"All men have a natural and indefeasible right to worship Almighty God according to the dictates of their own consciences; no man can of right be compelled to attend, erect, or support any place of worship... against his consent." William Penn, Declaration of Rights, 1682
Sketch of William Penn, from life.
When William Penn issued his Declaration of Rights in 1682, the idea that individuals have a natural right to worship according to the dictates of their own conscience was a radical, even subversive notion. No nation in Europe embraced it. Indeed, most used the full force of the law to punish religious "separatists" who broke from established, or state-affiliated, churches. Fines, imprisonment, and execution, however, did not deter Christians who believed they were called by God to embrace different forms of worship and belief. In the 1680s Europe was still reeling from the aftershocks of the Protestant Reformation, that great split in Christianity that had unleashed one hundred years of religious war and remade the map of Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. After Henry VIII broke from the Roman Catholic Church and in the 1530s created the Church of England over which he, the King, presided, England, too, experienced generations of religious conflict. In the aftermath of the bloody civil war of the 1640s, when Oliver Cromwell and his Puritan and Presbyterian supporters dethroned and then beheaded England's King Charles I, religious dissenters were free to worship more openly and varied religious enthusiasms took hold. For the future colony of Pennsylvania, and for the religious communities that would find haven there, the most important group of dissenters to flourish during this period was the Religious Society of Friends, better known as the Quakers.
From its start in 1647, when founder George Fox exhorted his neighbors to reject the empty formalism and rituals of the Church of England and seek a personal relationship with God, the Society of Friends threatened religious and political authorities. Believing that God existed in all people, Friends rejected the trained clergy and structured services of the Anglican Church. Instead they gathered in meetings where they sat in silence until a Friend was moved by God to speak.
Edward Hicks, Peaceable Kingdom, circa 1834.
Friends' trust in this Inner Light gave rise to other radical notions. In an effort to follow the model and teachings of Christ, they refused to bear arms, remove their hats before civil or religious authorities, swear any form of oath, or tithe. Fortified by the conviction that they were doing God's will, they wrote inflammatory pamphlets condemning corruption in the Anglican church, interrupted Anglican church services to loudly promote their views, adopted a different style of dress, permitted women to speak - and when so moved to preach - in meeting, and in other ways antagonized religious and civil authorities. To discourage and suppress these annoying and disrespectful radicals, British courts fined, flogged, and imprisoned Friends by the thousands. Holding to the example of the apostles who had suffered for the name of Jesus, hundreds chose to die in prison rather than renounce their faith. The Friends' more popular name of Quaker appeared during this period of persecution. According to one version of the story, an unrepentant George Fox, dragged into court yet again for challenging the Church of England, lectured the judge to "tremble at the word of the Lord," to which the judge dryly replied that it was Fox who should "quake" in his presence. Another version had the judge admonishing Fox to "quake in the face of the Lord." Either way, the name Quaker stuck and became the popular term for the Friends.
The “Cave of Kelpius,” Fairmount Park, Philadelphia, PA, circa 2010. ...
Shortly after founding the Society of Friends, Fox began to investigate the possibility of establishing a haven for Quakers in North America. In 1660 Quaker Josiah Cole traveled to territory north of Maryland to explore purchase of land from the Susquehannocks or Delaware. In 1672, Fox made his own tour of Britain's American colonies to seek a new home for his besieged flock. Following a scouting trip to the colony of West Jersey - present-day New Jersey - a group of Friends established the village of Salem in 1675, and Fox urged his friend and supporter William Penn to sponsor the immigration of 800 more Quakers.
Born in 1644, William Penn had joined the Quakers in his teens and soon became one of their most eloquent spokesmen and effective defenders. The son of Admiral William Penn, a celebrated war hero and commander of the British fleet, the junior Penn stunned English upper-class society when he converted from the established Church of England to this much-maligned sect. In the years that followed Penn agitated for Quakers' political rights and criticized English religious authorities, on occasion landing in prison for his efforts.
Penn was unable to provide much help for Fox in 1675, but when the Admiral died in 1680, the thirty-six-year-old Penn came into possession of a debt of £16,000 that the crown owed to his father for services rendered. In 1681 Penn requested that Charles II grant him the last large unclaimed territory on the North American seaboard as payment for the debt. When Charles agreed and awarded him a province of more than 40,000 square miles, Penn became the largest private landowner in the whole of Great Britain.
