4.
Sacred Time and Holy Community

For midcentury Anglo-Protestants the Sabbath was as much a part of a righteous Christian life as temperance, chastity, and education. While ministers were attempting to establish schools, discourage prostitution, and control the liquor trade, they were simultaneously campaigning for a Sunday law for the state of California. All the states east of the Mississippi had such laws, and in the 1850s they were still generally enforced (with some laxity in the large cities). There, Sunday was quietly and devoutly observed. Businesses were closed; most types of recreation were forbidden because they diverted people from the true purpose of the day, the worship of God. People traveled little, spending the day at home after going to church, or at most visiting nearby friends or relatives; ideally, they spent the day in rest, prayer, and discussion of the morning sermon. From the Anglo-Protestant perspective, such an observance was essential not only to religion but to civilization itself. Without it, men would turn into mere beasts of burden or make their day of rest a day for lightheartedness and wild behavior.^[1]

California had never had any such Sabbath. Before the Anglo conquest the Roman Catholic priests had of course conducted services on Sunday, but the Spanish and Mexican traditions did not forbid other activities. Sunday in California was often celebrated with a rodeo or feast, with much dancing and carousing.^[2] In mining times Sunday grew even farther from the Anglo-Protestant ideal: besides the Mexican celebrations, the miners gathered in the larger towns for a day of trade and recreation after six days out in the gold fields. Stores were open, political rallies were held, people went on river excursions or watched grizzly bears pitted against bulls. Often on Saturday night and Sunday, entertainers would provide music or theater for the miners.^[3] Among these attractions, the quiet and devout worship of God struggled for a place.

From almost the moment they arrived, ministers began calling for a statewide Sunday law. The first serious attempt, in 1853, did not pass the legislature, probably indicating the lack of popular sentiment for it. In 1855, however, lawmakers after considerable debate approved a law barring noisy amusements on Sunday. In 1858 a more stringent law was approved forbidding businesses to be open on that day. Clearly the forces of order were swinging in the direction of Sabbath observance, probably in part because of the upheavals surrounding the Vigilance Committees of San Francisco in 1856. But almost immediately the law was challenged in the State Supreme Court in ex parte Newman. Newman, a Sacramento Jew, had been convicted in a lower court of selling clothes on Sunday. The three-man Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice David Terry, overturned his conviction on the grounds that Sunday legislation violated the religious freedom provision of the state constitution. The single dissenter was Justice Stephen Fields, who was soon to become Chief Justice himself, when Terry resigned to fight a duel with David Broderick.

The legislature, following the trend of public opinion, passed another Sunday law in 1861, similar to the 1858 law. This time, when the law was challenged in the Supreme Court (ex parte Andrews ), Justice Fields was in charge and the conviction was upheld. The Sunday law stood on the books and withstood other challenges for the next two decades.^[4] Anglo-Protestant leaders seemed to have achieved a victory for Christianity and civilization in California.

The situation did not remain stable, however. The clergy may have breathed a sigh of relief in 1861, but only seven years later they faced one of the strongest challenges to Sunday observance—not from businessmen who wanted to stay open, but from the Seventh-day Adventists. In 1868 two missionaries, Elders J.N. Loughborough and D.T. Bourdeau, arrived from the Adventists' first General Conference. They met briefly with a small Adventist group in San Francisco, but their course was changed when they encountered a Petaluma man, Mr. C. A. Hough. Hough was one of the leaders of a religious group calling themselves Independents. Led by a dream reported to him by a member of this group, Hough had come to San Francisco to meet these two missionaries from afar. He persuaded Loughborough and Bourdeau to come and preach in Petaluma. They agreed, and began there a round of religious meetings that would stir up the small towns of northern California on the Sabbath issue much as Hamilton's heresy trial aroused religious people in the Bay Area.

The two Adventists held meetings in Petaluma from mid August into the fall, then moved on to Windsor, Santa Rosa, and Healdsburg by the summer of 1869. Before they left Petaluma, however, their teachings had already stirred considerable opposition. Local ministers spoke out against Adventism in their congregations and lectured on the proper observance of the Sabbath and other points of doctrine. Public debates were held in March and September of 1869, attracting hundreds of listeners. The missionaries worked in the counties north and east of the Bay over the next few years, stirring excitement everywhere. They moved into the cities in 1874, holding a tent meeting in Oakland and attracting large crowds with their willing support for the local temperance movement.^[5] In the same year they held a great debate with Spiritualists in San Jose. Over the next ten years and more, almost every minister had to deal with the Adventist challenge. Virtually every minister whose works are extant had at least one sermon on the Sabbath in his repertoire, and many gave major series of lectures on the question. Laymen and even non-church members wrote on the issue.^[6] The Adventists had managed to stir up issues at the heart of the religious concerns of many Protestant Californians.

