The Kingdom of Matthias: A Story of Sex and Salvation in 19th Century America

Matthews’s misogyny and bizarre religious rhetoric caused concern in the community outside the Kingdom. The worried brother of Sylvester Mills, a follower, reported the Kingdom to local authorities, and a warrant was issued for Matthews’s arrest. Matthews’s beard was forcibly shaved and both he and Sylvester Mills were committed to Bellevue Mental Hospital. Matthews was released but Mills was not released, and the congregation began to collapse. Pierson remained loyal, and he rented Matthews a house, where Matthews continued to preach. Here, Isabella, the woman who introduced Pierson and Matthews, worked as Matthews’s housekeeper. By April 1833, even Pierson became disenchanted and fed up with Matthews’s increasingly irrational behavior; he finally cut off his financial support of Matthews, leaving Matthews homeless.

After Pierson stopped funding Matthews, another follower named Benjamin Folger stepped in to provide financial support to Matthews. Folger and his wife continued to believe Matthews and his claim that he was God’s prophet. Aware that Benjamin Folger and his wife Ann were both under his spell, Matthews agreed to move to their estate at Heartt Place, near Sing Sing, in upstate New York. Matthews renamed the residence Mount Zion and established a small community of devoted followers. Matthias preached that his business failures were the fault of other revival movements and their effects on the development of capitalism and social mores. He promised his followers that “[in] the Kingdom of Matthias there would be no market, no money, no buying or selling, no wage system with its insidious domination of one father over another, no economic oppression of any kind” (96). By moving the Kingdom out of the city, he sought to “revive the rural ways he had known in his youth” (106). He changed the ritual suppers to better suit his anti-market sentiments:

Parts of the Prophet’s food code, however, had nothing to do with even the most wildly imagined Judaism…[and] stemmed not from Matthias’ kinship with the ancient Hebrews but from his hatred of new-fangled, middle-class ways introduced by the market revolution (109).

Everyone at Mount Zion had a job assigned by Matthews, who continued the ostentatious and luxurious lifestyle he had taken up in Manhattan and encouraged acts of wife-swapping. Supper was always a feast, but Matthews imposed his own dietary rules on the congregation. No fowl or pork was allowed, and meat was always boiled, never roasted. During supper rituals, Matthews sat at the head of the table, and the women served him separately. He drank from a silver chalice, while everyone else drank from plain tumblers. Eventually, Matthews’s hatred of traditional Christianity caused him to ban prayer altogether. Suppers were dominated by his long, angry sermons on a range of subjects.

Matthews’s influence was so strong that no one dared to challenge him. His Kingdom “echoed the rustic abundance of [his] half-remembered, half-idealized [memories] of Coila” (110). Matthias opposed gender equality, espousing the Calvinist belief that women were inferior beings. His fire and brimstone sermons and other church rituals ensured that men were always the head of households. As the authors explain, “[a]t the heart of his cosmology was a strenuous effort to elevate, in sometimes twisted and exaggerated forms, the ideals of manhood he had learned to respect back in Coila" (106).