The Bakery, (on the left), Saal (center), and Saron (right) buildings at the...
In Pennsylvania, as his new province was called, Penn was determined to create not just a refuge for Quakers, but a "Holy Experiment," where religious freedom would be the cornerstone of the new social order. Although Penn's royal charter had made him the governor as well as proprietor of his colony, rather than install himself as a feudal lord, he helped write and then agreed to a Frame of Government that allowed for freedom of conscience in religious matters and recognized the separation of church and state. To attract settlers to Pennsylvania, Penn traveled throughout the continent, promoting his colony to both Quakers and other religious groups suffering persecution for their beliefs. Many accepted Penn's invitation to come to the New World, and Pennsylvania quickly became a multinational and multi-religious colony unlike any other in North America. Rich with natural resources and economic opportunities, it attracted Quakers, as well as English Anglicans, French Huguenots, Scottish and Scots-Irish Presbyterians, Irish Catholics, and Jews. For most of the eighteenth century, Pennsylvania was one of the few places under British control where Catholics could legally worship.
Penn's promise of religious toleration was particularly welcomed by religious dissenters in the German Lutheran states, where a religious revival had been flourishing for at least a decade. Rebelling against the formalism of the established Protestant churches, pietists, as these religious dissenters came to be known, insisted upon a more spiritual and living faith, emphasizing simplicity, emotion, and the necessity of a new birth.
Bethlehem, PA, by Nicholas Garrison, 1784.
Eager to escape religious oppression, the first group of German Quakers and Mennonites immigrated to Pennsylvania in 1693 and settled Germantown, which became the base for early German settlement in the New World. They were soon followed by some 5,000 Lutherans, Dunkers, Mennonites, Schwenkfelders, Dutch Reformed, and other German pietist groups. Trusting in their personal experiences of God rather than established authorities, pietists organized into dozens of often contentious denominations, including religious separatists from the radical Protestant fringe. William Penn's Holy Experiment provided these groups an opportunity to live in holy communities that kept separate from the sinful world and remained quite independent from outside civil or religious authority. To purify themselves for the Second Coming of Christ and make themselves worthy of his grace, radical pietists drew the rules for their communities directly from the New Testament. Reading Acts 2 and 4, some decided to give up personal possessions "and hold all things in common," creating communistic commonwealths that rejected private property. From their reading Christ's Sermon on the Mount and the Gospels, German Mennonites, Quakers, Moravians, and the Swiss Amish became pacifists, and refused to swear oaths. Pietists' varying and often unconventional interpretations of the Bible thus gave rise to very different faiths.
The first religious communitarians to make the trip to Pennsylvania were a small group of German pietist hermits led by Johannes Kelpius who voyaged to Penn's colony to await the advent of Christ in the unspoiled wilderness of the New World. After Christ failed to arrive as expected in 1694, the celibate Brothers who belonged to a group known among the colonists as "The Woman in the Wilderness" lived ascetic lives in their Tabernacle on a ridge above the Wissahickon River, just north of Philadelphia.
Old Economy, Ambridge, PA, 2010.
The two largest groups of German religious communitarians to come to Pennsylvania were the Moravians and Harmonists. Fleeing persecution at home, Moravians established several closed theocratic communities in Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley in the early 1740s. Following their founder George Rapp to the woods of western Pennsylvania, the Harmonists in the early 1800s lived in a single celibate community of co-religionists whose success both economically and socially won it international acclaim. Voluntarily living in closed religious settlements with communal economic systems, both groups loved music, which they made an important part of their worship, as did Conrad Beissel, who organized a community at Ephrata in 1732, and embraced pacifism. The Moravians were the oldest of the Old World Protestant denominations, predating Martin Luther and the Reformation by more than a half century. George Rapp had begun preaching to his Wurttemburg neighbors fewer than twenty years before their immigration to Pennsylvania in 1804. The Moravians were avid missionaries, and used the wealth produced by their "General Economy" to fund missionary work among their German-speaking neighbors and Native Americans.
Believing that Christ would soon return to call them to his celestial kingdom, the Harmonists made no effort to win converts. Whereas the Moravians in fewer than twenty years abandoned their communal economic system, gave up residence in sex and age-segregated "choirs" to live in traditional family units, and eventually opened their settlements to outsiders and assimilated among their neighbors, the Harmonists held to their faith and communistic sharing of wealth throughout the nineteenth century.
