This book recovers the trans-Atlantic histories, networks, ideas and influences of Protestant Christian traditions of communal property across two centuries of early modernity. Between 1650 and 1850 a distinctive if disparate North Atlantic Protestant culture emerged, grew and continued among a variety of religious communities set apart from mainstream Protestant Christianities in both Europe and North America by their attitude to property and collective social practice. Across this period, small Protestant groups, often with a trans-Atlantic reach, came to embrace communalism, or the holding of property in common in single or interlinked settlements, as a mark of their ideal Christian practice.
Several groups displayed no communal propensity in Europe, yet came to adopt shared property soon after arriving in North America, such as the Shakers and the German-speaking Ephrata community in Pennsylvania in the eighteenth century. Others evolved elements of a communal outlook in Europe, adapting and expanding this further after migration to the new environment of the United States. These included the Community of True Inspiration and the Harmony Society—both traditions of radical German Pietism. Still other traditions developed in nineteenth-century American soil, or only practised communalism in America, yet maintained a trans-Atlantic component to their history, mission or recruitment, among them the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—the Mormons. While some communal traditions were short-lived, others endured for generations. All such communities co-existed with the tensions and opportunities presented by host cultures of individualism and private property—cultures themselves rooted in a predominant Protestant social ethic, in central Europe, in Britain or in North America.
A primary aim of this volume is to correct a still prevailing interpretation of many of these Protestant communal groups which sees such societies belonging to an explicitly American communal tradition, or a recognized tradition of ‘American utopia’. Countless essay collections, dictionaries and annotated guides have drawn more or less direct lines of comparison and precedent from these migrating and mission communities in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the communes and radical alternatives of the 1960s counterculture.1 Taken as a whole, this utopian tradition may be seen to appeal to some as a comforting testimony to ‘another America’. The perennial presence of such groups arguably reveals shared work and common ownership to be as ‘American’ a pursuit as the proverbial happiness conferred by individual interest, private property and other assumed legacies of American Protestantism.
While this book does not set out to dismantle this interpretation, it nevertheless confronts this reading by recovering and emphasizing the formative and persistent trans-Atlantic dynamic to the wider communal tradition as a whole, and to specific groups and traditions in their individual and collective histories and influences. This dynamic is illustrated in new understandings of the European roots, relationships and reputations of some communities, and the consciously ‘Atlantic’ rather than ‘American’ worldviews and influences assumed by others.
The comparative study of such communal religious traditions has a distinguished history. Yet this is in turn dominated by their American context—from Charles Nordhoff’s Communistic Societies of the United States (1875) to Arthur Bestor’s Backwoods Utopias (1950), and on to Donald Pitzer’s edited collection on America’s Communal Utopias (1997).2 These works have been almost exclusively concerned with the ‘American-ness’ of such communal phenomena. Robert Sutton’s two-volume collection Communal Utopias and the American Experience (2003–2004), which discusses Ephrata, Shakers, Harmonists, Inspirationists and others, acknowledges a persistent concern in its title: the extent to which such communalisms reflected an ‘American experience’ above all.3
Today, historians of the early modern and modern period are deeply engaged by the dynamics of Atlantic exchange and the nature and extent of intercontinental relationships across this ocean.4 Broader movements within Pietism and its recognized English-language relatives—revivalism and evangelicalism—are historical subjects which have benefitted greatly from the transnational perspective.5 Yet, the full spectrum of communal traditions related in diverse ways to this Protestant renewal remains understudied from a trans-Atlantic perspective.
In recent years, innovative research has begun to pay closer attention to the European origins and American connections of some individual communal traditions, but certainly not all. For instance, Clarke Garrett’s Origins of the Shakers sought to locate the ‘Shaking Quakers’ who migrated from the northwest of England to New York State in 1774 within a diffuse culture of ‘spirit possession and popular religion’ identified on either side of the Atlantic.6 One of several radical Pietist groups to leave southwest Germany during and after the Napoleonic Wars, the Separatists of Zoar, Ohio, have had their roots in early nineteenth-century Württemberg uncovered by Eberhard Fritz, in two articles originally published in German and translated for English readers in 2002 in the journal Communal Societies.7 The earlier cloistered community of Ephrata, Pennsylvania, founded by German Baptist immigrants, has likewise had elements of its ‘sacred world’ dissected for European precedents in Voices of the Turtledoves by Jeff Bach—who brings more recent research to bear in his contribution to this volume.8
Moravians—the revived Unitas Fratrum movement—are perhaps the most prominent Protestant tradition to have an identifiable history of communal property ownership, though this was limited to a specific period in the eighteenth century. Moravian history has fared especially well in the scholarly turn towards the transnational of the last decade or more. A growing body of scholarship now strongly emphasizes the trans-Atlantic dimension to Moravian group identity and collective practice.9 Yet, while the Moravian concept of community has gained much attention within such studies, their time-limited practice of shared property has rarely been related to a context of wider Pietist, and indeed Protestant, tendencies towards communalism in either the period or similar geographical settings.
The essays in this book do not set out to be exhaustive in their dissection of all instances of Protestant communalism across their period. Instead, they seek to offer a range of broad or focused accounts and perspectives which will go some distance towards defining the culture of communalism it recognizes, and locating this Protestant culture across an Atlantic geography encompassing northwest Europe, the British Isles, the eastern seaboard of North America and the continent beyond.
