Vegetarian Christianity
Among the imported religious groups were Protestants from England known as the Bible Christians. A number of sects have used this name in America, but the group referred to here were an offshoot of the even-more-obscure Swedenborgian Church.
Transcendentalism and Protestant Revival
The story of the arrival of the Bible Christians in America is complex, but it begins and ends with radical Protestantism. The First Great Awakening of the mid-1700s in England spurred the creation of spiritual groups which combined the practices of transcendentalism with Christianity. From this came the teachings of the mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg. Swedenborg believed that angels lived in houses in angel-cities where they held jobs and carried on like people. Swedenborg's most compelling ideas, however, were those which saw the consumption of meat as the greatest evidence of man's fall from grace and encouraged a vegetarian diet.
In most ancient times, people never ate the flesh of any beast or bird, but only different kinds of grain, especially wheat and bread, also the fruit of trees and vegetables...Slaughtering animals was to them abominable, akin to the behavior of wild animals.
-Emanuel Swedenborg
This religion, sometimes called The Church of New Jerusalem, gained a meaningful following in England, and it apparently survives in some form to this day. The Swedenborgian sect attracted Reverend William Cowherd after he had left his duties within the Anglican Church. As a leader of a Swedenborgian denomination, he attempted to mandate a meat-free diet. Cowherd's followers did not believe in these ideas (or support being told what to eat by God), so in 1807 Cowherd split to form his own denomination. At a church in Salford, England, Cowherd founded the first modern vegetarian church--the Bible Christians.
Cowherd and his crowd, "Cowherdites," were well liked in their community in England, as the Reverend was known to provide free medical care, a sizable library, and often gave out vegetable soup for free to hungry villagers. Cowherd preached that God was within all creatures and that it was sin to eat flesh. "If God had meant us to eat meat, then it would have come to us in edible form as is the ripened fruit," Cowherd once preached.
British Invasion
Up until this point, mandated vegetarianism was still only a British phenomenon. There were notable experiments in communal living with elements of vegetarianism in America, such as the Shaker sect of Christians. However while some Shaker communes ate vegetarian foods out of habit, health, or their resources on the farms, there was never a concerted effort to mandate the diet for the entire church. The Shaker religion, or United Society of Believers, was founded in England in 1770 by Ann Lee. Quickly after forming, a number of the group transplanted in America in 1774. They set up successful seed companies in the States, and worked communally owned land for food and profit. Although they did not by-and-large require meat-free diets, the Shakers did contribute to the development of vegetarian utopias by giving a blueprint for communal living arrangements. They may also prove an early testament to the difficulty of creating a vegetarian colony.
Like the Shakers, The Bible Christians eventually moved to America. In 1817, a year after Rev. Cowherd's death, Rev William Metcalfe decided to pursue Cowherd's wish, to bring the Bible Christian faith to the United States. It is perhaps shocking, but maybe not, that this pair of reverends with bovine names should protest eating meat so much, but that was a major tenant of the Bible Christians. There entire liturgy, including hymns and readings, focused on the prohibition on eating meat. The hymn here is one that was sung in Cowherd's Church, sometimes called "Beefsteak Chapel," shown in the image.
The Bible Christians were initially quite successful, establishing a branch of the church in Philadelphia. Metcalfe made a number of followers and converts in the United States, including some of the largest figures equated with modern vegetarianism. Among those Americans that took to Metcalfe's teachings were William Alcott, a physician who promoted the diet. William Alcott later turned this idea onto his cousin, Amos Bronson Alcott, who founded the first vegetarian colony in America, Fruitlands. The most notable conversion for Metcalfe was of a young Methodist minister, Sylvester Graham. Graham became the godfather of American Vegetarianism, and followers of his philosophy on diet and morality came to be known as "Grahamites"--a name used through the beginning of the 20th century. All of these thinkers and vegetarian idealists operated in a fairly tight social circle, going on to form the American Vegetarian Society in 1850.
