Biblical Fundamentalism

At the heart of the Bible Christian Church were three guiding principles: temperance, pacifi sm, and a meatless diet.  

In the early years of the nineteenth century, Cowherd’s church grew, primarily drawing members of Manchester’s working class with the promise of salvation for their souls and free vegetable soup for their stomachs. The church’s activities attracted the attention of William Metcalfe, a fellow former Swedenborgian. Metcalfe had already adopted a meat-free diet in 1810, viewing it as the most natural of human states. Many of Metcalfe’s friends and colleagues disagreed, urging him to give up what they referred to as his “foolish notions of a vegetable diet,” fearing for his strength and general well-being.  To the contrary, Metcalfe pointed out; the eff ects of a meatfree diet had quickly led to an increase in weight and strength.  Things were looking up considerably. With his health intact, Metcalfe even married; something he felt was highly unlikely just a few years earlier.

It was the early morning of March 29, 1817. A cool breeze waft ed through the foggy Liverpool air along with an overriding sense of excitement, anxiety, and anticipation. The Reverends William Metcalfe and James Clarke gazed out on their gathered flock, surveying the situation before them. Inspired by the providential timing—it was, aft er all, near the time of the year when the ancient Israelites made their exodus from Egypt—forty-one followers of the fledgling Bible Christian Church boarded the majestic Liverpool Packet . 1 For months church members had discussed rumors of religious freedom and abundant providence in the new American republic. With a radical religious and political spirit that had led to isolation and intimidation in England, Bible Christians saw the nascent American experiment as fertile ground where their independent lifestyle could flourish. The fear of political persecution combined with a burgeoning industrial society pushed Bible Christians westward to Philadelphia.  

The Bible Christians’ decision to leave England for the United States would eventually have larger social and cultural implications than the group could have imagined. The activities of this small band of dissidents would lead to the development of a much larger movement in the United States, focusing on one particular component of the church’s doctrine, the abstention from meat. Proto-vegetarianism—the individuals and groups who would lay the foundations of a vegetarian movement in the United States— began with the arrival of the Bible Christians.  

The group was the first to adopt meatless dietetics at the center of its members’ lives while also advocating for this lifestyle in American society at large. The Bible Christians, however, were not the only group to introduce the principle of meat abstention to Americans in the early years of the republic. Within years of the group’s establishment in Philadelphia, another movement, known popularly as Grahamism, inspired larger groups of interested reformers to abandon their carnivorous practices.  

In the first decades of the nineteenth century, multiple groups and individuals experimented with meatless diets, driven by a desire to create moral, social, and political reform. Proto-vegetarian movements in the United States were marked by outreach to meat-eaters through speeches, publications, newspapers, and public meetings that sought to illustrate the larger social and political implications of dietary choices. These early developments set the stage for a larger movement to mature outside of Philadelphia and eventually gave rise to American vegetarianism.  The Bible Christians migrating to Philadelphia did so with the full support of the movement’s founder, William Cowherd, who preached that it was only possible to live an authentic religious life in an agricultural society.

In 1811, Metcalfe was ordained as a Bible Christian minister. Soon aft er he began looking toward the United States as a new potential home where the group could grow. An increasingly oppressive political environment in England at the end of the Napoleonic Wars led to organized attempts to quell radical reformers. Bible Christians—sympathetic to the Luddite spirit of the times—were, in the words of one church member, “obnoxious not only to the hired minions of power, but also to our relatives.” The notion of emigrating enjoyed significant support among church members, who frequently discussed the opportunities for civil and religious freedom in the United States. What better place than America, Metcalfe argued, to present a nascent, radical religion?  Under the guidance of Metcalfe and Clarke, the Bible Christian immigrants arrived on the shores of the United States on June 14, 1817. The group had survived a difficult seventy-nine-day voyage at sea, presumably made even more objectionable by the liberal consumption of meat and alcohol by the ship’s crew, non–Bible Christian passengers, and even by a few renegade church members.

