Newborns in the Cradle of Liberty, Oley 1720—

In Sachse, German Sectarians, I, 209

 Newborns in the Cradle of Liberty, Oley 1720—Revised /Dec 2011

The Philadelphia Snort

“Philadelphians snort that a building in Boston—Faneuil Hall, should be called “the cradle of liberty” just because James Otis gave a fiery anti-British speech there in 1761. How can you compare that to a city where the Declaration of Independence and Constitution of the United States were drafted, debated, revised, and signed—both in a brief period of eleven years?” Gary B. Nash 

The Newborn of  Oley are more about politics than religion. The sweet and bitter ideas of founder Matthias Baumann, Newborn founder from Lambsheim, charmed and antagonized his time. His followers put these views into practice with such gracelessness and rancor they underwrote the formation of liberty. Newborns squalled all the way from Oley and Berks County into Philadelphia. Die Neu-geboren focused  on “confounding men.”  starting Baumann's  “principle [in 1705] that magistrates had no authority in matters of conscience, an early instance of separation of church and state” (Stoudt. Sunbonnets 51). The extremes of speech with which he challenged social order in Pennsylvania became beliefs transferred to a state that prepared guarantees for all citizens of their rights of free speech and practice.

This virulence, combined with its toleration, contributed mightily to the notion of liberty that entered Jefferson's language in his writing, but Baumann’s ideas also confronted the prejudice of Gnostic oriented sects against the body, that is against women. Finally, his “hallucinatory perfectionism” was influential in later revivals of Charles Finny, and the rise of evangelicalism, all of which marks out a territory of the Newborn far greater in influence that their number.

1. Freedom of Speech

Call dates itself by twice referring to 22 years since Baumann had a mind numbing overwhelming experience in 1701. Ad hominium attacks against him then and since pass over in silence that he had carried his dream before magistrates and into the new world, defending it charismatically before all comers, writing a defense that attracted strong minded intelligent men whose families grew large and prosperous in America, Kuhlwein, Joder, DeTurk, Schenkel, Yoder, Reiff, LeDee and others who acted  in a public manner.

The Newborn habits of American revivalism inculcated liberty by their theatrics. Religious primitivism and charismatic behavior mark all frontiers, and the newborn were at the forefront of  mystical nihilism, radical pietism and religious primitivism. So strongly individualistic in the overthrow of formula the peace loving spirit of all the groups of Philadelphia that made liberty possibleThat said, it was the deep abiding and the Newborn the best occasion of their testing.

The later freedoms of the Declaration and Constitution were nurtured most among the most outrageous sects and religions of early Philadelphia.

This article was written at the request of an editor, but not published, but it seems from the evidence that the Newborn Baumannites might be credited for contributing to American thought much outside their usual due.

Freedom of conscience went unnoticed in Pennsylvania except among the participants. Early Pennsylvania was a lawless place, but whether as a haven of extreme liberty or religious plurality in a golden age  the victor gets to declare.

Any window on 1720-1730 pre-revolutionary Philadelphia  is worth seeing through. It cannot help but focus what became significant later. Issues of religion were a whole lot more than religion, encompassed politics, science, art. There are not that many of these windows. The longer you look through them the more you see, not that a list is forthcoming, but the themes are undeniable, liberty being foremost. So something that first appears small can enlarge our understanding. (from Jacob Reiff)

2. The Rights of Women

 not so unlike that manuscript included at the end of he Music of the Ephrata Cloister where the writer takes up the first tract in support of animal rights attributed to Ludwig Hocker Brother Obed of the Ephrata Cloister, 95f. He does so also for the rights of women, but this had been a cause of Cornelius Agrippa in Nobilitate & Præœcellentia Fœminei of 1529,  The Nobility of Woman.

In addition to provoking liberty from their scurrilous speech,  Baumann’s idea of the sinless body implicitly supported the rights of women against the unworldly pietistic sects. Baumann incensed his opponents with the statement that “with the body one cannot sin before God.” The pietists’ fear of the body had extended to women in a kind of Gnostic transference which symbolized a fear of the flesh. Women were blamed for  male sexuality. Such prejudice extended to marriage, which Conrad Beissel of Ephrata called a refuge of the carnal minded. Baumann’s vindication of woman must be seen against the idea of woman symbolizing the unfaithful in the Gnostic world, a temptation to man to sin in the flesh. Baumann turns this view on its head when he says the body is not capable of sin.