WPA poster depicting and Amish family
On the eve of the American Revolution, nearly one hundred years after Penn first laid out plans for his "Holy Experiment," Pennsylvania had the greatest mix of peoples and religions in British North America. In Penn's time, the idea of a peaceful society based on religious pluralism had been a radical and untested proposition. But to the nation's Founding Fathers, it was an inalienable human right, one they enshrined in the first Amendment to the Constitution, which begins, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof..." Yet these very principles were not always easy for American patriots to accept, and some criticized, harassed, and persecuted religious dissenters during the American Revolution, whose pacifism and desire to remain aloof from political affairs ran counter to the spirit of the times. Efforts to restore the kingdom of Heaven on Earth and to form separate communities meant to serve as models for the nation - and the world - did not end with the enshrinement of the principle of religious freedom in the United States Constitution. The new Republic was plagued by a number of problems: racial inequality, slavery, disparity of wealth, social violence, greed, and myriad other social problems. So the search for communitarian solutions to these and other ills continued. Indeed, the American experiment in representative self-government made the United States the ideal site for new communitarian experiments that would be based on social contracts fashioned by reason as well as those based on religious faith. And Pennsylvania continued to attract both religious and secular communitarians who believed that small groups of people bonded together by shared beliefs could advance human progress in this world, or prepare the ground for a better world to be found beyond. In 2000, close to 10,000 Americans lived in more than 500 intentional communities nationwide; some based on religious beliefs, others built around other ideals and systems of belief. Today, Pennsylvanians of hundreds of different faiths live and work together peacefully, and the communitarian impulse survives in myriad forms: religious and secular, urban and rural, pacifist and apocalyptic.
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Czech Priest John Huss, burned at the stake in 1415.
After tying him to the stake, the Roman Catholic clerics in Prague gave the popular University Rector one last chance to recant his heresies against the church. "God is my witness," John Hus replied, "that I have never taught or preached that which false witnesses have testified against me.... In the truth of that gospel which hitherto I have written, taught, and preached, I now joyfully die." After the fire was lit Hus sang Kyrie Eleison until the smoke stifled his voice. When the flames had done their work, his ashes and even the soil on which they lay were thrown into the Rhine.
Zinzendorf als Lehrer der, by Johann Valentin Haidt, circa 1747.
For a decade before his martyrdom in 1415, John Hus (1373-1415) had been the Catholic rector of the University of Prague, one of the largest and most prestigious universities in central Europe. Criticizing the Roman Catholic Church for selling indulgences, Hus had begun to preach the "Gospel of Christ" in the Bohemian tongue rather than Latin, argued that all Christians had not just the right but the duty to read and study the Bible for themselves, and called for a return to the "heart religion" practiced by the primitive Christians. When Hus refused to admit to what he deemed false charges of heresy, the Roman Catholic clerics ordered him burned at the stake. But Hus's movement did not die.
In 1457, a large group gathered 200 miles east of Prague outside the castle of Lititz and organized themselves into the Unitas Fratrum, or United Brethren. Sixty years before Martin Luther launched the Protestant Reformation that would sweep Europe, these men and women began what would become the longest-lived of all Protestant churches. For the next 250 years the United Brethren suffered wave after wave of imprisonment, torture, exile, and suppression. Small bands survived, however, holding onto Hus's vision of "the faith that works"; that is, the practice of faith through the actions of one's daily life and especially Christian love, non-violence, and simplicity.
The Brethren emerged with renewed vigor in the 1720s when Moravian carpenter Christian David met Count Nicholas von Zinzendorf of Saxony, a rich, highly-educated, practical, and deeply religious aristocrat who as a child had been schooled in the teachings of the German pietists by the two noble women who had raised him. Zinzendorf granted David and other Moravian refugees land upon which they built a town they called Herrnut.
Map of the Moravian settlement of Bethlehem, PA, 1758.
Intent upon cultivating harmony among the more than 300 residents of Herrnut, Zinzendorf in 1727 provided a new order for their lives. Believing that men and women, old and young, had different spiritual needs, he divided them into sex and age-segregated "choirs," each one governed by their own elders. A College of Elders presided over the choirs and made all community decisions; above these elders stood Zinzendorf himself. The foundations of the new faith laid, and believing that it was their duty to bring their message of salvation to all, Zinzendorf sent Moravian missionaries to save souls in neighboring German states and in 1732, in the Dutch West Indies and Greenland.