  Yet the group arrived in Philadelphia well-funded and determined to “stand still and do good” with faith in the notion that “verily thou shalt be fed.” 9  Immediately, however, the group split along ideological lines. Clarke and his followers viewed agriculture as the key to the growth of the church. Metcalfe—cosmopolitan and decidedly more modernist—saw the city as the location with the greatest potential for expansion. In August 1817, Clarke and his family settled in Elkland Township, Pennsylvania, establishing a small church and Sunday school based on the principles of akreophagy, the habitual abstention from meat-eating. However, the agricultural life would not lead to the growth of the Bible Christians as Clarke and Cowherd had planned. In 1823 Clarke and his family—having lost the few followers they had accrued—resettled in Shelby County, Indiana, living out their days tilling their farm, disconnected from the Philadelphia Bible Christians. 10  The path of William Metcalfe and his followers diff ered signifi cantly from that of the Clarke family. Philadelphia originally attracted the group because of its available land and passable roads connecting the church to the rest of the city. 11 Philadelphia was the country’s second most populous city, and the Bible Christians saw it as an ideal location to gain converts amid a growing urban reform spirit. 12 In Philadelphia, popular fears of perceived new dangers including prostitution, pornographic writers, and other corrupting infl uences led older citizens to attempt to guide the younger generation toward moral piety. Through reform institutions, pamphlets, and novels these reformers sought to quell youthful intemperance. 13 Bible Christians’ attempts at converting individuals to a meatless diet fi t seamlessly within the larger reform milieu that took hold in Philadelphia during the early nineteenth  Proto-vegetarianism :: 13 century. Individuals free of the overly invigorating infl uence of meat, Bible Christians believed, were more apt to make morally sound decisions.  

In July 1817, the Bible Christians established a day school and informal worship space, inviting Philadelphia’s churchgoing public to join. Metcalfe’s entreaties were based on the desire to “not form a sectarian church, deriving their doctrines from human creeds.” Instead, the Bible Christians promised to “become more efficiently edified in Bible Truths” and “the literal expressions of Sacred Scripture.”  A meatless lifestyle, the Bible Christians believed, was the true heavenly inspired diet, present in the garden of Eden and promised during the messianic era. At the heart of the Bible Christian ideology was the notion that biblical truths were to be revealed to humanity progressively over time. Only through dedicated study of the Bible’s tenants could individuals truly understand divine providence. Under Metcalfe’s guidance, the group preached that Jesus himself was a vegetarian and that any stories of his eating meat were misinterpretations. 

The group rented a back room in a schoolhouse at 10 North Front Street, providing daily schooling along with Sabbath morning services that featured intensive text study. The church’s space quickly became too expensive, however, particularly aft er a handful of founding members perished during a yellow fever epidemic in the fall of 1818. With dwindling membership and an unpopular philosophy of meat and alcohol abstention, Metcalfe sought to reinvent the Bible Christian Church while holding on to its core principles of pacifism and meatless dietetics

In 1820, Metcalfe began trying to appeal to a wider audience, utilizing the development of the printed press while connecting the ideas of the Bible Christian Church with those of a variety of reform movements.  

Under Metcalfe’s guidance, ten prevailing principles of the Bible Christian sect were codified in a constitution, emphasizing the real world applications of a biblically guided life. While existing biblical interpretations were invaluable and even prophetic, Bible Christians argued that continued study and interpretation was necessary to avoid the pitfalls of narrow, sectdriven loyalties. The Bible, when approached with an open, scientific mind would continue to reveal new secrets to healthy, ethical living. The Bible Christians emphasized the power of revelation through concerted study rather than blind adherence to the dictates of religious leaders or sects. Meat abstention, temperance, and moral living served to transform an individual “conjoined to the Lord, and the Lord to him.” Thus believers had the capacity to be reformed, regenerated, and finally saved.