The body enabled sin for Beissel who believed every aspect of existence tainted with the flesh, so that the "good [that] sought to possess them" (Chronicon Ephratense 129) must be protected from "too much of the good [falling] into their natural life." He urged spiritual and physical virginity upon his followers. This natural life Beissel  called "man-power" (Chronicon 130) or the "selfish possession" of the good. Such medievalism overhung his  core belief that marriage was "a house of correction for carnal minded persons" (Chronicon 147). The  eminent editor of Chronicon, Peter Miller, expanded this notion to the effect that "who does not know that carnal intercourse stains not only the soul, but also weakens the body, and renders the voice coarse and rough; so that the senses of him must be very blunt who cannot distinguish a virgin from a married woman by her voice. Much concerning the fall of man can be explained from the voice" (161). Baumann’s notion of no longer sinning with the body struck at the heart of those theologies that posited sin as a cause for instruction and strong leadership. If sinless there was little  reason for such outer rituals toward redemption. A person could just live as they saw fit, which they did anyway, but with guilt.

Pennsylvania pietists believed the new birth was a regeneration leading to changed life, unworldly. Baumann  however said that “Christ’s congregation is invisible” (138) and “everything is of the spirit” (138). The Newborn hijacked the new birth and made it antagonistic to those beliefs.  Baumann's "perfection" of sinlessness constituted a massive internal revelation from which the "babe" could not fall. But when Baumann disputed with Quakers and all comers on the courthouse steps of Philadelphia, he did it with humor, promising he would walk on the Delaware river. He did not say if this would be in winter, on ice. When Baumann visited Beissel’s  “solitary residence” at Conestoga (c. 1721) that most famous comeuppance given him was as much a revelation of Beissel as it was correction of Baumann. Beissel said of Baumann's idea of freedom from sin, that “Adam did not do evil with his body” (Chronicon 137), was contradicted by his own stink (literally) and repudiated Baumann's sinlessness. Beissel’s demons would later allow him to seduce other men's wives with promises of spiritual intercourse, so physical sinlessness would of course much offend him (Chronicon 17).

3. Perfectionism and Humanitarianism

The cults of Perfectionism begat John Rogers in Newport about 1674. The Rogerenes were "the last of the English revolutionary sects and the first of the indigenous American perfectionist sects" (John L. Brooke. The Refiner's Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology, 1644-1844, 48)

Nature is freedom and law restriction, but liberty tries to reconcile nature and law, the personal with the social. Or put another way law is a form of enforced Perfectionism which opposes humanitarianism, which allows for imperfection. Philadelphia Quakers sought purity (law) in their shunning of the world (nature), which compromised the Quakers’ humanity, says Daniel Joseph Boorstin,  “To  avoid taking oaths, Quakers sacrificed the humanity of criminal laws.”(Daniel Boorstin 11).

But many Pennsylvania groups shared Quaker and Gnostic suspicions on the body and were willing to sacrifice humanity for the perfect pursuit of purity.  Count Zinzendorf (1799-1760) was both an autocrat and a sensualist. John Phillip Boehm (1683-1749) was a fanatic in all his personal polemics. He terrorized every reformed pastor, from Weiss and Peter Miller, who was pastor of a Reformed church in 1730, to pastors Rieger, Lispsky and Goetschy. Printer Christopher Sauer (1695-1758) was wildly partisan, blaming Beissel for heresy and overturning the English language movement. It is no surprise Baumann’s followers were fanatics who carried their own hypocrisies to an extreme. Sinlessly they met in taverns on Sunday and mocked the believers in their churches. Sinlessly they made creeds and beliefs a bedrock of their anti-hypocrisy, and instituted their own anti-Calvinisms as abominable, as though they were latter day prophets: “filthy!” they proclaimed like Isaiah,  “they are all gone out the way!”