In the second chapter, I attempt to ‘map’ Protestant communalism across 200 years and two sides of an ocean. This provides an overview of each of the groups and traditions discussed in greater detail elsewhere in the volume, and locates other communal movements, including Moravians and Anglican monasticism, emerging earlier and later from similar or drastically different beliefs. Across this survey chapter, the adoption of communal practices is shown to have been grounded repeatedly in theological ideas before or soon after its practical implementation. Eschatology in its broadest forms was the branch of theology most frequently involved in providing this theological conduit to communalism, though communal property was not dependent on an eschatological outlook: some attempts to revive monastic communities in Protestantism are found to have owed more to an intended return to Catholic traditions of asceticism and order.
In Chap. 3, Jeff Bach presents the first of five extensive case studies of distinct Protestant communal traditions forged in trans-Atlantic histories. Bach narrates the rise, flourishing and decline of the eighteenth-century Ephrata community in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania—a settlement with celibate orders and married families originating in the 1730s. Bach argues that an accurate interpretation of Ephrata must take account of how diverse religious and cultural influences from Europe combined in the American context. Ephrata maintained lasting communications with contacts in Switzerland and Germany, while further drawing on pockets of radical Christian views among the Pennsylvania population. Much of the past interpretation of Ephrata has focused on the unique location of America as a place for religious freedom. Through tracing outward communications and networks of relationships that spanned the Atlantic, the chapter shows both the patterns of Ephrata’s recruitment and its theological foundations to have remained intimately linked to Europe.
In Chapter 4, Christian Goodwillie offers a fresh and strikingly detailed group biography of the original trans-Atlantic English Shakers who founded one of the most recognizable traditions of Protestant communalism. The life of the Shaker leader, Mother Ann Lee has been narrated many times, not least in later Shaker writings reflecting a generation or more of oral tradition and collective memory. Of the eight other English Shakers who accompanied Ann Lee on her 1774 crossing to America, and the further handful of believers who joined them in America the following year, less has been written. This is despite Shaker sources taking care to record memories of some of their other founders, including Ann Lee’s brother, William Lee, and the first Shaker leader after Mother Ann’s death in 1784, James Whittaker. Goodwillie painstakingly compiles the evidence of the lives of these and each of the other English Shakers, from both Shaker and non-Shaker sources. He reveals how several played significant roles in shaping the emerging body of Shaker principles and communal settlements in New York and New England in the 1780s and 1790s.
In a third case-study chapter, Hermann Ehmer narrates a new European and American history of the Harmony Society, the radical German Pietist association led by George Rapp, which relocated from Württemberg in southwest Germany to western Pennsylvania in 1804. The Harmonists’ three successive settlements in nineteenth-century America—Harmony, Pennsylvania, New Harmony, Indiana, and Economy, Pennsylvania—are among the best-known historic sites of communal experiment in the United States today. In his revisionist study, Ehmer notably brings to bear a wealth of German-language scholarship on the history of Pietism and Württemberg’s social and political history, setting the emerging theology and practice of Rapp’s society within this specific German context. Ehmer argues that the emigration of the Harmony Society to the United States may only be understood in light of the group’s millennial beliefs. Their communalism in the United States was a further expression both of Pietist theology and inherited forms of communal behaviour transported from the German village to the American frontier.
In Chapter 6, Peter Hoehnle writes on the Community of True Inspiration—yet another radical German Protestant group with its origins in the eighteenth century. Hoehnle uncovers a notable ‘axis of communalism’ along which this persisting Pietist tradition moved between the early and mid-nineteenth century, and from central Germany to central Iowa, via upstate New York. This movement towards communal property, Hoehnle shows, was not simply a response to the demands of the American landscape, or even a following of precedent set by other Pietist traditions in the United States. Rather, many surviving and newly converted Inspirationists had already gathered together on a series of estates leased from tolerant landowners in the Hessen region. Several of these estates had once been Roman Catholic monasteries or convents; one was ‘Herrnhaag’, a Moravian communal settlement since left in a state of disrepair. On these German estates in the 1820s and 1830s, the Inspirationists took significant steps towards communalism, sharing many assets, living in communal buildings and working in common industries. The Inspirationist experience of Protestant communalism is thus shown to have been forged in circumstances and practices on both sides of the Atlantic, expressing an evolving bond of community embodied in their trans-Atlantic crossing.
Chapter 7 concludes the series of case studies with a perhaps unexpected tradition: Matthew J. Grow and Bradley Kime re-examine the origins, points of influence and repercussions of communal experiments among the Mormons in the nineteenth century. As Grow and Kime show, communalism in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was inextricably bound up with millennialism—a theological concern animating several of the groups already encountered in the volume. From Joseph Smith’s early prophecies directing his followers to realize God’s intended unified and equal society, to the developing vision of ‘Zion’—a righteous place which the Latter-day Saints sought to build in Ohio, Missouri, Illinois and then Utah—early Mormonism challenged mainstream ideas of individualism and private property in America. Mormon prophetic and millennial beliefs in particular were utilized in missionary contact with prominent traditions of Protestant communalism, and converts won from both these traditions went on to influence organizational aspects of nascent Morm...