Seriously though, I do believe that some people have psychic or psychometry abilities. Do I believe every palm reader and alleged psychic I go to? No, I do not. There are far too many charlatans out there and I am at heart a skeptic. However, that belief in other worldly or occult things is compartmentalized away from my religious beliefs. It has never occurred to me to join the two. I'm not sure how that would benefit me. 
Maybe it wouldn't. I don't know. Some sects look dimly upon psychics and the like as being tools of Satan. I don't know what the Methodist church says about it. I don't see time as necessarily being linear anyway so I don't know why it's such a stretch to imagine that some people are more conscious of it than others.
The Spiritualist movement was born straight out of the horror of the Civil War where so many families lost so many men. It came at precisely the same time as photography was beginning to become more affordable and widely practiced as well. The two together, along with the miracle of the telegraph, heralded a new era of technology which amazed the average person no end. People wanted to hear from their loved ones on the other side, they wanted desperately to believe they wouldn't have to let them go. In their desperation, they turned to the burgeoning psychic movement which had sprung from such national sensations as the
Fox Sisters and, later, the Bell Witch. Traditional religion was, for many, unsatisfactory in light of the carnage of the Civil War.
There were charlatans aplenty all over the place using very crude techniques to supposedly contact and interact with the spirit world. You can see from
these pictures just how crude some of the spirit photography was yet people, many of whom were very willing to believe, were taken in. Double exposures were used, sometimes outright cutouts from magazines or other photographs, sometimes images which were supposed to be of dead loved ones but didn't resemble them at all, were said to be, "spirits in their true form as they should have looked on earth." And people bought it! Then came ouija boards and seances and stage shows and again, people just flocked to it. When radio was invented, spiritualism grew again because spiritualists were quick to point out that if we can broadcast our voices through the ether, than why not the dead?!
Houdini was a huge debunker of spiritualism but Arthur Conan Doyle, the inventor of Sherlock Holmes, was a big fan. Spiritualism faded in popularity but was buoyed again during and just after the world wars, again largely by people who had prematurely lost loved ones. It never became as big as it once was, as people became more technically inclined, but by the late 60s it was again gaining in popularity because, after all, God was dead and the upheaval in the world was being poorly addressed by churches. It really never went away though it rises and falls in popularity. I don't know what a spiritualist church is like. I'd be curious to know.
