphasis on local church communities, orthodoxy, and close-knit family life than idiosyncratic visions.
Themes
Elijah grows up with strict religious rules in his household, and his family sets up the first Presbyterian church in Morristown, New Jersey. In the church, the Reverend Mr. Richard preaches a Calvinist brand of Christianity, which focuses on fearing God, obeying parents, and downplaying individualism. Calvinists believe that if any members of the congregation act sinfully (by indulging in their personal whims and desires), God will punish the whole town.
Presbyterianism is a branch of Christianity that is rooted in the sixteenth-century Calvinist branch of the Protestant Reformation. Traditionally, Calvinists stressed not just individual holiness, but community holiness, too. Thus, if individual church members behaved sinfully, the entire community could be subject to God’s judgment. This also meant that fathers were viewed as authoritative, responsible for teaching their households to obey the Bible’s standards for holiness. The book suggests that Elijah’s Presbyterian upbringing inclined him to be sympathetic to the patriarchy he’d later find in Matthias’s cult.
Themes
Elijah’s congregation sits in order of wealth, with the most expensive pews being near the front, although the community allows those who are elderly and hard of hearing to sit right at the front. As the family patriarch, Elijah’s father, Benjamin Pierson, is responsible for the whole community’s moral well-being. In 1796, Benjamin disciplines another man’s wife for smoking too much opium. Benjamin also provides a church job for his destitute brother-in-law Usual Crane and supports Crane’s widow after Crane dies. From the outside, this community looks like an unjust system in which women, slaves, and the poor must defer to the community’s patriarchs. From the inside, however, it likely feels like a community that looks after its members.
Elijah’s childhood community has upsides and downsides. On the upside, there is a strong ethos of community: the community’s leaders are responsible for looking after those who are disempowered (such as the poor and elderly) to make sure that nobody has to fend for themselves. On the downside, it is authoritarian: everybody must obey the community’s father figures at all times, meaning that women, children, and people of color have little power.
Themes
Like many 19th-century young men from rural areas, Elijah leaves his home as a young adult to work as a clerk in New York City. By 1820, he owns his own merchant store on Pearl Street, selling goods from trade ships to country general stores. He’s become part of the emerging urban middle class. As a religious man with family-oriented country values, Elijah finds himself uncomfortably wedged between wealthy, indifferent people who drink and keep mistresses, and desperately poor drunks and prostitutes who live in squalor. Elijah keeps to himself, and he finds himself affluent, chaste, and unmarried by the time he’s in his 30s.
Throughout the early 1800s, the rise of industry draws rural people to urban hubs like New York City to take jobs in manufacturing and trade. As a young adult, Elijah leaves his close-knit, religious, farming community and struggles to fit in among people who don’t value religion and morality in the same way. The book suggests that by his 30s, Elijah has failed to adapt to urban culture.
Themes
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Elijah finds solace in religion. In 1819, he joins Brick Presbyterian Church and begins volunteering there. Elijah begins supporting the church’s evangelical missions in poor communities. Evangelicals believe that the poor aren’t inherently sinful, but they make bad choices because they’re ignorant and need spiritual education. Evangelicals place a lot of importance on learning from loving mothers rather than obeying strict fathers. Middle-class evangelical women begin making domestic visits into poor people’s homes to act as moral guides, believing that bad morals stem from absent or cruel fathers.
Church membership helps Elijah feel more established in his new environment. In contrast to the congregation Elijah grew up in, though, Brick Presbyterian is more engaged in the social reform efforts that became popular among 19th-century evangelical Protestants. Some of these reform movements empowered women and emphasized mothers’ moral influence in the home. Women, therefore, play a more active role in church life than those in Elijah’s childhood church did.
Themes
Despite the evangelicals’ emphasis on women, male clergymen still remind their congregations that evangelical women’s roles are to assist and support men. They continue advancing a patriarchal picture in which God is seen as the ultimate “father” figure. Several ministers fear the idea of their congregations rejecting fatherly authority too much, since it questions their own power, and this is exactly what happens. Many evangelicals—including Elijah Pierson—start believing that too much power, cruelty, and intimidation from male authority figures in society causes problems and encourages sinfulness.
