Chapter 3
Spirit Versus Scripture
Maurice Barbanell’s relationship with organized religion was antagonistic from his early experiences living in London with his family. Growing up with a devoutly Jewish mother and an atheist father, Barbanell wrote that he was not involved with any religion. In his youth, he embraced his father’s atheism, which later mellowed into agnosticism with a marked bias against Spiritualism.
Barbanell often listened to his parents discuss religion without ever reaching an agreement, experiences that shaped his outlook on religion.
Introduced to Spiritualism at eighteen and deeply committed to the religion for the rest of his life, Barbanell’s books and long career editing Psychic News demonstrate his knowledge of, and disdain for, orthodox religion. Before looking at Barbanell’s well-documented conflict with both the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church, it is useful to consider the context of Spiritualism’s relationship with religion in Britain after 1920.
Spiritualism shares a common belief with other religions that the human soul survives physical death. However, while Christian churches teach that survival of death is a matter of faith and part of the church’s dogma, Spiritualists base their belief, or what they call “knowledge,” on evidence. This evidence is mostly gathered through messages communicated through mediums who talk with the spirits of loved ones who have passed away. Furthermore, Spiritualists believe that orthodox religion instils fear in its adherents through its teachings of “Hell, the Fall, and the Sacrifice of Christ,” ideologies that are not part of spiritualistic belief systems. Spiritualism follows no creed or dogma, has no central leader, and has no book that Spiritualists are expected to follow.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, raised in the Catholic tradition, initially “regarded Spiritualism as a vulgar delusion of the uneducated.” It was not until he experienced spiritualistic phenomena for himself that he “recognised that the testimony was so strong that no other religious movement in the world could put forward anything to compare it with.” In his book The New Revelation, Doyle stated that Spiritualism was not a threat to Christianity, rather something that could unite every religion.
He believed Christianity needed to change with the times to stop losing its congregants, emphasizing that too much was made of Christ’s death.
Instead, more focus should be on Christ’s life, which was “full of easy tolerance for others, of kindly charity, of broad-minded moderation, of gentle courage, always progressive and open to new ideas, and yet never bitter to those ideas which He was really supplanting.” In 1920, notices to “come and hear” Sir Arthur Conan Doyle speak about his “experiences” at a celebration of the seventy-second anniversary of Spiritualism appeared in Light. The same issue also provided readers with an article about “The Churches and Psychic Research.” Christianity, as understood within a Spiritualist context, was well covered in the estimated 5,000 books and several hundred Spiritualist journals published since Modern Spiritualism began in 1848, including many during the 1920s to 1940s which were Barbanell’s formative years in Spiritualism. Authors covered topics ranging from psychic events in the Bible to the central role of Jesus as a medium. Even Silver Birch’s teachings on religion included his explanation that God is the Great Spirit, described as: the natural law of the universe: the creative force behind all life, whether registered in the plane of matter or in the plane of spirit.
The Great Spirit is perfect love and perfect wisdom… The Great Spirit fills all life. The Great Spirit is within all laws. The Great Spirit is the Great Spirit. He is life. He is love. He is everything.
Of course, Barbanell would have been aware of these writings.
Between 1938 and 1988, Psychic Press, its imprint Psychic Book Club, and the related Spiritualist Press published at least eighty books about mediumship and spiritual healing, many of which touched upon the relationship between Spiritualism and orthodox religion. One of those books, Spiritualism in the Old Testament, was a recapitulation of articles written by the Rev. G. Maurice Elliott about the Bible’s Spiritualist nature. The articles had been published in Psychic News during 1937 as a series called “Spiritualism in the Bible.” Elliott, a Church of England vicar in London, resigned from his position in 1936 in protest when the Bishop of London “refused permission for a medium to give a psychic demonstration under Elliott’s auspices on church premises.” In his books, Bible Blunders and The Psychic Life of Jesus, Elliott argued that you could be a Christian and a committed Spiritualist.
As a medium himself, he claimed that his long-term contact with spirits allowed him to “think in terms in which the average person cannot yet think.” Elliott was a driving force behind the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Committee on Spiritualism, believing that “The Bible is a continuous record of psychic manifestation” and that “None but students of psychic science can properly understand the Bible and interpret correctly the meaning of its stories, for the stories do but corroborate their own psychic experiences.”
Maurice Barbanell and his War with the Church of England.
The rise in popularity of Spiritualism in the United Kingdom during the First World War did not go unnoticed by the Anglican Church. Amid the widespread death and destruction, the Anglican Church failed to provide guidance on how to “address the sorrow, grief, and anxiety occasioned by the staggering casualty lists of the war.” This lack of support turned many Anglicans towards Spiritualism, where they found “consolation and support.” The Anglican Church began to question its relationship with Spiritualism at the 1920 Lambeth Conference under Archbishop Randall Davidson’s (1848-1930) leadership. The Times reported, “The conference promises to be of greater importance and more general interest than any of the five which have taken place… Several of the subjects to be discussed are distinctly controversial.” However, the 1920 Lambeth Conference did not result in any official response from the Anglican Church regarding its relationship with Spiritualism. Ultimately, the conference produced four resolutions concerning Spiritualism, the principal outcome being that the Church was “prepared to expect and welcome new light from psychical research.”
The Archbishop’s Committee on Spiritualism.
The Anglican Church took another fifteen years before revisiting the relationship between Spiritualism and Christianity. Francis Underhill raised the issue with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Gordon Lang (1864-1945), intending for Lang to form a commission to investigate the subject. Underhill, who was appointed Bishop of Bath and Wells in 1937, had a keen interest in Spiritualism. In June 1936, he wrote to Lang, informing him that he had been investigating Spiritualism and had even sat with mediums. Underhill reminded the archbishop of a conversation earlier that year when Lang stated, “that if all that purports to come through from departed spirits were genuine, you would prefer to become extinct rather than to go forward into the future life.” Underhill agreed, writing that he had received contact from his parents and former Archbishop Davidson, yet “the general impression I gained is that, if these are the persons they purport to be, they have deteriorated mentally and spiritually since death.” The Dean of Rochester ended his letter by requesting that Lang task a few people to work with him to continue the investigation into Spiritualism, as he could not conduct further research alone.
Archbishop Lang was not in favour of establishing anything as formal as a commission. In a confidential letter to Dean Underhill, he suggested that “it would be better for me, after consulting my brother Bishops, to take the responsibility of appointing a small body to carry on quiet investigations with you and coming to such conclusions as they are able to reach.” The archbishop referred to the subject as a “painful and difficult matter.” Lang and Underhill spent the remaining months of 1936 deciding who should be invited to join the committee, with Underhill agreeing to lead as chairman. In November, Lang invited the selected individuals to join the committee. He acknowledged the work already undertaken by the Society for Psychical Research and suggested that this committee “might undertake some independent investigation quietly and without undue publicity especially as to the bearing of these [spiritualistic] phenomena on the Faith of the Christian people.”