The Adventists were an unusual group with an unusual message. Centered around their visionary leader, Ellen G. White and her husband James, who was a major writer on belief and doctrine for the movement, they had adopted distinctive practices, notably vegetarianism and the seventh-day Sabbath. They believed in the imminence of the Second coming of Christ and in some respects sounded like revivalists with their message of repentance and conversion before it became too late.^[7] On the Sabbath issue, however, they differed from other Protestants, on fundamental grounds. The Adventists argued that the New Testament era, from Jesus's time to the present, did not necessarily inaugurate a new code of behavior; some Old Testament laws, and certainly the Ten Commandments, were still valid. As James White put it, when a person is united with Christ the Son, that "does not separate him from the Father and his moral code."^[8] Most Protestant groups, while claiming to hold to the Ten Commandments, preached that the Gospel freed men from Old Testament law, "fulfilling the law" by going beyond it to a new spiritual condition; the Adventists insisted that the Law and the Gospel were in total harmony.

On the Sabbath issue, the Adventists argued that the Christian

church had long ago fallen into error on the proper day of observance. Sunday observance had its roots, as James White recognized, in the practice of celebrating the Resurrection, which, according to tradition, occurred on a Sunday. But, he said, we should not celebrate the Resurrection as though it represented the completion of redemption, for Christ had yet to return in glory and finish his work. Most Christians, according to White, were one dispensation ahead of God.^[9] We might be commanded to celebrate Sunday when Christ returns, but in the meantime people should live under God's law as revealed to date. Since Jesus did not change the day of the Sabbath, the seventh day should still be observed as set forth in the Ten Commandments.

On strictly biblical grounds, the Adventists were right. God had ordained the seventh day as the Sabbath according to Genesis 1, and again in the Ten commandments as given in Exodus 20, among other places. Christians supposedly retained the Ten commandments, yet they had changed their observance of a weekly holy day to the first day of the week, commemorating the Resurrection. This change was not authorized by Jesus; it had evolved as the Christian sect had grown away from Judaism. Adventists argued that Protestants, who usually claimed to model their churches on the New Testament church, had in this case accepted a Roman Catholic tradition and adopted a Roman Catholic principle in allowing tradition to take priority over the Bible. The Roman church had rejected the Ten Commandments, supposedly the only thing that God gave in person: that was their great "treason" against Christ.^[10] Protestants, by following Catholics in observing Sunday as the Sabbath, were guilty of the same treason. This argument, by comparing traditional Protestants to their great nineteenth-century enemies, the Roman Catholics, was designed to hit where it would hurt most.

Protestant ministers replied in various ways to these charges. One of Loughborough's early opponents reaffirmed the distinction between the Law and the Gospel, arguing that Jesus did in fact nullify the Ten Commandments, and Christians are to live by the "law of love" instead. Loughborough replied that we are not at liberty to steal or commit adultery or murder in the name of the "law of love," so why should we be able to break God's commandment concerning the Sabbath? Another tried an elaborate hedge, suggesting that the "Sabbath" in Genesis 1 was not an ordinary day, because the Bible did not say it had an evening and a morning like the other days. Per-

haps it was a thousand-year day, or some other unusual period of time. The Adventists' answer was that God would hardly have commanded us to keep the Sabbath if that were the model of it.^[11]

The more learned of the Protestant ministers recognized the truth in the Adventist charges and constructed more elaborate arguments. A favorite approach was to trace the pre-Christian and pre-Israelite history of the idea of a Sabbath or rest day—a "primeval Sabbath," as it was sometimes called, which supposedly went back to Adam and Eve—and then to argue that Sunday, the Christian Sabbath, was the perfect observance of God's original intention, untainted by idolatry. For example, M.C. Briggs, a Methodist minister and leading crusader, argued that the original Sabbath established in Genesis was a Sunday, but idolaters later perverted it into a day of sunworship. So the Jews were given the 15th of Aviv (the first Hebrew month, now called Nisan) as a Sabbath, a reminder of Passover. That day fell on a Saturday in the first year of its observance, and thus the Hebrew Sabbath was distinguished from the Egyptian day of sunworship, Sunday. With the coming of Jesus, Briggs said, the Jewish Sabbath was superseded and Christians returned to the observance of the original Sabbath of creation (he did not say who authorized the change).^[12]

