The Kingdom of Matthias documents the rise and fall of a historic cult in New York in the 1800s. The cult itself symbolizes the dysfunctional rage in men who feel ignored by a society that’s rapidly becoming more progressive (and less patriarchal) than they want it to be.
The cult centers on a poor, white, uneducated man (Matthias) who grows up in a strictly religious Calvinist community, believing that one day, he’ll be an authoritative father figure running his own household. When Matthias grows up, however, he’s thrust into a world in which people increasingly value personal freedom over fatherly authority. Around this time, urban middle-class culture is on the rise, anchored by people who grow successful through trade. In comparison, Matthias—a poor man from a traditional farming community with strict patriarchal values—feels that society has left him behind. Out of rage, Matthias starts a cult that reenacts the power structure that life has denied him. He establishes himself as a father figure who has complete authority over his followers. Shortly after, he initiates wife-swapping, violence, and even murder.
The cult illustrates the toxic effects of poor, white, male rage on vulnerable and/or marginalized people (especially women, children, and people of color). Moreover, authors Johnson and Wilentz argue that cults like Matthias’s continue to exist today, showing that there are still many people in American society—especially disenfranchised, white, uneducated men—who feel angry about being sidelined by a society that once promised them complete power and authority. In order to reclaim their lost authority, such men try to create mini-societies that return power to a paternal figure (a head of household, community leader, or God, which they claim to personify). These cults represent dysfunctional rage-fueled attempts to cling to patriarchal values that are waning in American society.
Cult Quotes in Kingdom of Matthias
But Americans also sensed that the Matthias cult spoke with strange eloquence to the social and emotional upheavals in which they lived their own lives—particularly their struggles to redefine what it meant to be a woman or a man in the new world of the nineteenth century.
Boys would work with their fathers, then join their sisters at night to learn Truth at the father’s feet. Wives would cheerfully assist the patriarchs, bearing their children, preparing their food, keeping their houses spotlessly clean, and obeying husbands who were their only source of knowledge and material support.
But with Ann’s ascendance in Matthias’s affections, [Isabella Van Wagenen] coupled her faith with her own notions of what was going on, notions that had to do less with divine patriarchy than with devilish lust.
The bulk of the Kingdom’s household drudge work now fell on Isabella Van Wagenen, who was especially peeved that Mother and Father rose late in the day, which threw her back in her chores.
As life in the cult (or, as the cult members call it, the “Kingdom”) falls into a rhythm, it becomes clear that Isabella Van Wagenen—a Black woman who functions as the cult’s household servant—bears the brunt of the domestic labor. Other cult members, like Matthias (who informally refers to himself as “Father”) and Ann (who starts going by “Mother” after she begins a relationship with Matthias) barely do any work at all. They sleep all day and keep shifting more work onto Isabella’s shoulders. The cult is a patriarchal environment, and Isabella’s plight exposes how such environments tend to marginalize and oppress people who are undervalued. The cult’s most powerful white man (Matthias) and white woman (Ann) effectively exploit the only Black woman (Isabella Van Wagenen). Matthias organizes the cult to recreate the “traditional” way of life he experienced as a child in a rural community run exclusively by father-figures (patriarchs). Many situations that unfold in the cult thus symbolize dysfunctional aspects of patriarchal societies. Here, Isabella’s frustrations show that such environments tend to disenfranchise, marginalize, and exploit women of color the most. Isabella’s plight thus serves as a subtle commentary on the racism and sexism in “traditional” American society.
There is too much changing of wives here […] l have a nice little woman, and I should not much like to lose her.
What a devilish shame it is […] that a woman wants two or three men.
[F]or all their seeming eccentricity, these extremist prophets have a long and remarkably continuous history in the United States; they speak not to some quirk of the moment or some disguised criminal intention, but to persistent American hurts and rages wrapped in longings for a supposedly bygone holy patriarchy.
Cult Symbol Timeline in Kingdom of Matthias