On any occasion of assembly, outside churches, during sermons and at funerals, the newborn in their cups mocked and satirized the public beliefs of every fellow cultist, sectarian and religious. There is no record of newborn piety anywhere else but in this public mockery or in taverns taking beer as communion. Separated from all semblance of tolerance it was a lifestyle that grew thin quick. In New England they’d have been stoned. If the Newborn were tolerated in this barbarism anyone could be, but the long lasting social effects of the Newborn in the birth of liberty also influenced later American religion: “Matthias Baumann’s hallucinatory perfectionism had important consequences: it helped inspire the many ‘holiness revivals’ of the nineteenth century in both Europe and America and left traces in modern American evangelicalism” (Bernard Bailyn 157).

As a result of their extreme beliefs the Newborn also dramatically confronted the overt occultism of the sects who yoked primitive biblical devotional language with an allegorical remake of the nature of man. The Newborn  put to flight those renaissance pictographs of the spiritual bride. There is no new moon braying among them or disciple anointing talk, just rancor and  parody, satire and rigor. These were applied across the board against all religiousity, including the Rosicrucianism of the mystic Jacob Boehme (1575-1624) and  the mystics of the Wissahickon. The Newborn rejected outright every form of sectarian and denominational worship. So when those “extraordinary physical manifestations occurred—some quacked like ducks, some brayed like jackasses,” (Sunbonnets, 51), and descriptions of the Fall occurred  in mysterious quaternaries, they heaped them with scorn.

The denominations were as much offended with Baumann’s sinlessness as the sects. The spiritual stink for them of such talk was  Baumann’s arrogating spirituality to himself,  but it is pointless to debate  the Newborn theology of lawlessness in Oley.

4. --Acceptance of the body, liberty of speech, perfectionism were all wrapped up together in Newborn life.

Die Neu-geboren was an anti church. They “boasted they had only been sent by God to confound men” (Chronicon Ephratense 17). Matthias Baumann’s call to examine the spirit as the cause of sin instead of the flesh confronts the first Gnostic delusion that fell into the material realm, and confirms Dante climbing out, entering Paradise, in “this glorious and holy flesh (Paradiso, XIV, 45).  The spirit made the choice, said Baumann. The body is incapable of sin without the spirit the way a car does not sin when the operator fails to brake. The Newborn took spiritual sin as the motive of their Call to confound and confront men even if St. Paul confronts both in his filthiness of the flesh and spirit (II Cor 7.1). What indeed is a doctrine of the flesh?

The Newborn held baptism in contempt with communion and church attendance because “Christ’s congregation is invisible” (Stoudt, Baumann 138). “Everything is of the spirit,” said Baumann (138), but when he said he could not sin in the body, his opponents said he claimed he could not sin at all. What he actually said was that sin was of  the spirit. Of course his tract in its plain speaking has as many inconsistencies as those of other battling shepherds, John Philip Boehm, George Michael Weiss and Conrad Beissel. The light and shadow of Call are part of Baumann's confounding the world. In the light that emerges from his coruscations extremes define the question; if this then that! Newborn beliefs were so big they could not contain Newborn ideas and became disbeliefs.

 Standing against visibility Baumann’s followers enacted shadow services outside conventional churches at worship, and in taverns, mocking and mimicking the evangelism of the time with scatological preaching that would not pass the censors of Saturday Night Live. The excesses reported by Mittelberger are parody (see Journey to Pennsylvania 45, 83-86). Henry Muhlenberg accounts the more sober side of  facetious Newborn rhetoric (Journals, I, 138-139) with their evangelistic picketing (I, 146, 357) and mock services held in taverns on Sunday mornings (I, 352). The first licensed Reformed preacher in Philadelphia, Rev. George Michael Weiss, found farmers not pastors performing their doctrines in The Preacher  traveling about in the American Wilderness (1729).  Matthias Baumann, founder of the Newborns left one work, A Call to the Unregenerate (Berleberg, 1731). The marks of infamy were their fame.

The Newborn were champions at holding their neighbors in contempt. Believing they were free from sin they could hardly mistake, which is how they underwrote  free thought, because they presented to society the dilemma to either forcibly suppress them or tolerate them. Liberty cannot exist without this tolerance, so it is also a mark of the generosity of Pennsylvania culture that they were tolerated. If the newborn could mock all sacred  beliefs of their neighbors and be tolerated then their liberty was great indeed. To show how noxious this can be, compare the birthers of today who challenge the president’s nativity or the people who show up at funerals to protest government wars (Westboro Baptist Church, of Topeka, Kansas has picketed at the funerals of 500 soldiers nationwide since June 1991.). The newborn practiced even greater offenses, which freedom of speech was ultimately licensed into the constitution.

