Thread by @MorsRattus

so like

I am going to tell you about a dude I JUST learned existed

His name was John Murray Spear, and he attempted to build ROBOT JESUS

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Murr…

Turn the clock back to 1804. A boy named John is born to the Spear family of Boston, just a year after the birth of his elder brother, Charles. They are both raised in the First Univeralist Church of Boston, and got baptized by the founder of American Univeralism, John Murray.

American Universalism is one of the nicer historical strains of American Christianity - they believed that no loving God would damn anyone, so Hell clearly could not exist, and all were saved by nature of being creations of God. Eventually they and the American Unitarians merged.

John and Charles grew up in the Univeralist Church and adored it. After brief apprenticeships (John with a shoemaker and Charles with a printer) they eventually became preachers themselves, preaching in various parts of Massachusetts together.

John even ended up, briefly, the ordained minister of the Universalist Church in Barnstable, Mass, in 1830. However, this was also the time his brother Charlie began what would become a lifelong campaign: the abolition of the death penalty.

John didn't stay the local minister long - he spent around six years in the area, and by 1835 both John and Charles were vocal opponents of the death penalty at the Universalist General Conventions. They were extremely loud about both their political views in general, actually.

Both John and Charles were founding members of the radical pacifist New England Non-Resistance Society, which swore to do no violence and partake in no worldly government, both being forms of control over others that they refused to take part in. But that wasn't it for our boys.

See, our boys were not just anti-death penalty and anti-violence - they were anti-slavery. In 1841, they organized and led the first AND second Univeralist Anti-Slavery Conventions, and John was a leader among the Boston Vigilance Committee, which helped escaped slaves.

Charlie ended up as the General Agent of the Massachusetts Society for the Abolition of Capital Punishment. He was, for his entire life, an ardent crusader for the reformation of the prison system and the rehabilitation of criminals rather than punishment.

He served as an Army chaplain and briefly attempted to reform an Army-run hosptial to work according to his ideas before he got booted by a pro-slavery hospital director. He and his second wife ran anti-death penalty newspapers and hospitals entirely on donated funds. Nice guy.

But it's his brother, John, we care more about. John Murray Spear became a leading voice in the American Abolitionist movement. He worked alongside Frederick Douglass, and he wasn't afraid to get into scraps - verbal, of course - with "moderate" voices.

John led a massive fight against the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, a "moderate" group that wanted a gradual reduction in slaves with accomodations made for slave states. John wanted no part of that, and even advocated for active political punishment of slave states.

John Spear was so vocally anti-slavery that, in Massachusetts, he was actually ATTACKED BY A MOB after one of his lectures. He also became a hated figure in Southern politics after his work in the legal process of freeing Lucy Faggins, an escaped slave.

After that, he was threatened with lawsuits and forced to resign from his work in New Bedford as a preacher. Not that this stopped John. He worked alongside his brother, writing for the newspaper The Prisoner's Friend and helping to formalize and create the job of parole officer.

It is around this point, in 1852, that John starts to get weird. I mean, weirder than being a hugely influential abolitionist and the inventor of the parole officer. See, his daughter Sophronia gets him into magnetic healing and talking to spirits.

John begins writing what he says are messages from the late John Murray, Universalist founder, and then declares himself the chosen medium of Murray, Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin and Ben Rush, along with a few others. He calls them the Congress of Spirits.

The Congress, through John, is...well, weird. "Jefferson" argues against slavery, "Rush" talks about health, medicine and the healing power of animal magnetism. The entire collective urges for the founding of spiritual communities. But first, a special moment for Ben Franklin.

"Ben Franklin," through John Murray Spear, delivers the plans for:
- a perpetual motion machine
- an "electric thinking engine"
- an electric boat
- an "intercontinental telepathy network"
- an improved sewing machine

Spear's friends were certain he'd gone mad, and he didn't bother to stop them when they got his Universalist preacher's cred revoked. His fellow reformers now attempted to distance themselves from him, and he recruits many lay people into spiritualist societies.

In 1857, the Congress of Spirits apparently decides it's time to go harder. John becomes a proponent of free love and the replacement of marriage with sex governed by mutual desire and love. Our boy could not stop being progressive, either, even in his years of madness.

He was a proponent of free birth control and of women's right to refuse sex, even marital sex. He was disavowed by more conservative Spiritualists...and also, unfortunately, by most women's rights advocates, who were at the time more about voting rather than reproductive rights.

Spear believed that he had to usher in a new age, under the direction of the Congress of Spirits - or, as he also called them, the Association of Electrizers. He and several of his followers headed to Lynn, Massachusetts to bring the machine that would give mankind true freedom.

There, they would produce the New Motive Power, a "mechanical messiah" that would bring about true paradise. The New Motive Power would be built of zinc, copper, magnets and a dining room table. It would take nine months to build, a time period carefully selected by Spear.

At the end of the nine months, Spear and a woman known to history only as "the New Mary" would ritually birth the machine, giving it spiritual life. The New Motive Power, he believed, would then produce even more benevolent machines of perfection, which would free humanity.

Near his death, he wrote: "Dearly have I loved the work in which I was engaged. I have been helped to see that [..] there was a living, guiding, intelligent, beneficent purpose—the elevation, regeneration and redemption of the inhabitants of this earth.”

Unfortunately, the New Motive Power never actually...did anything. His ritual probably did involve sex, given his personal beliefs on sexuality. Robot Jesus never ended up taking form and bringing us a world of 1870s radical freedom.

RIP John Spears, you beautiful madman