The Bible Christians argued that religion, like science, could be rationally understood—emphasizing the power of individual, lay study over bombastic sermonizing. The group downplayed the idea of heavenly revelation in favor of learned epiphany, even questioning the ultimate divinity of Jesus Christ in favor of strict monotheism. The group emphasized that right living in body, mind, and soul ensured salvation for the individual as well as the community at large. The words of the Bible, Bible Christians believed, clearly called for the abstinence from the flesh of animals as food, intoxicating liquors as beverages, as well as war, capital punishment, and slavery. The second coming of the messiah was not a literal, physical event but rather the personal attainment of the divine truths revealed by concentrated study. 

There were, of course, ironies in the principles of Bible Christianity. At the same time that the Bible Christians criticized established churches led by cults of personality, the group was led by a vocal, gregarious personality in Metcalfe. And as church ranks grew, the group sought to build institutions that provided social legitimacy. While the religious and political views of the Bible Christian Church were radical, the group was decidedly conservative in its structure and notion of self-righteousness, sharing these values with other more established Philadelphia churches.  

Metcalfe’s exhortations met harsh responses from Philadelphia’s established religious elite. Warning of the dangers of “wolves in sheep’s clothing,” one Philadelphia religious body accused the Bible Christians of having “attacked the most plain and important doctrines of our holy religion” while seeking to “impose their own creed upon mankind, and take away from us the doctrines for which martyrs bled.” Bible Christians were often met in the streets with accusations of heresy. It seemed apparent to the Bible Christians that meat did, in fact, stir up animalistic responses in its consumers.  

Despite the angry reactions, the church and its membership continued to grow, thanks in part to a series of articles published in The Rural Magazine and Literary Evening Friend , an agricultural and literary-themed periodical headquartered in Philadelphia. In a series of “Letters on Religious Subjects” published throughout 1820 and 1821, Metcalfe expounded on a variety of reformist ideals, connecting them with religious justifi cations and explanations. In “The Duty of Abstinence from All Intoxicating Drinks,” he off ered one of the fi rst arguments in the United States for total avoidance of alcohol.

Metcalfe followed his protemperance essay in 1821 with Bible Testimony: On Abstinence from the Flesh of Animals , his first piece articulating the moral, religious, and health justifications of a meatless diet. At the heart of Metcalfe’s argument in favor of a flesh-free lifestyle was his interpretation of the biblical commandment against killing, whose application he believed “was benevolently intended to reach the animal creation.” The fact that the prohibition had not been understood as such was proof of humanity’s degradation. Humanity, however, had the power of reason to follow such prohibitions. 

Metcalfe equated meat consumption with violent, cruel tendencies, appealing to the most uncontrolled whims of human aggression. Even more than alcoholic spirits, a carnivorous diet was deleterious to the soul, an affront to the natural forces of life. Further, meat consumption was a violent rejection of God itself, a notion expressed by one Bible Christian hymn that warned, “Hold daring man! From murder stay: God is the life in all, You smite at God! When flesh you slay: Can such a crime be small?”

  It was the Bible Christians’ goal to “instruct . . . to correct general sentiment and to determine the principles of public habits so as to cherish universal humanity.” Metcalfe placed abstention from meat at the center of a plan for total reform. Once the church accomplished its goal of converting nonbelievers to its violence-free diet, Metcalfe believed that individuals would “withdraw themselves from a system of cruel habits . . . which has unquestionably a baneful eff ect upon the physical existence and the intellectual, the moral and religious powers of man.” The benefits of a vegetable based diet—mental clarity, a sense of morality, and an adherence to nonviolence—allowed individuals to lead lives of “benevolence,” caring for the “souls of all men.”  

Metcalfe’s pamphlet was the first published creed in favor of total avoidance of meat in the United States. The booklet helped spread the idea of a meatless diet to the general public, connecting food choices with a variety of reform principles ranging from pacifi sm to antislavery. And while Metcalfe was fundamentalist in his religious outlook, he utilized modern technologies and an Enlightenment-inspired emphasis on rational study to spread the word of his church. What started as a group of twenty families had nearly doubled by 1825, garnering increased attention among interested social reformers in Philadelphia.