 God Falls Into My Mind

All parties derided the Newborn, in part to evade their own malfeasance, but it is too easy to discredit Matthias Baumann as a bipolar menace in his so-called ravings. Called an hallucinatory perfectionism because of the way its founder came to his beliefs, he fell into a coma for some days, or weeks. His wife thought him dead and he had no memory of the event except to say that he had been transported to heaven, caught up like St. Paul, who also says little of the experience (II Corinthians 12. 1-4). He returned to earth changed. Whether this happened once or twice, in five or fourteen days, and whether he was arrested in 1702 and 1705 or 1706,  in 1709, when a handful of Baumann relatives and friends emigrated to Pennsylvania and settled in Oley, Pennsylvania, Baumann followed in 1714.

He says himself “I entered the sickness an old man. I arose a new one.”  (translated by John Joseph Stoudt in  the Historical Review of Berks County, Fall, 1978). Baumann repeats that before this he could not concentrate on saying the Lord’s Prayer long enough to avoid being interrupted by errant thought four times over, but after God fell into his mind, as he puts it (Stoudt, 137) he could not be distracted. He would have been hospitalized, drugged and shocked in later times. There are plenty of analogues besides psychosis in the religious ecstasy of the saints, the visions of Blake and in the supernatural ramblings and astrologies of them all. But unlike Jacob Boehme the shoemaker, acclaimed for alchemy and psychology, translated not to heaven but to English (by William Law, 1764). Baumann put no structure on his visions. He lacked a system, merely conceptualized that the inner world trumps the outer, that sin is of the spirit not the flesh, that beliefs, realities are internal, that outer practices of devotion  contravene the truth of the inner. How he knows this of course questions the sincerity of his own motive since he judges piety, but “Christianity is not something as you think which can be taught” (Stoudt, 142).

 Christians Without Christ

A majority of Newborn practices after Bauman’s death in 1727 read right out of his plan of action for these “Christians without Christ,” Christians in quotes, or the unregenerate in A Call to the Unregenerate World  (Ein Ruf an die Unwiedergebohrene Welt, written 1723). The faux evangelist in the back of a manure wagon mocking Oley farmers (Mittelberger 45) is following Baumann’s seven points, holding that “all denominations are sinful’ (Stoudt 138), and “all that Christ and his Apostles commanded has become vast idolatry” (Stoudt 144). Baumann ridiculed the hypocrisy of outer worship held sacred by churches and sects. His Call  reads like an invective against the Pharisees who think that “if you only live devoutly you will go to heaven” (Stoudt 144).  He calls this “self-centered piety” with the paradox that “God dwells in a Christian, therefore he can sin no more.” And “he who is born of God cannot sin” (Stoudt 137), which seems to say that because he cannot sin that being devout is a sign that he is sinning.

So all signs of devotion to him were sin. He numbers seven axioms of these disbeliefs and says that “is the doctrine that Christ brought into the world.” Self centered piety is a proof of sin because “when God comes into a person…he does nothing but praise and honor God. Rather, he does not do it but God’s Spirit does it in him.” (Stoudt 137) If this equivocates the doer from the deed that is the paradox, to call it so, because all that is seen is the deed,  the motive of the doer is unknown, whether acting out of God or selfishness. Thus with baptism, communion, church attendance, prayer, devout living, alms giving and fasting, the doing of the deed, he said, betrayed the outer act against the inner. Hence “all that Christ and His Apostles commanded has become vast idolatry…the best has become the vilest” (Stoudt 144). The societal malignancies of these people, who seem so out of sorts, were easy targets for their antagonists to discredit.

Muhlenberg, the most balanced voice of the time, gave a contemporary explanation of Newborn theology: "this sect claims the new birth which they receive suddenly through immediate inspiration and heavenly visions through dreams and the like. When they receive the new birth in this way, then they are God and Christ Himself, can no longer sin, and are infallible. They therefore use nothing from God's Word except those passages, which taken out of context, appear to favor their false tenets. The holy sacraments are to them ridiculous and their expressions concerning them are extremely offensive" (Journals I, 149, June 10, 1747).

