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Mapping Protestant Communalism, 1650–1850

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Protestant Communalism in the Trans-Atlantic World, 1650–1850

Part of the book series: Christianities in the Trans-Atlantic World, 1500-1800 ((CTAW))

Abstract

Lockley maps the history of Protestant communalism in the Atlantic world between 1650 and 1850, identifying the geographical contexts, migration patterns, and theological frameworks behind a range of Protestant traditions of communal property in early modernity. In addition to Ephrata, the Shakers, the Harmony Society, the Inspirationists, and the Mormons, which are all discussed in detail elsewhere in the volume, the chapter locates further communal movements, including Moravians, the Separatists of Zoar, and Anglican monasticism, emerging earlier and later from similar or different beliefs. Lockley shows communal practices were most often grounded in eschatological ideas before or soon after their practical adoption, though some attempts to revive monastic communities in Protestantism stemmed from alternative, older Christian theologies.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    G.H. Williams, The Radical Reformation (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1962), pp. 124–46, 429–34, 680; James Stayer, The German Peasants’ War and Anabaptist Community of Goods (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991). The Hutterite Brethren was the one branch of Anabaptism to have reinstituted the practice of community of goods in the later sixteenth century, and preserved it since. Most Hutterites migrated east to the Ukraine in the 1770s, and west across the Atlantic to the Dakotas in the 1870s.

  2. 2.

    Acts 2:44.

  3. 3.

    Hendrick Niclaes, quoted in Alastair Hamilton, The Family of Love (Cambridge: James Clarke, 1981), p. 10. See also C.W. Marsh, The Family of Love in English Society, 1550–1630 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

  4. 4.

    John Demos, A Little Commonwealth Family: Family Life in Plymouth Colony (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970).

  5. 5.

    Timothy Kenyon, Utopian Communism and Political Thought in Early Modern England (London: Pinter, 1989).

  6. 6.

    Andrew Bradstock, Radical Religion in Cromwell’s England (London: I.B. Tauris, 2011), pp. 56–7.

  7. 7.

    Pieter Plockhoy, The Way to Peace and Settlement of These Nations: Fully Discovered (London: 1659); and, idem, A Way Propounded to Make the Poor in These and Other Nations Happy, by bringing together a fit, suitable, and well qualified people unto one household-government, or little-common-wealth (London: 1659).

  8. 8.

    Donald F. Durnbaugh, ‘Communitarian Societies in Colonial America’, in America’s Communal Utopias, ed. D. Pitzer (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), pp. 15–17; Leland Harder and Marvin Harder, Plockhoy from Zurik-zee: The Study of a Dutch Reformer in Puritan England and Colonial America (Newton, KS: [Mennonite] Board of Education and Publication, 1952). See also, P.C. Plockhoy, ‘An Invitation to the Society of Little Commonwealth’, in Every Need Supplied: Mutual Aid and Christian Community in the Free Churches, 1525–1675, ed. Donald F. Durnbaugh (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1974), pp. 143–55.

  9. 9.

    Greg Peters, Reforming the Monastery: Protestant Theologies of the Religious Life (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2014), pp. 53–90.

  10. 10.

    Walter Joseph Travers quoted in Peters, Reforming the Monastery, p. 56; Peter Anson, The Call of the Cloister: Religious Communities and Kindred Bodies in the Anglican Communion (London: SPCK, 1964), pp. 14–18.

  11. 11.

    George Wheler, The Protestant Monastery: or, Christian Oeconomicks. Containing directions for the religious conduct of a family (London, 1698).

  12. 12.

    Trevor J. Saxby, The Quest for the New Jerusalem: Jean de Labadie and the Labadists, 1610–1744 (Dordrecht: Nijhoff, 1987).

  13. 13.

    Everett Gordon Alderfer, The Ephrata Commune: An Early American Counterculture (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985), p. 32.

  14. 14.

    Steve Longenecker, Piety and Tolerance: Pennsylvania German Religion, 1700–1850 (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1994); Aaron S. Fogleman, Hopeful Journeys: German Immigration, Settlement, and Political Culture in Colonial America, 1717–1775 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996).

  15. 15.

    Kenneth Rexroth, Communalism: From Its Origins to the Twentieth Century (New York: Seabury, 1974), p. 173. The most recognizable group of Anabaptist emigrants today, the Amish, migrated in waves from Switzerland and the Alcase region in the mid-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Donald Kraybill et al., The Amish (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013).

  16. 16.

    Jane Lead, Signs of the Times (London, 1699) quoted in Paula Mcdowell, The Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics, and Gender in the London Literary Marketplace 1678–1730 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 199. On the Philadelphian Society, see Ariel Hessayon (ed.), Jane Lead and Her Transnational Legacy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).

  17. 17.

