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When the Extraordinary Hits Home
presentation of Spiritualism and the church that is the principal site
of this study, I explain the research process in greater detail.^3
The Spiritual Church of Healing
The Spiritual Church of Healing (sch), where my research is focused,
was founded in Montreal in 1967 by a married couple from England,
both Spiritualist ministers.^4 The religious movement that came to be
known as Spiritualism dates back to 1847 , when Margaret and Kate
Fox, two sisters living on a farm in Hydesville, New York, heard
strange noises. The girls managed to establish contact with their source,
which they eventually determined to be the spirit of a peddler who
had been murdered in the house. His skeleton was later found in the
basement (Aubrée and Laplantine 1990 , Goodman 1988 ). The reli-
gious movement that developed around the two girls spread across
the United States in a climate influenced by Emerson’s transcenden-
talism, and soon spread to England. In France, it influenced the devel-
opment of French Spiritism, also known as Kardecism, after its lead-
ing figure, Alain Kardec. Spiritualism enjoyed great influence in the
United States over the latter part of the nineteenth century and was
especially popular among feminists and other progressive thinkers
(Braude 1989 ). Some estimates of the time found its adherents num-
bering in the millions. The lack of institutional centralization that
even now characterizes Spiritualism makes such numbers difficult to
verify (Braude 1989 , 25 ).
The Spiritual Church, as its members often call it, developed in the
middle of the Quiet Revolution, a period of rapid secularization for
Quebec in the 1960 s, when religious institutions changed greatly. While
most Franco-Québécois remained nominally Catholic, clergy declined
drastically in number as did religious practice among the Catholic la-
ity (Linteau et al. 1989 , 648 – 649 ; Bibby 1990 , 135 ). At the same time,
many new religious groups, notably Pentecostal churches, challenged
the position of classic Protestant churches, such as the Anglican and
Presbyterian, and continue to do so (Polo 2001 ).
When the founders of the Spiritual Church of Healing left Canada
in 1975 , a young Québécois, Michel, replaced them, and gradually the
