Spiritualism, Civic Engagement, and Religious Polemics in Early Twentieth-Century Finland
Juuso Järvenpää
Abstract
This article studies the first attempt to organize Spiritualism in Finland in the early twentieth century. The main visionary of the short-lived project was former labour activist Jaakko Jalmari Jalo-Kivi. He founded the first Finnish Spiritualist journal Spiritisti in 1909 and headed the Spiritist Society in Finland, which soon followed. The article examines Jalo-Kivi’s Spiritualist activities as a form of religious civic engagement at the intersection of Finnish civil society and the religious field. It is argued that the main motivation behind these activities was the felt need to battle the spread of materialism, which Spiritualists — along with members of various other social and religious movements and institutions — considered a serious moral and societal threat. Jalo-Kivi’s attempt to organize a specifically Spiritualist battlefront against materialism exemplifies how this widely shared opposition to materialism could encourage both religious cooperation and polemics. Methodologically, the article draws from biographical microhistory.
Keywords
Spiritualism; anti-materialism; Spiritist Society in Finland; religious civic engagement; religious polemics; Jaakko Jalmari Jalo-Kivi