The Kingdom of Matthias portrays a religious cult—centered on obeying men—in New York in the 1830s, led by infamous cult leader Robert Matthews (or “Matthias”). Matthews grows up in a society where men are completely in charge of their communities, homes, and families. But he struggles to adapt when religious reformers shift more power to women. In the early 1800s, evangelicals try to replace the idea that families must obey the eldest man (or father figure) in each household. Instead, they want mothers to become families’ domestic anchors and moral guides. Matthews feels displaced by this new agenda, and he starts a cult that celebrates patriarchy: the idea that men ought to be in charge of all moral, social, economic, sexual, and domestic decisions in society. The authors of The Kingdom of Matthias Paul E. Johnson and Sean Wilentz argue that the rise of Matthews’s cult is not an isolated incident, and describe many cults, historical and contemporary, that try to reestablish a conservative social structure in which men have all the authority. In writing about these cults, Johnson and Wilentz more broadly make the case that the cults reveal a dangerous and persistent undercurrent in American culture of male rage that men are no longer society’s exclusive authority figures.
The strict Calvinist community Matthews grows up in is structured such that men have complete power and authority—both in society and within family units—which makes Matthews believe that he, too, will enjoy this power as an adult. Calvinists believe that if one person in the community behaves immorally, the whole community is sinful, so they give the community’s men the power to keep everybody in line. This effectively sets up a patriarchal society in which father figures have complete authority. In Matthews’s community, the “ministers and elders” are “always men” whose job it is to lead prayers and publicly shame those who are deemed to have acted immorally—these men have authority to control others in the community. Within each household, father figures also have complete authority. Fathers are considered “the masters of their households”—they must lead “their wives, children, and servants,” and those women, children, and servants must in turn obey the household’s father figure. Matthews’s community encourages him to believe that patriarchal societies are good because they empower men to take care of everybody. So, Matthews acts obediently as a child, assuming that he’s destined to become an authoritative father figure who will help to maintain the community’s moral and social order.
By the time Matthews reaches adulthood, however, sweeping religious reforms have taken place in the United States that question absolute male authority, especially in the home, placing more emphasis on motherly love instead. Evangelical religious reformers worry about struggling families in which fathers abuse alcohol and beat their wives and children, so they empower middle-class women to enter poor people’s households to provide spiritual guidance rooted in motherly love. This shifts the balance of power towards women within the home, and it also increases women’s involvement in society by encouraging public missionary work. Even though Matthews is the kind of person whom evangelicals worry about (as he has angry outbursts whenever he struggles financially, beating his wife Margaret and their children with a whip), he believes in “divine patriarchy”: the idea that only men are capable of teaching others how to be moral, holy, and good. Matthews thus thinks that allowing women to provide moral guidance—in both domestic and public settings—is wrong, causing him to resent the rise of evangelical values in American society. Matthews also argues that evangelicalism “systematically steals women and children from fathers,” suggesting that he’s angry about evangelical ideas dismantling his own fatherly authority in society.
By starting a cult, Matthews establishes himself as a father figure who’s in charge of his community, and which enshrines masculine authority more generally. Matthews structures his cult to make boys “work with their fathers, then join their sisters at night to learn the truth at the father’s feet.” Similarly, he claims that wives do their moral duty by “obeying husbands” who should be a family and community’s “only source of knowledge.” Matthews believes that this setup will create a healthy, moral environment that restores order in the home and in society. Instead of creating a healthy environment, however, Matthews ends up abusing his power: he beats his daughter Isabella Laisdell, seduces Ann Fogler, the married wife of one of his followers, forces his Black servant Isabella Van Wagenen to work herself to exhaustion so that he and Ann can sleep late into the day, and murders his disciple Elijah Pierson. The events that unfold in the cult show the pitfalls of giving anyone complete authority, and the nature of the physical and sexual abuse particularly suggests that unchecked male power leads to calamity.
The book broadens its particular focus on Matthews’s cult to show that in the United States there are still many cults in which angry men attempt to reclaim the power they once had in American society. Although not every such cult creates a public scandal like Matthews’s did, authors Johnson and Wilentz note that “extremist prophets” who exude “hurts and rages wrapped in longings for a supposedly bygone holy patriarchy” have “a long and remarkably continuous history in the United States.” Johnson and Wilentz thus leverage the story of Matthews’s cult to warn that American culture is saturated with dangerous—and ongoing—male rage about losing absolute patriarchal authority.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Patriarchy, Family, and Society ThemeTracker
Patriarchy, Family, and Society Quotes in Kingdom of Matthias
In contrast to the Finneyite inventors of Yankee middle-class culture, the two prophets at Kirtland may look like marginal men—cranky nay-sayers to the economic, domestic, and social progress of the nineteenth century. Against the Finneyites’ feminized spirituality of restraint, Smith and Matthias (each in his own way) resurrected an ethos of fixed social relations and paternal power. Yet as they saw things, they were defenders of ancient truth against the perverse claims of arrogant, affluent, and self-satisfied enemies of God.
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.
Young Elijah learned early in life that God had placed men and women into families and social ranks, then governed their destinies according to His inscrutable Providence. Elijah was not to question this visible, worldly order. He had only to apprehend his station within it and then follow the rules of that station. As a child this meant fearing God, denying his own sinful will, and obeying his father and mother. (Later, it would mean being a father and family governor himself.) Elijah […] knew that if he misbehaved or if the local fathers allowed others to misbehave, God would do terrible things to Morristown.
Absent, ignorant, and cruel fathers had degraded poor women and children and left a moral void. City missions would fill that void, mainly (in the case of the Female Missionary Society) through the ministrations of middle-class women.
Elijah and Sarah prayed with the Holy Club for three years, and in 1828 Elijah began talking with the Holy Ghost. He had always been a man of prayer, and had always asked God for help when he had to make some decision. But it was only in 1828 that God began answering him in English.
In 1835, an enterprising Manhattan journalist disclosed that, as a boy, Robert Matthews had his own conversations with supernatural spirits and impressed his friends with feats of clairvoyance. […] It is even more likely that when the adult Matthews began having visions years later, he would have instinctively trusted that they came from God.
Despite all of his protestations of faith, [Matthews] was violating the most basic precepts of evangelical manhood, with his unsteady work habits, his self-glorification, and his domestic tyranny.
Margaret […] stopped by the mayor’s office to find out what she could do—and learned that, in the eyes of the law, she could do very little.
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.
In effect, the court sustained [Charles] Laisdell: every man should have his rights, and the rights of a husband over the body of his wife superseded those of her father. On that basis, the jury found Matthias guilty.
[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.