Outraged at the reappearance of Moravians in Bohemia, the Lutheran Church, now the established church of the region, pressured the King of Saxony to banish Zinzendorf, and the United Brethren were once again on the move. Exiled from Saxony, Zinzendorf founded congregations in Holland, England, Ireland, and elsewhere in Germany. Other Moravians became part of the "Sea Congregations" that emigrated to the West Indies, South America, South Africa, and North America. Within a decade the Moravians had put in place the most ambitious mission program ever developed by the Protestant world.
Bethlehem, PA, by Nicholas Garrison, 1784.
In 1736, Moravians established their first North American colony along the banks of the Savannah River in Georgia. Caught in the war between their British hosts and Spain, the pacifist Brethren moved north to Pennsylvania where they bought 500 acres of land at the confluence of the Monocacy and Lehigh Rivers in northeast Pennsylvania. There on a cold Christmas eve under a sea of stars, the small band of colonists huddled in a single log cabin and held a Moravian "love feast" with the newly arrived Zinzendorf and his daughter. That night Zinzendorf named the new settlement Bethlehem.
Soon afterwards the Brethren purchased 5,000 acres ten miles to the northwest, founding the settlement they named Nazareth. Directed by the General Synod in Germany, the Moravians also founded settlements at Emmaus in the Lehigh Valley, Lititz in Lancaster County, Hope in northern New Jersey, and Dansbury near the New York border, which served as a base for missionary efforts among the Lenape people.
Moravian Gemein House, Bethlehem, PA, circa 1870.
Adopting the communal order under which they had lived at Herrnut, the Moravians at Bethlehem and Nazareth created closed theocratic communities that limited their interaction with outsiders. As they had at Herrnut, they lived in segregated choirs and soon built a separate
Brethren's House for single men,
Sisters' House for
women, and schools for both girls and boys. Organized in 1794,
Linden Hall in Lititz is the oldest girls' boarding school in the United States.
Missionary work remained an essential part of the Moravian order. To keep their focus on a spiritual life while producing the wealth necessary to support their missionary activities, the Moravians at Bethlehem in 1744 voluntarily entered into a "General Economy," whereby they pooled all of their work and resources. The General Economy soon spread to Nazareth, Lititz, and Wachovia, North Carolina - the seat of the Moravians' southern settlements - making it the largest communitarian enterprise in colonial North America. By 1761, Bethlehem had become a thriving community of more than 2,500 people, close to fifty businesses, and more than 2,000 acres of farmland and pasture.
For Moravians music was an essential aid to worship, so it was part of every religious service and celebration. Moravian choruses won renown for their beautiful harmonies, and Bethlehem became a musical center, its musicians introducing much of the great classical music of Europe to North America. The playing of hymns required the construction of church organs. Between the 1760s and his death in 1804, David Tannenberg built and supervised the installation of nearly fifty instruments of his own design in churches throughout the Commonwealth
For eighteen years, Nazareth and Bethlehem bore the full financial burden of the Brethren's missionary work in North America. Moravian missionaries worked tirelessly to carry the message of Christ to Europeans and Native Americans in eastern North America. Zinzendorf himself spent two years attempting unsuccessfully to create a grand "Congregation of God in the Spirit" among all the German settlers of Pennsylvania. During his sixty-year career, Moravian missionary David Zeisberger converted hundreds of Lenape and Iroquois.
A view of the Moravian town of Nazareth, PA, circa 1761.
Other colonists often viewed with concern and suspicion the close relations that Moravian missionaries were able to establish with Native American tribes that others feared. After Indian warriors attacked frontier settlements during the bloody French and Indian War of the mid 1700s, a group of vigilantes known as the Paxton Boys in 1763 massacred twenty Conestoga Indian men, women, and children, even though they were pacifist Christians. During the American Revolution, Moravian Indian converts again became victims of war when a band of vigilantes murdered and scalped another ninety-six of them.
Young Ladies' Seminary and Church, at Bethlehem, PA, by Gustavus Grunewald,...
In 1762 the General Synod in Germany ordered the Moravians in Pennsylvania to abandon the General Economy for more traditional family units. At first the change had little impact on the close-knit communities as Moravians continued to live, work, and worship in settlements that excluded outsiders. Gradually, however, many of the faithful moved away from their experiment in utopian Christian community.