Even though evangelicals empower mothers to morally guide their families, evangelicalism remains “patriarchal” in the sense that churches are led by male clergy, and God is worshiped as “Father.” Nonetheless, the authors suggest that as women become more visible in missionary work, male authority gets questioned and even eroded somewhat in broader society.
Themes
One evangelical woman pushing this agenda is Elijah’s future wife, Sarah Stanford. Sarah’s mother dies when she’s four, and her father preaches in New York’s prisons. By the time Sarah meets Elijah, she is widowed and has a young daughter. Elijah’s drawn to Sarah’s strength and competence. They get married in May 1822. Elijah joins Sarah’s congregation, and they begin forging out an evangelical life together, centered on work, visits to the poor, and prayer at home. Sarah takes on the role of Elijah’s moral compass and caretaker in their “mother-centered household.” Unlike authoritarian father figures in his hometown, Elijah likely feels quite lost and unsure about how to run his daily life after his wife dies.
Elijah and Sarah’s domestic life illustrates the shift that the book has just presented—from a patriarchal household to a “mother-centered” one, in which Sarah makes most of the domestic decisions and exercises moral authority. In fact, Elijah grows so used to relying on Sarah that later, after she dies, he doesn’t know where to turn—showing how dramatically his view of family has changed.
Themes
In 1825, Elijah crosses paths with a radical evangelical woman named Frances Folger. Frances thinks that luxury is sinful, and she chastises a woman in her congregation for wearing a feathered hat to church. Frances also starts challenging male power and authority in both poor and wealthy households. Her group even enters wealthier peoples’ homes unannounced to pray, with the aim of reforming their families. Elijah follows Sarah to one such event at Frances’s cousin Benjamin Folger’s home, where almost 40 people are praying in the living room. They begin to condemn church rituals, as they believe that private prayer enables them to commune more directly with the Holy Ghost.
Frances Folger pushes the boundaries around the religious power that women are allowed to have in American society. In this respect, Frances exemplifies gender shifts in 19th-century evangelicalism. By emphasizing informal, personal prayer over formal, church-mediated prayer, evangelicals like Frances undermine the traditionally patriarchal (male-dominated) character of church and society.
Themes
In 1828, Elijah releases a pamphlet (mostly written by Sarah) that objects to the church’s tendency to collect money (during services and from renting out pews of different price levels). They believe that collecting money over-privileges the wealthy and makes the poor feel unwelcome. Frances, Sarah, Elijah and several other prominent evangelicals set up a more formal religious community in Bowery Hill. They sell their worldly possessions, reject unnecessary luxuries, wear modest clothing, and live simply on bread and water. Elijah begins fasting on weekends, believing that it helps him connect more directly with the voice of God. He begins preaching sermons about this way of life.
Elijah, Sarah, and Frances’s religious zeal starts to take on a perfectionist character: that is, they believe that it’s possible for a Christian to live a perfectly holy life. For example, they think that good Christians are detached from the world, so they take this idea to an extreme, rejecting all luxuries. To live this way, they also separate from traditional Christian communities and start their own, showing their openness to radical forms of religion.
Themes
Although many of the city’s other evangelicals distance themselves from such practices, the group nonetheless fosters enough connections to fund a mission to convert Jewish people, a campaign to halt Sunday postal service, and another mission to end prostitution. They begin following sex workers home from prison and set up a preaching station in New York’s notorious Five Points neighborhood. Disenfranchised young women, meanwhile, see that they might get financial support from such middle-class evangelicals by peddling stories about abusive men who forced them into sexual trade.
The fact that other evangelicals distance themselves from Sarah, Elijah, and Frances underscores the radical nature of their beliefs. Not only do Sarah, Elijah, and Frances strive for perfect holiness in their own lives, they also attempt to recruit and reform people whom they see as sinful. This twin emphasis on perfectionism and social reform illustrates some of the ways 19th-century evangelicalism tried to adapt to an urbanizing culture.