An interesting feature of such arguments was their use of very recent scholarship on the ancient civilizations of the Near East and Egypt, including archeological discoveries and the decoding of previously untranslatable texts. That scholarship was highly fragmentary at the time, however, and much of it would be considered historically unreliable today. Of course, the same scholarship could be used to support either side of the argument. Some claimed, for example, that since Sunday had been proven to be a relic of the days of sun-worship it should be avoided today.^[13]

The debate produced many novel uses of the Bible and history, indicating, at the very least, that the protagonists were challenged to use their imaginations and intellects. But it is not for us to judge the merits of the arguments. What is important is that the Adventists successfully challenged a Protestant tradition of biblical interpretation and religious practice on a particularly vulnerable point. It was exceedingly rare in those times for ordinary ministers to resort to nonbiblical evidence—let alone evidence of pre-Israelite practices—to to uphold a Christian doctrine. Those who delved into new scholarship on the ancient civilizations were forced to rechart their his-

torical maps of Judaism and Christianity, which undoubtedly had a long-term effect on clerical attitudes toward the Bible and history. More important for California, it had an immediate effect on the Adventists' large audiences. One listener at their Oakland tent meetings in 1874 wrote to the city's newspaper as follows:

The Elders there are upsetting my theology on some points which I had supposed were impregnable, and I find this to be the case of the majority who attend. Either these preachers have a very plausible way of presenting their theories, or we do not know what good evidence is, if their positions are not true. They give the Bible, chapter and verse, for everything they affirm, and back it up with testimony from eminent authors. They do not seem to shun investigation, but give liberty for questions and objections which they readily answer.^[14]

Of course, the Adventists wanted above all to establish the authority of the Bible. But by questioning the dominant interpretations on so basic a matter as Sabbath observance, they contributed to the undermining of religious authority in general. As another listener at the tent meetings said, "The authority of tradition, creed, or party is growing less each year."^[15]

Californians had already been exposed to questioning of religious authority, most notably in the tolerant, openhearted liberalism of Thomas Starr King. Concurrently with the Adventists' missionary campaign, Bay Area Californians were reading about Laurentine Hamilton's fight over Presbyterian doctrine. Sabbath observance in particular had other opponents besides the Adventists—Spiritualists, for example,^[16] as well as many nonreligious people. But unlike the others, the Adventists could not be dismissed as anti-Christian; they were as devoted to the Bible and its authority as any traditional minister. Their questioning of established Protestant interpretations had a greater impact than that produced by religious liberals who interpreted the Bible freely.

The debate raged throughout the 1870s. Meanwhile, secular forces were gaining ground, and petitions for repeal of the Sunday law came regularly before the legislature. In 1870 a mild law permitting theater performances on Sunday but prohibiting the sale of alcohol was passed. Anglo-Protestant churchmen became concerned about gradual erosion of the law through lack of enforcement. Apparently there was good reason to be concerned; at least in the larger cities, there was some popular demand for grocers to be open on

Sunday. Saloon keepers and tobacconists often opposed the law. The Adventists joined the campaign for repeal on the ground of religious liberty; but just as their approach to the Bible, intended to establish their interpretation as absolute authority, had undermined all authority, so their attacks on the Sunday law, based on a fine principle, undermined the weight of custom and the social authority of the clergy.

By the early 1880s, the Occident was complaining loudly about the growing sentiment against the Sunday law. The popular California magazine, the Argonaut , had come out openly against Sunday observances, saying they were "unreasonable, unprofitable, and tedious." The Atlantic , with its national readership, had claimed that popular sentiment demanded at least some recreation on Sunday.^[17] In an effort to stem the tide, the San Francisco Ministerial Union and other religious bodies began to call for enforcement of the law by public officials. They seemed ready for a confrontation; perhaps the traditionalists felt stronger as a result of the Moody revivals of 1881. In any case, they were strong enough to get their way in the election year of 1882. As a result, over 1600 arrests were made between march and June of that year, mostly of Seventh-day Adventists and Jews, with some Chinese. Among the more notable figures arrested was the editor of the Pacific Press Publishing Association, the state's largest publishing firm and the fount of all Seventh-day Adventist literature. Nearly all those arrested demanded a jury trial, thereby flooding the courts. Juries all over the state consistently refused to convict.^[18]