    Francis Burke Brandt, The Wissahickon Valley within the City of Philadelphia (Philadelphia: Corn Exchange National Bank, 1927), pp. 84–95.

  18. 18.

    Johannes Wallmann ‘Kirchlicher and radikaler Pietismus: Zu einer kirchengeschichtlichen Grundunterscheidung’ [Church and Radical Pietism—toward a Basic Distinction] in Wolfgang Breul et al. (eds), Der Radikale Pietismus: Perspektiven der Forschung (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010), pp. 19–44; Douglas Shantz, An Introduction to German Pietism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), pp. 150–1; Hartmut Lehman, ‘Zur Definition des “Pietismus”’, in Zur Neueren Pietismusforschung, ed. Martin Gerschat (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1977), pp. 82–90.

  19. 19.

    See Johannes Wallmann, Philipp Jakob Spener und die Anfänge des Pietismus, rev. ed. (Tübingen: Mohr, 1986); idem., ‘Pietas contra Pietismus. Zum Frömmigkeitsvertändnis der Lutherischen Orthodoxie’, in Udo Sträter (ed.), Pietas in der Lutherischen Orthodoxie (Wittenberg: Hans Luft, 1998), pp. 6–18. In extensive and sharply critical reviews of recent studies of Pietism, Wallmann further argues that the broadening of the concept of Pietism so blurs the contours of church history that Pietism as a movement is no longer definable and distinguishable from other movements. Johannes Wallmann, ‘Eine alternative Geschichte des Pietismus. Zur gegenwärtigen Diskussion um den Pietismusbegriff’, Pietismus und Neuzeit, 28 (2002), 30–71.

  20. 20.

    Shantz, Introduction to German Pietism, pp. 86–91.

  21. 21.

    Martin Brecht quoted in Carter Lindberg, ‘Introduction’, in Carter Lindberg (ed.), The Pietist Theologians: An Introduction to Theology in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), p. 3. Brecht’s implementation of this broad conception of Pietism in the first volume of the Geschichte des Pietismus is, according to Wallmann, a ‘false start’: Johannes Wallmann, ‘Fehlstart. Zur Konzeption von Band 1 der neuen “Geschichte des Pietismus”’, Pietismus und Neuzeit, 20 (1994), 218–35. For Brecht’s reply see, Martin Brecht, ‘Zur Konzeption der Geschichte des Pietismus. Eine Entgegnung auf Johannes Wallmann’, Pietismus und Neuzeit, 22 (1996), 226–29. The issue is really whether Pietism is a concept of a particular period of history or an a-historical, typological concept. Johannes Wallmann, ‘“Pietismus”—mit Gänsefüsshen’, Theologische Rundschau, 66 (2001), 462–80; see 464, 478–80.

  22. 22.

    Simeon Zahl, Pneumatology and the Theology of the Cross in the Preaching of Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt (London: T&T Clark, 2010), p. 17.

  23. 23.

    Shantz, Introduction to German Pietism, pp. 147–78.

  24. 24.

    Many scholars now stress the porosity of the boundary between ‘church Pietists’ and radicals. Hans Schneider, German Radical Pietism, transl. Gerald T. Macdonald (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2007); Breul et al. (eds), Der Radikale Pietismus.

  25. 25.

    Shantz, German Pietism, pp. 154–8.

  26. 26.

    Ariel Hessayon and Sarah Apetrei, An Introduction to Jacob Boehme: Four Centuries of Thought and Reception (New York: Routledge, 2014).

  27. 27.

    Jeff Bach, Voices of the Turtledove: The Sacred World of Ephrata (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), p. 10.

  28. 28.

    The Pietist origins of the Neu-Täufer and their distinction from Anabaptists were debated during the 1960s in response to new studies of the Mennonite tradition which recognized their opposition to Pietism. For a useful summary of this debate, see Bach, Voices of the Turtledove, pp. 28–9.

  29. 29.

    See Chap. 3, p. 45.

  30. 30.

    Hans-Walter Erbe, Herrnhaag: Eine religiöse Kommunität im 18. Jahrhundert (Hamburg: F. Wittig, 1988). Herrnhaag was abandoned by the Moravians between 1750 and 1753, after a new Count Ysenburg-Büdingen demanded the community reject Zinzendorf’s leadership.

  31. 31.

    Leland Ferguson, God’s Fields: Landscape, Religion, and Race in Moravian Wachovia (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2011).

  32. 32.

    Colin Podmore, The Moravian Church in England 1728–1760 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).

  33. 33.

    A useful overview of the development of Moravian settlements appears in Felicity Jensz, German Moravian Missionaries in the British Colony of Victoria, Australia (Leiden: Brill, 2010), pp. 20–1.

  34. 34.

    Durnbaugh, ‘Communitarian Societies in Colonial America’, pp. 28–9.

  35. 35.