Themes
Elijah and his group begin recruiting sex workers and sending them to be reformed at “Female Asylum House,” which they run in New York City’s Bowery Hill neighborhood. Members of the asylum include its matron, a reformed sex worker named Mrs. Bolton, and a Black servant named Isabella. The Asylum is founded on the principle of discovering God through Christian love. What unfolds, however, is an “unsettling surprise.”
Elijah and his friends set up an asylum to reform sinners, pulling others—like a Black woman named Isabella Van Wagenen, who will become central to the story—into their circle. The authors’ hint that what unfolds is “unsettling” suggests that the group’s efforts to embody Christian perfection will backfire.
Themes
On June 20, 1830, Elijah believes that he hears the voice of God talking to him. The voice proclaims him “Prophet Elijah of Tishbe,” and Elijah believes that he must prepare the world for “the coming of the Lord.” Sarah has fallen dangerously ill from excessive fasting, and eventually, she dies with Elijah and his followers by her side. Around 200 people attend Sarah’s funeral, and Elijah declares that he will raise her from the dead. He prays and preaches for an hour. Eventually, a drop of blood emerges from Sarah’s nostril. A doctor at the funeral explains that this means her corpse is rotting.
Elijah the Tishbite was a prophet of Israel in the Old Testament’s Books of Kings. Elijah’s identification with the biblical prophet, Sarah’s fasting-induced death, and Elijah’s prayer for Sarah’s resurrection all illustrate how far they’ve passed outside the Christian mainstream. The authors portray these beliefs as not just extreme but disconnected from reality.
Themes
Elijah claims that over the next week, Sarah rises from her coffin and appears several times. Apparently, Sarah wants to make sure that Elijah knows how to take care of himself without her, and she wants to urge Elijah to continue their missionary work. While grieving, Elijah throws himself into increasingly fervent prayer over the next several months, during which he believes that Jesus appears and tells him that Sarah will return and bear him a son, after which they’ll all ascend to heaven together. Elijah’s followers begin to abandon him, one by one, believing him to be deranged.
Elijah’s vision of Sarah returning from the dead to check on his domestic affairs reinforces the idea that Sarah ran the home, in contrast to traditional family structures where the father-figure ran the home. Elijah’s subsequent delusions suggest, as before, that extreme religious beliefs can harm a person’s mental health.
Themes
By this time, a man named John McDowell is running day-to-day operations at Female Asylum House (now called “Magdalen House of Refuge”), while Elijah serves as a founding director. A man named Arthur Tappan from the evangelical community serves as Magdalen House’s president, but he soon leaves. Shortly after, John McDowell severs ties with Magdalen House as well, citing doubts about Elijah’s sanity. In 1831, Elijah shuts down his merchant business and devotes himself to preaching, praying, and fasting full-time, from a house near Fourth Street and Bowery in Manhattan, along with Frances Folger; her husband, Rueben; their servant, Isabella Van Wagenen; and Mrs. Bolton (former matron of Magdalen House).
Elijah’s mental health declines so much that many people distance themselves from his endeavors. His religious devotion ends up causing his missionary work and his career as a merchant to collapse. This suggests that Elijah’s attempts to fulfill an extreme religious ideal also damage his capacity to function as a contributing member of society. Elijah’s religious devotion is thus beginning to consume him in an unhealthy way that isolates him from all but a handful of people in his life.
Themes
Elijah continues to denounce churches that charge rent for pews and collect money at services. His followers share pamphlets telling people to come and hear “Elijah the Prophet” preach. Elijah preaches that prayer and fasting will enable his followers to heal sick people, deter evil spirits, and resurrect the dead. About a year later, in 1832, a man named Matthias knocks on Elijah’s door.
In claiming that he and his followers can perform miracles, Elijah appears to consider himself a Christ figure, suggesting that he’s growing increasingly delusional and out of touch with reality. Building tension, the book connects Elijah’s and Matthias’s paths at this ominous point.
Themes