Had the arrests focused on the saloonkeepers, public opinion might have been different. But the 1861 law was written so as not to discriminate among types of business that could be open, so that wholesale enforcement meant wholesale arrests. The Adventists in particular had finally forced the hand of their opponents, with the result that large numbers of upright, prosperous, and otherwise law-abiding citizens were being jailed and tried for a serious crime. Popular furor over these developments influenced the political campaigns of 1882. The Democratic platform committee, headed by none other than David Terry, who had overturned the 1858 law, wrote a strong plank demanding repeal of the Sunday law. The delegates to the convention hesitated to endorse it because they feared losing churchpeople's votes. But Mr. Grady of Fresno, the District Attorney of Fresno County and himself a Southern Methodist, spoke

up, saying that he had nearly ruined his own reputation and bankrupted the county by spending four or five thousand dollars trying violators of the Sunday law. In his county, known as one of the most religious areas of the state, he had been unable to get a single conviction. Grady's conclusion was that even the religious people of his county did not want the Sunday law. After hearing his testimony, the Democrats adopted Terry's platform.^[19]

The Republicans were in trouble in 1882, although they had gained a majority of twenty thousand votes in the last election and generally had an edge on the Democrats in the state. Their party had become clearly associated with the railroad interests at a time when anti-monopoly sentiments were on the rise. Although they tried to salvage something by adopting a mild anti-monopoly plank (shocking the railroad moguls) and an anti-Chinese statement, the Democrats had taken much stronger stands on both those issues. Republicans decided to go for the church votes by supporting the existing Sunday law; but even on that they vacillated, saying they did not wish "to force any class of our citizens to spend that day in any manner."^[20] Their stand mattered little. The Democrats turned the tables, counting a majority of more than twenty thousand votes on their side. One of the first acts of the 1883 legislature was to repeal the Sunday law.^[21]

Historians have generally not focused on the Sunday issue, treating the railroad monopoly and the anti-Chinese agitation as the crucial issues. The big-city papers would tend to support that interpretation. The San Francisco Examiner claimed that "the day of rest is no more an issue in this campaign than is the man in the moon," while the Oakland Times said Sunday was merely a political football. But the Examiner also reported that newspapers in the inland cities were devoting whole columns to the Sunday question. The Los Angeles Times —then still a small-city paper in a heavily Protestant area—had declared that Sunday would be the issue of the campaign.^[22] In cosmopolitan San Francisco, religion had already been squeezed off of center stage, but inland and in the newly emerging southern part of the state, it could not be so easily discounted.

This evidence suggests that the people of the inland cities and towns (we will examine the south later) were formulating new religious attitudes. It is no coincidence that Adventists had worked actively in small towns like Healdsburg, Napa, and Fresno, preaching their distinctive gospel and campaigning strongly for religious lib-

erty. They never became a large denomination: in 1873, after five years of work, they could claim only about three hundred Sabbath-keepers in the state; thirty-five years later they still had only about 6400 members in California.^[23] But they had convinced people that their beliefs and way of life deserved respect and that the religious liberty clause of the Constitution should protect them from having to observe Sunday in any way. That is why juries would not convict Sabbath-breakers even in Fresno County, and why many traditional Republicans voted Democratic in 1882.

California never had a Sunday law again. The heavily urbanized states of New York and Massachusetts relaxed their statutes at roughly the same time (1883 and 1887 respectively), but California was the first state to repeal its Sunday regulations entirely. The 1882 election in California marked a permanent victory for openness and tolerance, many years ahead of the rest of the nation.^[24] Yet something was lost in the process. Protestants were not simply trying to force dissident minorities to conform to their standards; they believed that preserving the Sabbath would promote social order, morality, and a devout populace. We can note also that a community that shares the same temporal rhythms, the same calendar and clock, has a fundamental unity, which the common Sunday observance might have provided. Looking back on the events from our present standpoint, we can see that the defeat of the Sabbath was a blow to community-building in California. In Chapter 1 we noted Joseph Benton's hope that in California there would be established "the same secular and religious festivals, as have been the strength, and glory, and beauty of the land of our Fathers and the places of our birth"; the Sunday Sabbath was one of those traditions that ministers hoped would make California an extension of Protestant Christian America. In 1882, by their actions in juries and by their ballots, Californians rejected that bond with traditional Protestant culture in favor of a more open and diverse society.

The large vote against the Sunday law did not signal a grand exodus from the traditional churches any more than it did a mass conversion to Adventism. The churches continued to prosper in California, although they were never as strong there as east of the Mississippi.^[25] Despite their defeat on this issue, Anglo-Protestants by the end of the decade were, according to historian Douglas Anderson, self-confident and optimistic. Their weekly audiences in the churches were small, but people supported revivals led by Dwight

Moody, Sam Jones, and many lesser lights.^[26] Yet in more subtle ways they had to accept, by the 1880s if not before, that their position in California culture was not and could not be dominant. Newspapers were likely to report church events and revivals in one column, and quote with approval the famous agnostic Robert Ingersoll in the next.^[27] Californians simply were not committed to traditional religion, or to any one religion; they continued to pride themselves on their tolerance. As the San Francisco Chronicle proclaimed in 1889, part of the region's culture was its openness in religion:

The truth is that there is as much interest in religion, art, literature, and charity here as at the East, but that we make no display of it. All the creeds are represented, and the bitterness of sectarianism, which is so often found in Eastern communities, is absent here, because we are more cosmopolitan, and therefore more tolerant of all beliefs.^[28]

Anglo-Protestants in California had to accept that tolerance and fairly genial support without occupying center stage for the culture at large.

