Rural Life and Urban Culture Theme Analysis

The Kingdom of Matthias describes the life stories of Elijah Pierson and Robert Matthews, two young men who grew up in poor, rural communities in the Northeastern United States in the early 1800s, around the time when urban culture in cities like New York began to have a strong impact on American society. The men’s rural upbringings focus on community, family, farming, and strict religious obedience, but they are both forced to seek work in New York, where life is very different. Pierson ends up becoming a successful merchant, while Matthews struggles to find work. Despite their different paths, both men feel out of place in an urban society that privileges individual freedom, trade, and economic success. As a result, both men turn even more powerfully to religion, which ends in them starting a cult that tries to recreate the faith-based community values they knew from their childhoods, with disastrous results. Through Pierson and Matthews’s story, authors Paul E. Johnson and Sean Wilentz offer a cautionary tale about people from rural, homogeneous, traditional faith-based communities who cling too tightly to traditional values and therefore struggle to adapt as their societies grow and change.

Elijah Pierson and Robert Matthews both grow up in close-knit, religious, rural communities, and when they go to find work in New York City each of them struggles to adapt to the affluent, individualistic culture in the city. Elijah’s father, Benjamin Pierson, is a church leader who looks after many of the people in his town, and Elijah notices and admires the way that his community centers on “mutual care and obligation” and ensures that “widows stayed warm in winter, deaf people took the best seats in church, and [impoverished men] kept their dignity.” Elijah thus grows up in an environment where community leaders (typically wealthy, elderly men) take care of those who are more vulnerable. Matthews, similarly, grows up as an orphan who’s cared for by church leaders in his community. They even set Matthews up with his own business when he becomes an adult, such that he becomes used to having support from others to make his way in the world.

As adults, though, both Elijah and Matthews struggle to adapt to New York’s more secular, individualistic culture, because it conflicts with their religious and community-oriented childhood values. Moreover, their efforts to integrate into urban society’s religious communities ultimately fail, leaving them even more isolated. Elijah becomes a well-respected merchant, but he’s unable to fit in with other affluent men who prefer to drink, seek luxury, and pursue relationships with multiple women, all of which conflict with Elijah’s small-town “moral code.” Matthews, meanwhile, who works as a laborer, is rejected by New York’s working-class community because he keeps scolding others for what he sees as their “immoral” behavior, such as drinking. Both men feel isolated and unable to integrate into New York’s urban culture, because they find that other New Yorkers embrace drinking, socializing, and personal happiness over faith, work, and obedience to community leaders.

Both Elijah and Matthews respond to their sense of isolation by seeking a sense of community through religion, which feels familiar to them. However, they also find it difficult to adapt to evolving religious ideas. Elijah begins attending a Methodist church and engaging in missionary work with his wife, Sarah. However, when Sarah dies, Elijah struggles to keep evolving and fitting in to his community without her guidance. Most of his acquaintances ultimately reject him, believing that he’s losing his mind. Elijah’s struggles to adapt to changing situations in his life thus ends up pushing people away and isolating him even more. Matthews is also excited by the sense of community he witnesses at a Methodist church, and he strives to fit in within the evangelical church community, but he feels “humiliated” when they reject him after learning that he beats his wife. Instead of adjusting his behavior to fit the community’s values, however, Matthews assumes that he’s being mistreated because he’s poor. Matthews’s inability to change and embrace evolving social values thus ends up isolating him. 

Matthews, with Elijah’s support, ends up starting a cult that recreates traditional, faith-based, community-oriented rural living, but it ultimately devolves into a hostile, violent environment resulting in Elijah’s death and Matthews’s imprisonment. Matthews sets up the cult as an extended “traditional farm family,” attempting to “revive[] the rural ways he had known in his youth,” but he takes his vision so seriously that he grows deluded, and he ends up terrorizing his followers. He eventually murders Elijah and winds up in prison for beating his daughter Isabella Laisdell. Matthews and Elijah’s obsession with recreating a way of life that is fading from their society ends up destroying their lives. In contrast, other cult members—including Benjamin and Ann Folger and Isabella Van Wagenen—fare much better because they are able to adjust their values after escaping the cult, enabling them to reintegrate into society. This juxtaposition suggests that rigid adherence to a single lifestyle will ultimately lead to failure, while those who can adjust to a changing moral and social landscape leave themselves with more options to find success, because society itself is always changing and evolving.