Reasonable Thoughts on Religion, Science, Skepticism, and Atheism

by VorJack

Here’s a little ditty I learned back in the days of Vacation Bible School:

The Lord is good to me,
And so I thank the Lord,
For giving me
the things I need,
The sun and rain and an apple seed.
The Lord is good to me.

I suspect that many of you are baffled, particularly those of you from outside the US. This is supposedly the prayer of Johnny Appleseed, an early American missionary who traveled the frontier, planting small patches of apple trees along the way.

The song was featured in a short Disney film that was inflicted on boys of my generation. It depicted Johnny as a simple man, his only possessions a bible, a pouch of apple seeds and a tin pot which he carried on his head. Since it’s a Disney cartoon, Johnny pauses to cavort with the woodland creatures at every opportunity.

The Swedenborg Collective

Pullquote: I have often talked with angels on this subject, and they have invariably declared that in heaven they are unable to divide the Divine into three, because they know and perceive that the Divine is One and this One is in the Lord.
Emanuel Swedenborg

This is one of those cases where the reality is more complicated than Disney could handle. The man who inspired the legend was named John Chapman, a curator of apple nurseries in Ohio in the early 19th century. He was indeed a traveling evangelist, but not the sort that Disney imagines. Chapman was a actually a traveling Swedenborgian.

The Swedenborgian Church is an offshoot of Christianity, based on the writings of an 18th century Swedish visionary named Emanuel Swedenborg. Like many religious visionaries, Swedenborg believed that Christianity had been obscured by centuries of misunderstanding, and that he was receiving revelations of the pure religion directly from God. His new religion was mystical and difficult to grasp, but he clearly rejected the doctrine of the Trinity. He also rejected the simplistic interpretation of Sola Fide (faith alone), and insisted that faith is only a guide to the true path to salvation, which included works of charity.

The Swedenborgian “New Church” became moderately popular in England, then spread to the US in the early 19th century. In America, which they called the “New Jerusalem,” Swedenborg’s writings were influential if not exactly popular. It’s hard to say how many members the church had, but it did directly influence the Transcendentalists. Swedenborg’s concept of a three-tiered heaven may have influenced Joseph Smith’s emerging Church of Latter Days Saints.

Johnny Appleseed’s Religion

Pullquote: “This man for years past has been in the employment of bringing into cultivation, in numberless places in the wilderness, small patches (two or three acres) of ground, and then sowing apple seeds and rearing nurseries.”

John Chapman was a star player, from the early days of the American church until his death in 1845. Consider this extract from a meeting of the English branch of the New Church, shortly after the American branch was founded:

There is in the western country a very extraordinary missionary of the New Jerusalem. A man has appeared who seems to be almost independent of corporeal wants and sufferings. He goes barefooted, can sleep anywhere, in a house or out of a house, and live upon the coarsest and most scanty of fare. He has actually thawed ice with his bare feet. He procures what books he can of the New Church Swedenborg, travels into the remote settlements, and lends them wherever he can find readers [...] This man for years past has been in the employment of bringing into cultivation, in numberless places in the wilderness, small patches (two or three acres) of ground, and then sowing apple seeds and rearing nurseries. (quoted in Occult America, 39-41)

No word on whether or not he danced with raccoons.

Some years back, the historian Mike Wallace coined the term “Mickey Mouse History” to describe the sanitized, streamlined history that frequently gets produced in America. This is the sort of commemorative history that is informed more by nostalgia or ideology than historical principles. The Disney image of Johnny Appleseed is a perfect example of this, but the problem goes deeper.

The period where Chapman was active is known as the Second Great Awakening. It’s usually depicted as the triumph of Evangelical Christianity as it spread through the land, driven by tent revivals and itinerant preachers. Stories like Chapman’s remind us that the reality was far more complex than that. Religion in America has always been heterodox and complicated, from the founding to today.