Sects before marriage
Christopher Hill
God's Blueprints: A Sociological Study of Three Utopian Sects J. M. Whitworth (Routledge and Kegan Paul £7.50)
Dr Whitworth defines a utopian sect as a religious group which partially retreats from the world with the avowed intention of eventually re-structuring worldly society according to a better model. His three examples are the Shakers, who existed from the 1770's to the beginning of this century, the Oneida community, which flourished from 1847 to the end of the century, and the Bruderhof, 1920 to the present. As a historical account Dr Whitworth's story is both fascinating and thought-provoking. The three sects all adopted community of goods, but only the Oneida perfectionists extended this to reject the monogamous family. The Shakers practised celibacy, the Bruderhof insist on • monogamy, though playing down the individualising role of the family. The Shakers inherited many beliefs and practices from the radical sects of seventeenth century England, especially the Quakers. Ann Lee, founder of the sect, was born in Manchester, emigrating to America in 1774 at the age of thirty-eight. The Shakers benefited from the millenarian revivalism which accompanied the American Revolution as it had accompanied the English Revolution one hundred and thirty years earlier. Like many seventeenth century radical sects, the Shakers believed in the equality of the sexes. Women played a significant role as preachers and elders. Ann Lee believed herself to be the female equivalent of Christ. The Oneida community owed its inspiration to John Humphrey Noyes, a remarkable man. The sect emerged in the 1830's from among a group of New England antinomians who believed that perfection was attainable in this life — another traditional seventeenth century radical doctrine. This led some into sexual experiments, and Noyes himself — in addition to drinking "ardent spirits" to show his emancipation from legalism — acquired an early sexual notoriety. He announced that "when the will of God is done on earth as it is in heaven, there will be no marriage. . . In a holy community there is no more reason why sexual intercourse should be restrained by law than why eating and drinking should be." In the 1840's he established a remote community in which economic communism and "complex marriage" were practised, the latter at first secretly, then increasingly openly.
Noyes instructed his community in a system of birth control which he called "male continence." This was coitus reservatus, coitus without ejaculation. A theological advantage of this practice was that passion had perforce to be controlled by reason, at least until "reason" became second nature. As a contraceptive system it was relatively successful: between 1848 and 1868, in a community of about two hundred and fifty, only some forty children were born, many intentionally. From the age of thirteen upwards, children of the community were introduced to the sober delights of complex marriage by the more spiritually advanced members, Noyes taking more than his fair share of this educational work. Every adult member of the community was free to make sexual advances (through an intermediary) to a member of the opposite sex, though anyone was, in theory at least, free to decline. Some, unfortunately, succumbed to "the temptation to make a separate hobby of it [complex marriage] and neglect the religious conditions out of which it originally issued." Noyes evolved a pet eugenic theory of his own, aiming to breed a physically and morally superior group by "scientific" marriages. Fifty-three young women of the sect offered themselves as "'living sacrifices' to God and true communism." Again Noyes played his part in siring those who were known as "stirps." When complex marriage was finally abandoned in 1879, economic communism was given up almost immediately thereafter. The two went together in a way that would have gratified Engels, collecting material at about this time for his Origin of the Family.
The Shakers expanded in a millenarian and revivalist atmosphere, and despite their principle of celibacy the community attracted enough converts to survive for well over a century. The majority of these were women, presumably seeking refuge either from the sexual rigours of marriage or from the economic rigours of frontier America. The Oneida community owed almost everything to the charismatic personality of Noyes. He taught its members to expect the conquest of disease and death — for sexual intercourse in his scheme of things had its therapeutic uses too, is indeed "in its nature the most perfect method of 'laying on of hands'." When he himself succumbed to old age and illness, awkward questions could not be avoided.
By comparison with the Shakers and the Oneida community, the Bruderhof lacks glamour, and Dr Whitworth barely conceals his boredom and irritation. Eberhard Arnold, its founder, hoped to change the world. But he died in 1935, and the group was beset by problems of survival — first in Nazi Germany, then in wartime England, then in Paraguay and the USA. In order to survive the group became more and more inward-looking, and came to lay greater stress on other-worldly salvation. Their high birth-rate and production for the market helped to keep them going. The differing histories of the three sects suggest problems about the sociological method when applied over time. We cannot accept the sectarians' simple opposition between the holy community and "the world": the world itself was changing. The Shakers enjoyed the tremendous advantage of starting off in a society which believed that the Bible laid down ideal social arrangements and which was familiar with millenarian beliefs. As the nineteenth century advanced, one wing of the Shakers — who had always opposed slavery — interested itself more and more in secular reform, trying to ally with non-religious radical and communist movements; the other wing became more introverted. Noyes adopted the first strategy, editing a paper called The American Socialist and aiming to unite communists under his leadership. The Bruderhof, at least after Arnold's death, took little interest in the outside world.
The original impetus to all three sects was agrarian; even the Bruderhof looks back to .a sentimentalised peasant society. But even this failed; all three communities found craft production necessary to economic survival: the Shakers and the Oneida community deserted their communist principles to the extent of employing wage labour. Once the millenarian impulse was lost, a utopian community of this sort faced two alternative possibilities: intro version, cutting itself off from the world, or alliance with external, secular, reformist movements. The former necessitated an authoritarianism, an isolation, which were increasingly difficult to maintain as the charismatic leaders and the first generation of devoted disciples died off. The second ultimately dissipated the group's sense of its unique mission. This was anyway increasingly difficult to maintain as the world of the American frontier gave way to the one world of TV and universal education. So the members found themselves, in Dr Whitworth's vivid phrase,. 'trapped in the sect."
Dr Whitworth never tells us why he chose these three sects. He says at one point that a utopian sect in his sense can exist only in conditions of religious freedom. This begs a number of questions. The Diggers of St George's Hill in 1649-50 surely wished to be a utopian sect in his sense; so perhaps did the Anabaptists of Munster in 1535. Some early Christian sects may have had similar objects before the totalitarian authority of the church forced them underground. At the other end of the time scale Dr Whitworth agrees that utopian sects are unlikely to emerge in the modern world. They belong to a specific historical period, in which it was possible to conduct such experiments in relative isolation. As Dr Whitworth suggests, such sects are likely to suffer most of all from a knowledge of historY, a realisation that it has all been tried before, that they are not the unique possessors of God's blueprint. His own secret presence at the Woodcrest Bruderhof, an uninvolved observer taking sociological notes, is symbolic of the way in which the world had changed.
Christopher Hill is the Master of Balliol College, Oxford
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