As pacifists, Moravians could not bear arms or swear oaths of allegiance during either the French and Indian War or the American Revolution. Bethlehem did, however, serve as a military hospital during the Revolution, and some Moravian men, disobeying orders from the General Synod to shun involvement in political affairs, did supply material support and take up arms for the cause of Independence.
In 1818 the General Synod rejected the Pennsylvania Moravians' petition to bear arms during times of war, but did permit ending the practice of determining marriages by the casting of lots - yes, no, or blank - which Moravians had long practiced as a way to determine God's will.
Painting of a Moravian "single sister," Lehigh Valley, PA, circa 1840.
In accordance with their faith, Moravians emphasized individual conversion to the Gospel of Christ rather than doctrinal conformity. Zinzendorf had begun missionary work to extend the faith not of Moravians - for the Count believed that the Moravians would one day be absorbed by other churches - but of a more ecumenical Protestant Christianity. This, perhaps more than any other single factor, had restrained the growth of the Moravian Church in America. In the 1820s the General Synod at long last permitted American Moravians to establish new congregations and in 1844 abolished the settlement system that had banned outsiders from moving into Moravian towns. In 1855, American Moravians finally became self-governing when the American provincial synods gathered in Bethlehem and declared their independence from the General Synod. Deeply committed to their mission to bring Christ's love to non-believers, Moravians continued, in the words of one of their early members, to "fly to every region of America [and the world] as evangelists, as doves from a dove-cote." At the end of the twentieth century the Moravian Church had 39,000 members in the United States and between five hundred and seven hundred thousand worldwide, the largest numbers residing in Tanzania and South Africa.
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And the multitude of those that believed were of one heart and one soul; neither said any of them that any of the things which he possessed was his own; but they had all things common. Acts 4: 32-35
When William Penn in the 1680s opened his lands in North America as a haven for his fellow Quakers, he also offered it as a refuge to other Europeans who suffered persecution for their religious beliefs. Pennsylvania quickly became a multinational and multi-religious colony unlike any other in North America. Rich with natural resources and economic opportunities, it attracted English Anglicans, French Huguenots, Scottish and Scots-Irish Presbyterians, Irish Catholics, and Sephardic Jews.
Johannes Kelpius, by Christopher Witt, 1705.
For most of the eighteenth century, Pennsylvania was one of the few areas under British control where Catholics could legally worship. Penn's promise of religious toleration proved especially attractive to Protestant sectarians in Germany, more than 5,000 of whom left their homes to settle in Pennsylvania during the eighteenth century.
Among the religious refugees who immigrated to Pennsylvania were small groups of radical German-speaking Protestants who were determined to live apart from others. These religious communitarians believed that they constituted a separate and consecrated body that must live apart from the sinfulness of the world. Many wanted to recreate the simple lives and pure faith of the early Christians and to create autonomous states as independent as possible from outside civil or religious authority. The desire to distance themselves from the corruption of the world also had motivated the Pilgrims in their migration to Plymouth in 1620 and the great Puritan exodus to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1630s. The English separatists who settled in New England, however, were no friends of religious pluralism.
Bakery (on left), Saal (Meetinghouse) and Saron (Sisters’ House), Ephrata...
The 1730s witnessed the appearance in Pennsylvania of two pietist groups that would become deeply identified with Pennsylvania: the "Solitaries" and "Householders" of the Ephrata Cloister, a non-utopian sect, and the Amish. Founded in 1732 by Conrad Beissel, a German pietist who more than a decade before came to Pennsylvania to join Kelpius's monks, Ephrata won international renown as an economically self-sufficient and deeply spiritual community of celibate and married Christians. The Brothers and Sisters of Ephrata soon became well known among the German immigrants in Lancaster for their rigorous ascetic life, the services they provided the larger community, and their belief in the imminent return of Christ to the world.
Emphasizing spiritual rather than material goals, the Brothers and Sisters of the Ephrata Cloister made important contributions to colonial life and culture. They ran an important printing operation and produced exquisite, hand-illuminated books and documents in the style known as Fraktur. The choir performed its renowned hymnal music in a hauntingly beautiful style designed to move listeners and singers alike to a state of mystical exaltation. In the late 1700s, an "offspring" of Ephrata formed at the base of the South Mountains in Pennsylvania's Franklin County. Although it bore little physical resemblance to the Cloister of Ephrata, the Snow Hill community carried the spirit of Beissel's movement into the 1890s.