    Craig D. Atwood, Community of the Cross: Moravian Piety in Colonial Bethlehem (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), p. 3.

  36. 36.

    Atwood, Community of the Cross, pp. 16–17.

  37. 37.

    See Chap. 5, pp. 119–20.

  38. 38.

    Frederick Rapp to Samuel Worcester, 19 Dec 1822 in Karl Arndt (ed.), A Documentary History of the Indiana Decade of the Harmony Society 1814–1824, 2 vols (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 1975–78), 2:512.

  39. 39.

    Frederick Rapp to Samuel Worcester, 19 Dec 1822 in Arndt (ed.), Documentary History of the Indiana Decade, 2:514.

  40. 40.

    1 Cor. 7:29. Karl Arndt, George Rapp’s Harmony Society 1785–1847, second edn (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1972), p. 97.

  41. 41.

    Andrew Weeks, Böhme: An Intellectual Biography of the Seventeenth-Century Philosopher and Mystic (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), pp. 114–21. For Separatist views on marriage, see Charles Nordhoff, The Communistic Societies of the United States (London: J. Murray, 1875), pp. 104–8.

  42. 42.

    Eberhard Fritz, ‘Roots of Zoar, Ohio, in Early 19th Century Württemberg’, Communal Societies, 22 (2002), 27–44. See also, the second part of this article in Communal Societies, 23 (2003), 29–44.

  43. 43.

    K.M. Fernandez, A Singular People (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2003).

  44. 44.

    The Eben-Ezer to Amana migration features in S. Scott Rohrer, Wandering Souls: Protestant Migrations in America, 1630–1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), pp. 194–214.

  45. 45.

    History of La Salle County, Illinois, 2 vols (Chicago, 1886), 1:454. For more on this group, see Chap. 7, p. 176.

  46. 46.

    The oral history of Bishop Hill descendants is reported in Philip J. Stoneberg, ‘The Bishop Hill Colony’, in History of Henry County, Illinois, ed. H.L. Kiner (Chicago: Pioneer, 1910), p. 630.

  47. 47.

    Paul Elmen, Wheat Flour Messiah: Eric Jansson of Bishop Hill (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1976); Jon Wagner, ‘Eric Jansson and the Bishop Hill Colony’, in Pitzer (ed.), America’s Communal Utopias, pp. 297–318.

  48. 48.

    Samuel Koehne, ‘Pietism as Societal Solution: The Foundation of the Korntal Brethren (Korntaler Brüdergemeinde)’, in Jonathan Strom (ed.), Pietism and Community in Europe and North America: 1650–1850 (Leiden: Brill, 2010), pp. 329–51. Korntal and Wilhelmsdorf are discussed further in Chap. 5, p. 126.

  49. 49.

    David Nelson Duke, ‘The Evolution of Religion in Wilhelm Keil’s Community: A New Reading of Old Testimony’, Communal Societies, 13 (1993), 84–98.

  50. 50.

    Duke, ‘The Evolution of Religion in Wilhelm Keil’s Community’, 87–9.

  51. 51.

    Arndt, George Rapp’s Harmony Society, pp. 539–41.

  52. 52.

    Robert J. Hendricks, Bethel and Aurora: An Experiment in Communism as Practical Christianity (New York: Pioneer Press, 1933).

  53. 53.

    James Kopp, Eden within Eden: Oregon’s Utopian Heritage (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2009), pp. 39–50.

  54. 54.

    Clarke Garrett, Origins of the Shakers: From the Old World to the New World (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), pp. 145–8.

  55. 55.

    Stephen A. Stein, The Shaker Experience in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 25–31.

  56. 56.

    Stein, Shaker Experience, pp. 70–1.

  57. 57.

    Arthur Bestor, Backwoods Utopias: The Sectarian and Owenite Phases of Communitarian Socialism in America, 1663–1829 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1950; second edn, 1970); Robert P. Sutton, Communal Utopias and the American Experience: Secular Communities (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004).

  58. 58.

    J.F.C. Harrison, Robert Owen and the Owenites in Britain and America: The Quest for the New Moral World (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), pp. 107–8; Carl Guarneri, ‘The Associationists: Forging a Christian Socialism in Antebellum America’, Church History, 52:1 (1983), 36–49.

  59. 59.

    Foster Stockwell, Encyclopaedia of American Communes, 1663–1963 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1998), pp. 233–6.

  60. 60.

    Paul Johnson and Sean Wilentz, The Kingdom of Matthias: A Story of Sex and Salvation in 19th-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); R.A. Gilruth, ‘The Community of United Christians at Berea, Ohio, in 1836’ (PhD thesis, Princeton University, 1941); Counties of La Grange and Noble, Indiana, Historical and Biographical (Chicago: Battey, 1882), pp. 268–9. For more on The Family at Kirtland, Ohio, see Chap. 7, p. 166.

