Child, Lydia Maria
CHILD, LYDIA MARIA. Lydia Maria Child (1802–1880) was a prolific author and a founder of the American abolitionist movement. Child wrote two books on religion: The Progress of Religious Ideas (1855), which offered a history of the world's religions and sought to put Christianity on a level footing with other religions; and Aspirations of the World: A Chain of Opals (1878), which collected what Child considered the most valuable religious texts, including many more excerpts from Greco-Roman, Buddhist, Persian, and Hindu sources than from the Bible. Child's radically universalist religious sensibility informed her life-long quest to eradicate racial prejudice.
Child did not fit easily into religious categories. She was born in Medford, Massachusetts, the daughter of a baker, and she rejected her parents' Calvinism as an adolescent. The older brother who educated her, Convers Francis, became a Unitarian minister, but she found Unitarianism cold and intellectual. She was attracted to Swedenborgian mysticism, but felt that it fed her imagination more than her heart or her intellect.
Child published her first novel, Hobomok: A Tale of Early Times (1824), a controversial story about an Indian-white romance and marriage, when she was twenty-two, and was soon feted as a promising young author. She wrote a book or two per year while editing the first successful children's magazine, and she married David Lee Child, an idealistic and debt-prone political activist.
In 1833 Child published An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans, the first significant study of slavery, emancipation, and American racism. This ardent yet well-researched plea for the eradication of slavery established her as a leader of the abolitionist movement. She went on to edit the National Anti-Slavery Standard, thus becoming the first female editor of a national political newspaper. During this time, Child concluded that Swedenborgianism was not a true religion because so many of its followers accepted slavery. She attended numerous religious institutions, including a Catholic cathedral and a Jewish synagogue, but felt they were all too narrow-minded.
Child took seven years to write her three-volume Progress of Religious Ideas, in which she argued that all religions are revelations of the divine spirit. People throughout history have asked the same questions and expressed the same hopes, and the divine spirit has spoken to them using whatever forms they were best able to receive. Symbols that may seem odd to an outsider—the Egyptians' golden scarab, the Christians' cross—feel quite different when viewed from inside a tradition. People should therefore respect all the world's religions, acknowledging their weaknesses but cherishing the ways in which they partake of truth and goodness. True religion is a matter of faith and hope, not theological arguments or sectarian divisions.
Christianity, Child suggested, has no privileged status. Each religion builds upon the spiritual insights of earlier eras, and Christianity is rooted in Jewish, Greek, and Persian thought. It may, furthermore, eventually be superseded by new, more true, beliefs that cannot yet be imagined. Child warned against holding too tightly to old revelations. Each revelation is designed to be comprehensible in a specific time and place, and once people move too far past that state of society a written revelation may hinder, not help, further spiritual growth.
Child conceded that Christianity can have unusually good practical results. All religions have an iniquitous tendency to divide humanity into competing sects, but Christianity alone sometimes preaches universal sympathy and benevolence. Christians often fall into divisiveness, bigotry, and war, but Christianity can encourage them to see all people, even non-Christians, as one family. Christian sympathy, for example, led England to abolish slavery. Christianity is thus desirable not because it is more truthful than other religions, but because it is potentially more moral.
Many reviewers protested Child's refusal to give Christianity any preferential divine origin, but two of the abolitionist ministers whom Child most respected—Theodore Parker and Samuel May—enthusiastically praised her work. Forty years later, Elizabeth Cady Stanton echoed Child's views in her Woman's Bible (1895–1898). Child's readership was not large, but she gave courage to some of the nineteenth century's most rebellious religious thinkers.
When Child was in her seventies, she finally found a compatible religious community. The Free Religious Association was founded by a group of progressive Unitarians who wanted a place for people of all religions, including agnostics, to come together in an unconstrained pursuit of truth. Child found its gatherings inspiring and thought-provoking.
She had become particularly interested in Buddhism, and avidly read new translations of Asian texts. In two Atlantic Monthly articles, written at a time of rising anti-Asian racism, she portrayed Buddha and Jesus as almost identical figures. Both, she explained, identified with the poor and outcast and sought to open "the road to holiness" to everyone. No longer did Child claim that only Christianity teaches universal sympathy.
Child's last book was Aspirations of the World: A Chain of Opals. Its goal, she explained, was to illuminate the soul's universal aspirations and intuitions. Most of the book consists of selections from the world's sacred scriptures, grouped into subject headings such as "Ideas of the Supreme Being," "Moral Courage," and "Fraternity of Religions," and arranged in chronological order under each heading. Child included only the passages that she found most wise, beautiful, and intellectually and imaginatively satisfying. This "Eclectic Bible," she suggested, offered guidance and inspiration from the best aspects of all the world's religions. In this work, as in all her religious and political writings, Child sought to eradicate divisions within the human race and help readers see everyone as equal parts of one humanity.
Bibliography
Child, Lydia Maria. An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans (1833). Edited by Carolyn Karcher. Amherst, Mass., 1996.
Child, Lydia Maria. The Progress of Religious Ideas: Through Successive Ages. 3 vols. New York, 1855.
Child, Lydia Maria. Aspirations of the World: A Chain of Opals. Boston, 1878.
Child, Lydia Maria. Hobomok and Other Writings on Indians. Edited by Carolyn Karcher. New Brunswick, N.J., 1986.
Karcher, Carolyn. The First Woman in the Republic: A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child. Durham, N.C., 1994.
Karcher, Carolyn, ed. A Lydia Maria Child Reader. Durham, N.C., 1997.
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