Heavenly visions and inner light preoccupy what Muhlenberg learns of the old man who disturbed Philip Bayer's funeral: "this was the basis of his authority: one night, many years ago, he saw a light in his room. He claimed that this light revealed to him that he was a child of God, that the magistracy, the ministry, the Bible, sacraments, churches, schools, etc. are of the devil, that all men must be like him, etc" (Journals, I, 357-358). This smacks as much of ergot poisoning as illumination. The conflict of the inner and outer raised deep psychological issues for a Pietism that rejected formalism on one hand for a reviving of the spirit on the other. This pendulum came full swing in Baumann’s seven laws rejecting outer form, but he opposed all the theology of the time in saying the body was not the cause of sin,

5. Dada

Resisted in the new world as he had been in the old, Baumann provoked the second extant printed book in Pennsylvania, The Preacher, / traveling about in the American Wilderness/ by George Michael Weiss (1729) [Der IN DER AMERICAN SCHEN WILDNUSZ]. As is often the case the back story of these affairs rivals the main tale, for Weiss not only wrote this title, but also the first book about the Indians in the wilderness (1741). Weiss was not alone in resisting the Neu-geboren since nearly every other religious figure of the time did so, from Beissel and Boehme of the 1720’s to Muhlenberg and Zinzendorf in the 1740’s. The Newborn, never more than a few hundred, overtook more  powerful groups in influence out of all proportion to membership. Reformed apostle Boehm compares it with much larger groups,  “all sorts of errorists, as Independents, Puritans, Anabaptists, Newborn, Saturday-folks, yea even the most horrible heretics, Socinians, Pietists, etc. (Letter of 1728, Life and Letters 161). Mittelberger does the same in 1756, “Lutherans, Reformed, Catholics, Quakers…Dunkers, Presbyterians, Newborn…” (Journey 54).

It is hard to  judge them fairly from the words of their enemies, almost the only other source being a letter of May 14, 1718 written by his follower Maria De Turk where she says, “I cannot sin any more.” This is the crux of the affair, the cause of newborn mockery of other beliefs and the revulsion against them in turn. Sure, Baumann was no longer a force after his death, as his critics say in every breath, along with mentioning that he was a day laborer, or that maybe if there had just been a good asylum none of this would have happened, but it needs to be said that Baumann’s visitation at the birth of Liberty in America  prefigured the whole Dada movement of the 1920’s in Paris, to hold up to scorn the everyday affairs of men thus to provoke them into consciousness, which became by the 21 century public philsophy in the dissolution of  all boundries whether religous, social, geographical. All values dissolved into a melting pot merged identities, the opposite of Dada intent. So it goes.

Notes:

Bernard Bailyn. British Academy, 2007. The Search for Perfection: Atlantic Dimensions. http://www.proc.britac.ac.uk/tfiles//151p135.pdf

Daniel Joseph Boorstin. The Americans, the colonial experience. New York: Random House, 1958. “To  avoid taking oaths, Quakers sacrificed the humanity of criminal laws.”(Daniel Boorstin, 11).

Chronicon Ephratense. Ephrata, 1786. Translated by J. Max Hark, Lancaster, 1889.

Mittelberger, Gottlieb. Journey To Pennsylvania. Edited and Translated by Oscar Handlin and John Clive. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960.

Journals of Henry Melchior Muhlenberg. Translated by Theodore G. Tappert and John W. Doberstein. Fortress, 1958. Reprinted by Picton Press, Camden, ME.

The Life and Letters of the Rev. John Philip Boehm. Edited by the Rev. William J. Hinke. Philadelphia: Sunday School Board of the Reformed Church in the United States, 1916.

Motherwell, Robert. tr. The Dada Manifesto, in Dada Painters and Poets, NY: 1951.

Gary B. Nash http://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/essays/cradle-of-liberty/

Pendleton, Philip E. Oley Valley Heritage, The Colonial Years: 1700-1775. Birdsboro, PA: The Pennsylvania German Society, 1994. [The general details of the Newborn are well stated here. Pendleton also gives Maria DeTurk’s letter of 1718 in full]

John Joseph Stoudt. “Matthias Baumann.” Historical Review of Berks County. Fall, 1978. [a translation of Baumann’s Call to the Unregenerate]

John Joseph Stoudt. Sunbonnets and Shoofly Pies. New York: A. S. Barnes & Co., 1973