The Erie Canal is an outstanding example of a human artifact creating and facilitating new religious movements. Within 25 years of its opening, the Erie Canal cultivated extraordinary experimental spiritual groups including the Mormons, the Adventists, Spiritualism, a revived Apocalypticism, utopian communal societies such as the Oneida Community, with the Amana Colony and Shakers passing through, as well as the emotion-laden revivals of the Second Great Awakening. The Canal also engendered the religiously infused social movements of abolition, women’s suffrage, and temperance. And because of its key location and function as the link between east and west, the repercussions of canal-formed spiritual experiments rippled across the continent with westward expansion, creating unique currents of religion in the United States into the present day. Better understanding this particular religious thread in the American tapestry will equip us to be more effective citizens in the work of perpetuating our democracy with its world-changing innovation of religious freedom as defined by the U.S. constitution’s Article VI and the Bill of Rights religion clauses.

Season 4, Episode 1 – The Erie Canal and American Religion

Guest Bio

S.B. Rodríguez-Plate is a professor of religious studies at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York and author of many books including A History of Religion in 5 ½ Objects: Bringing the Spiritual to Its Senses, and Religion and Film: Cinema and the Re-Creation of the World. S.B. investigates the ways people connect with physical objects through sense perception: the things we see, hear, smell, taste, and touch are what give people their spiritual dimension.

Matthew Smith is Visiting Professor of History and the Regional Director of Public Programming at Miami University of Ohio’s Hamilton, New York regional campus. Matthew’s research interests include American religious history, Appalachia, The Ohio Valley, and Trans-Atlantic immigration. Dr. Smith is the author of The Spires Still Point to Heaven: Cincinnati's Religious Landscape, 1788-1873

Podcast Support

Scholarly support provided by Dr. Lauren Turek, Associate Professor of History at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas.

Technical audio and video assistance provided by Dr. Randall Stephens, a Professor of American and British Studies at the University of Oslo.

Religion in the American Experience is a podcast of the private, digital-first National Museum of American Religion, which tells the story of what religion has done to America and what America has done to religion. This includes the establishment of religious freedom in the United States Constitution’s Article VI and Bill of Rights religion clauses.

The Erie Canal's Influence on American Religion