That situation was unlikely to change over the next decade or so. Sometimes the Protestant mood seemed overwhelmingly despairing, as ministers worried about the problems of urban life. At the end of the century the Occident frequently indulged in clerical self-flagellation: ministers had not preached pure enough doctrine, or the reality of sin; they had let the people lapse from Sabbath observance; they had not explained the truth about the end of the world or about what holiness meant in Christianity. As a result families had collapsed, suicide rates were high, and the church in general was weak.^[29] Yet the reality was not too different then from more optimistic times when churchpeople still hoped for a true Christian Sabbath in California, or when revivals stirred the hearts of whole communities. In 1900 as in 1870, membership was small, attendance even smaller; many Christians showed only a weak commitment, while the population as a whole was generally open and tolerant toward many forms of religion.

By the 1880s and 1890s, of course, California was not alone in facing such a situation. In the 1860s there were few places in the nation where people flocked to hear a charismatic Unitarian minister, where respected Methodists and Presbyterians were tried for heresy, and where strange sects like Adventists and Spiritualists required a great deal of attention from the mainstream clergy.^[30] But in the late

1870s through the 1890s, heretics abounded in the East. A national battle over the Sabbath began in the 1880s, shortly after California's had ended. Pluralism and ethnic diversity were making themselves felt in all the nation's cities, while labor unrest was common from the 1870s onward. The rest of the nation, at least in the major cities, had caught up with California. Anglo-Protestants in California were now in tune with their counterparts elsewhere: they built larger churches for their wealthy congregations; they worried about urban problems; some began to speak of the Social Gospel; and they supported foreign missions.

One can imagine the Protestant clergy of northern California breathing a collective sigh of relief at the discovery that they could once again feel united with their brothers at the other end of the continent. California might not be so unique; San Francisco was a city like other cities; and Californians could be reached (or not reached) by the gospel taught in seminaries, like Americans elsewhere. But were Californians now going to ignore the distinctive qualities that had shaped early California culture and led them to embrace Starr King's grand vision of nature and spirit, or induced them to become interested in religious viewpoints offering the hope of eternal spiritual progress? Ministers had fought these tendencies and thus far had neither defeated them nor integrated them into Protestantism itself. Would church building and social improvement now force the alternative traditions out of the public eye?

In fact, on the popular level, the alternatives continued to grow. For example, even after the Sabbath question was settled publicly, some dissidents continued to address the issue. One example is found in an unusual manuscript by a layman, Hiram Plank of Gilroy, written (judging from internal evidence) in the late 1880s or a little later. His basic argument about the Sabbath is that no external observance of it is binding on any Christian. Neither the "Jewish" Sabbath (Saturday) nor the "Papal" one (Sunday) is the true Sabbath; the true one is internal, a matter of spirit, and therefore has to be observed by the individual in his heart.^[31] That attitude reflects the independence and individualism characteristic of many Protestants in California; moreover, it reveals that even in tiny towns like Gilroy (south of San Jose), some people were thinking about religious matters in a highly internalized way. Anglo-Protestant leaders in California, in contrast, had emphasized the social aspect of religion. They wanted private piety, to be sure, but their great concern in Cal-

ifornia was to influence morality, law, and social life. Hiram Plank's idea of internalizing the Sabbath moved far in the opposite direction.

This popular tradition of interior religion grew stronger in the last two decades of the nineteenth century in northern California. Occultist and Spiritualist groups appeared, especially in San Francisco, as did strange-sounding cults such as the Delsarte Conservatory of Esthetic Gymnastics and Gnostic School of Psychic and Physical Culture.^[32] Although such groups attracted members in the north, the momentum of religious change during these years shifted to the rapidly developing southern half of the state, especially the area around Los Angeles. Since the dissident movements that were to affect the north most strongly by the turn of the century were clearly centered in the south, we must shift our focus to that region in order to understand the new developments. In the sunny southland, as we will see, another strong branch of white Protestant California culture was emerging, together with some disturbing metaphysical religions.