  61. 61.

    See Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, A.J. Macdonald Collection of Utopian Materials, c.1840–65, ff. 271–92. Thomas Hamm, God’s Government Begun: The Society for Universal Inquiry and Reform, 1842–1846 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), pp. 31–56.

  62. 62.

    Sterling Delano, Brook Farm: The Dark Side of Utopia (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Edward K. Spann, Hopedale: From Commune to Company Town, 1840–1920 (Columbus OH: Ohio State University Press, 1992).

  63. 63.

    Oneida Community, Bible Communism: a compilation from the annual reports and other publications of the Oneida Association and its branches (Brooklyn, NY: 1853); Spencer Klaw, Without Sin: The Life and Death of the Oneida Community (New York: Allen Lane, 1993).

  64. 64.

    Alice Felt Tyler, Freedom’s Ferment: Phases of American Social History to 1860 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1944).

  65. 65.

    Grant Underwood, The Millenarian World of Early Mormonism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993); Philip Taylor, Expectations Westward: The Mormons and the Emigration of Their British Converts in the Nineteenth Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966).

  66. 66.

    This proliferation was unwittingly measured and recorded in a unique religious census carried out in 1851: Horace Mann, Census of Great Britain, 1851. Religious Worship in England and Wales. Abridged from the Official Report (London: George Routledge, 1854). A classic statistical study of the period is Alan D. Gilbert, Religion and Society in Industrial England: Church, Chapel and Social Change, 1740–1914 (London: Longman, 1976).

  67. 67.

    Underwood, Millenarian World of Early Mormonism, pp. 127–38; J.F.C. Harrison, The Second Coming: Popular Millenarianism, 1780–1850 (London: Routledge, 1979).

  68. 68.

    Philip Lockley, Visionary Religion and Radicalism in Early Industrial England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 103–24.

  69. 69.

    Lockley, Visionary Religion, pp. 118–23.

  70. 70.

    Philip Lockley, ‘Missionaries of the Millennium: Israelite Preachers in the English-speaking World, 1823–1863’, Journal of Religious History, 37:3 (2013), 369–90.

  71. 71.

    C.J.T. Bohm quoted in C.G. Flegg, Gathered Under Apostles: A Study of the Catholic Apostolic Church (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 180–6.

  72. 72.

    Timothy C.F. Stunt, ‘Prince, Henry James (1811–1899)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 (http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/37864, accessed 28 July 2015).

  73. 73.

    Dennis Hardy, Alternative Communities in Nineteenth-Century England (London and New York: Longman, 1979), pp. 134–9.

  74. 74.

    David Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 80–5.

  75. 75.

    Quoted in Charles Whibley, Lord John Manners and His Friends, 2 vols (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1925), 1:107.

  76. 76.

    A.M. Allchin, The Silent Rebellion: Anglican Religious Communities, 1845–1900 (London: SCM, 1958), pp. 52–6.

  77. 77.

    Anson, Call of the Cloister, pp. 30–43.

  78. 78.

    Susan Mumm, Stolen Daughters, Virgin Mothers: Anglican Sisterhoods in Victorian Britain (London: Leicester University Press, 1999), p. 3.

  79. 79.

    Allchin, Silent Rebellion, pp. 71–3; Mumm, Stolen Daughters, Virgin Mothers, pp. 3–8.

  80. 80.

    Allchin, Silent Rebellion, p. 186. For other short-lived lay and clerical ‘brotherhoods’ in the period, see Anson, Call of the Cloister, pp. 50–1.

  81. 81.

    Allchin, Silent Rebellion, p. 89.

  82. 82.

    R.M. Benson, quoted in Allchin, Silent Rebellion, p. 193.

  83. 83.

    Anson, Call of the Cloister, pp. 531–79.

  84. 84.

    Anson, Call of the Cloister, p. 532.

  85. 85.

    Anson, Call of the Cloister, pp. 532–3.

  86. 86.

    Anson, Call of the Cloister, p. 535.

  87. 87.

    Senator George Badger, quoted in Anson, Call of the Cloister, p. 537.

  88. 88.

    The classic study of early Christian asceticism is Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). On property, see Peter Garnsey, Thinking about Property: From Antiquity to the Age of Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 59–106.

  89. 89.

    A recent, valuable study taking its cue from this broader definition of eschatology is Martin Spence, Heaven on Earth: Re-imagining Time and Eternity in Nineteenth-Century British Evangelicalism (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2015).

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    Philip Lockley

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    Philip Lockley

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Lockley, P. (2016). Mapping Protestant Communalism, 1650–1850. In: Lockley, P. (eds) Protestant Communalism in the Trans-Atlantic World, 1650–1850. Christianities in the Trans-Atlantic World, 1500-1800. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-48487-1_2

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