The Missionary Era · 1848-1881 · New York
Oneida Community
An open theological question
Historians and Christians themselves are divided on whether this group's core beliefs fall inside the historic Christian creeds.
About This Movement
John Humphrey Noyes taught that a Christian could be wholly free of sin in this life, and in 1848 he gathered a community at Oneida in upstate New York to live as though the kingdom had already arrived. They held property in common, replaced marriage with what they called complex marriage — in which every member was in principle married to every other. Submitted to a formal system of group criticism, and from 1869 ran a selective breeding programme they named stirpiculture. They also worked hard and paid their way, manufacturing animal traps, silk thread and eventually tableware. Outside campaigning and internal strain finished it. Noyes left for Canada in 1879, and in 1880 the community voted itself out of existence, reorganizing on New Year's Day 1881 as a joint-stock company.
Sources
- John Humphrey Noyes, Bible Communism (1848), Male Continence (1872), History of American Socialisms (1870) (primary) — The community's own founding texts, in Noyes's own words.
- The community's own record: The Circular/Oneida Circular, the First Annual Report (1849), daily journals, mutual-criticism records, the stirpiculture records (1869-79) (primary) — Diary-depth self-documentation, including the real question of consent and coercion inside the community's practice of complex marriage — not smoothed over.
- Members' voices: Tirzah Miller's diaries (ed. Fogarty, Desire and Duty at Oneida, 2000); ex-members' accounts and the 1879-81 breakup correspondence; Prof. John Mears's public campaign (primary) — A woman member's own inside record, though the founder's authority visibly presses on it. Mears writes as a hostile outside critic.
- Lawrence Foster, Religion and Sexuality (Illinois, 1984), with Spencer Klaw, Without Sin (Penguin, 1993) (secondary)
- Cambridge History of Christianity vol. 8, ch. 22 'Christian America' and 'Christian Canada' (Noll) (reference)