In 1736, a small group of Swiss Brethren known as the Amish, or followers of Jakob Ammann, established their first significant New World settlement at Northkill on the Berks County frontier. Insistent upon strict separation from the world and the expulsion and shunning of sinners, the Amish would thrive in Pennsylvania and, unlike the other German religious communitarians, maintain their separate communities to the present day.
The Amish, like the Quakers, Mennonites, Moravians, and Beissel's followers at Ephrata, were pacifists. Following Christ's self-sacrificial model and his Sermon on the Mount, their churches taught them to be willing to die, but not to kill for their beliefs. Maintaining their "non-association" with the local militias and their detachment from political affairs, however, proved problematic, especially during the French and Indian War and the American Revolution when their refusal to bear arms and attempts to remain politically neutral drew the anger of their neighbors and Pennsylvania's political and military leaders.
Joseph Smith, by Adrian Lamb, copy after unidentified artist, circa 1840.
During the American Revolution, the peace churches struggled to maintain their distance from the outside world, even as the events of the war intruded on their communities. After disastrous defeats at Brandywine Creek and Germantown, the American army carted wounded soldiers to Ephrata, Bethlehem, Nazareth, and Lititz, where they commandeered buildings and the pacifist pietists into service. Once free from Britain, Americans joined together in a nation that guaranteed a broad range of inalienable rights to its citizens, including the free practice of religion. But the new Republic was also plagued by race slavery, violence, greed, and other human imperfections. So the search for religious communitarian solutions to the problems of the human condition continued. Indeed, the American experiment in representative self-government made the United States the ideal site for new communitarian experiments that would be based on social contracts fashioned by reason as well as those based on religious faith.
In the early nineteenth century, tens of thousands of Americans were swept up in religious revivals so widespread they became known as the Second Great Awakening. From the "Burned Over District" of western New York to the canebrakes of Kentucky, Americans followed new prophets and embraced new faiths, including the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, whose founder Joseph Smith, first worked on his translation of the Book of Mormon while living on his father-in-law's farm near Great Bend, Pennsylvania. In the isolated valley that surrounded the Great Salt Lake, the Mormons created an independent, theocratic state with its own government and army.
Horace Greeley, 1869
In the 1830s and early 1840s, thousands embraced the vision of millennialist preacher William Miller, who prophesized the Second Coming of Christ would occur in March 1843. In 1850 former Millerite Peter Armstrong led a small group of followers to the Endless Mountains of Pennsylvania to found the community of Celestia. For more than thirty years Armstrong and his followers eagerly anticipated the return of their Savior. Like the Harmonists of western Pennsylvania, the residents of Celestia pooled their property and labor into a communistic economic system deeded to "Almighty God and to his heirs in Jesus Messiah" to better prepare themselves for Christ's imminent return.
Secular efforts to accelerate human progress in the world through communitarian principles also arose during the early 1800s. Among the most significant was that promoted by English industrialist Robert Owen, who in 1824 bought the Harmonists' abandoned community in Indiana and attempted to build a socialist utopia that would serve as a model for the world. Owen's "New Harmony" experiment quickly failed, but the dream lived on as social theorists and reformers on both sides of the Atlantic designed communitarian models for a more perfect human society.
Alfred Brisbane initiated another communitarian movement in the 1840s, when he introduced Americans to the ideas of French socialist Charles Fourier in his best-selling book, The Social Destiny of Man. In a wave of enthusiasm, American Fourierists launched more than forty rural "phalanxes" during that decade, modeled on Brisbane's Americanized version of Fourier's ideas. The first of these, financed by The Sylvania Society, took shape on thirty two thousand acres bordering the Delaware River in Pike County, Pennsylvania. Few American phalanxes lasted more than a year or two, but a handful, including Brooks Farm in Massachusetts, gripped the imaginations of people seeking peaceful and voluntary ways to perfect the human condition.
The rapid failure of these antebellum utopias did not end the search for communitarian solutions to human problems. An exploding population, rapid industrialization, and the rising cost of land did, however, make it harder to buy land for large settlements. In the 1870s German Hutterites set up communities on the northern Great Plains, and splinter groups of United Order Mormons formed communities that for a short time rejected private property. Small cooperative associations of spiritualists, perfectionists, brotherhoods, sanctified Sisters, and others appeared and disappeared across the United States.
The Divine Lorraine Hotel, Philadelphia, PA., 2008.
