“This is the way that cults are now,” Rick Alan Ross said. “Everyone is online, everyone uses social media platforms.” Money is exchanged through PayPal, Venmo.

In a culture where religion is so revered, religious people can get away with just about anything.

Spiritualism became a realm where women could reject the Victorian values that caged them.

The people who took the Chapman survey seemed to be afraid of everything that was currently happening. They were afraid to die right now and yet also afraid to be alive.

During the war, a chasm had formed in the country, and loss touched nearly every household, crossing class boundaries. Spiritualism was an antidote for a place that felt irreparably broken, and for that reason, people feared what it could do to Christianity in America.

The wrong of these things, as I see it, is not in the money the victims part with half so much as in the mental and spiritual poison they get. But that is precisely the thing the Constitution put beyond the reach of the prosecutor, for the price of freedom of religion or of speech or of the press is that we must put up with, and even pay for, a goo

Few, if any, give their powers or knowledge away for free.

The core belief that humanity is undergoing a drastic consciousness shift remains but is colored by the idea that a secretive elite group—often referred to as a cabal or “New World Order”—is preventing human enlightenment and the dawning of a New Age from happening.

“There’s anti-intellectualism at play,” she said. “And a real resentment of expert knowledge.”