In the twentieth century American communitarians banded together in cities as well as the woods, and sought salvation in an increasing diversity of religious traditions. The twentieth century also witnessed the birth of a worldwide network of multiracial religious communities whose members followed the teachings of Indian gurus, Sufi mystics, and African-American prophets.
In the early 1930s, African-American evangelist Father Divine created an urban, multiracial, international religious community that sought to cultivate loving relations between the races, and encouraged its members to work hard, avoid debt, pay taxes, and resist Communism. During the Great Depression his Peace Mission Movement provided badly needed goods and services for people in need, regardless of their race. In the 1940s Father Divine relocated from New York to the Philadelphia suburb of Gladwyne. In Philadelphia, the Peace Mission opened the Divine Lorraine Hotel on North Broad Street, one of the first, high-quality integrated hotels in the City of Brotherly Love.
In the second half of the twentieth century, Pennsylvania continued to be home to a growing diversity of what increasingly were referred to as "intentional" communities. In the 1960s and early 1970s people embracing the values of the anti-consumerist American "counter-culture" banded together in communes in the Pocono Mountains and along the banks of the Delaware River. Followers of Indian yogi Amrit Desai moved to his Hindu Ashram at Sumneytown in Berks County, where many embraced celibacy and donated their labor, wages, and assets to the community.
Amish farmer, Lancaster, PA, circa 2000.
In Philadelphia, African-American followers of Vincent Leaphart, who adopted the name John Africa, lived communally in row houses, emphasizing physical work, healthy diet, and resistance to what they considered to be an unjust and corrupt social system, one that was especially oppressive to black Americans. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, members of Africa's MOVE organization clashed with local police; their homes became fortified compounds; and in 1983, after escalating confrontations with the authorities, Philadelphia police bombed MOVE homes, in the process burning sixty homes and killing all but two MOVE members in the homes at the time. Meanwhile, in Lancaster, Somerset, Union, and Mifflin counties, Amish farm families continue to live and work following the pacifist traditions and values of their forebears. Eschewing electricity and automobiles, they struggle to maintain their communities in a modern world where encroaching suburban development and rising land prices make it increasingly difficult to follow the centuries-old directive of being in the world, but not of it.
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Religious splits among Christians during the Protestant Reformation caused violent upheavals and devastating wars that remade the map of Europe. For centuries afterwards, the Roman Catholic and established Protestant churches feared religious separatists, that is, individuals who invoked the principle of personal faith and refused to respect established religious authorities, for they threatened the stability of both church and state. Yet since the time of John Hus's heretical views in the early fifteenth century, the German states had remained hotbeds of religious fervor and dissent.
George Rapp, founder of the Harmony Society.
In the late 1700s, a new separatist movement appeared in the town of Wurttemberg in southern Germany. There a young farmer and weaver by the name of Johann George Rapp stopped attending Lutheran services and began to preach to his neighbors. Called before the Church Council in April 1785, Rapp explained that he had found a better light - the fount and body of Christ - and had since found himself "weakened rather than strengthened" in the local church.
In the days that followed, Rapp and his followers baptized their children within their own fellowship and refused to send them to the local schools, refused to swear oaths, worked on the customary Sabbath, and insisted that God had forbidden them to attend Lutheran church services. Rapp declared that he no longer considered the local pastor a servant of God and that Lutheran ministers could no longer forgive sins.
Old Economy, Ambridge, PA, 2010.
Fines, imprisonment, and threats of exile had no effect on this renegade evangelist or his growing body of congregants. Ordered to be silent at a formal hearing in 1791, Rapp replied "I am a prophet and am called to be one!" Eight years later Rapp drew up articles of faith that included a refusal to train for military service because "those who possess the inner peace of God do not like to hurt creatures, and accordingly they may bear no weapons of war."
By 1803, Rapp had boldly declared himself the bishop of a separatist evangelical movement that was spreading through neighboring towns. Fearing the crackdown that was sure to follow, in that year Rapp sailed to Pennsylvania to find a new home for his flock, where they could prepare in peace for the Second Coming of Christ and "end of days" that Rapp believed was imminent. After an initial scouting trip, Rapp wrote back to Germany that he was sure "God has prepared a little place for us" in a land where "they want you to think and believe what you wish."
Economy, Rapp's Colony on the Ohio, watercolor on paper, by Johann Karl Bodmer,...
Responding to his call, more than 500 followers sold all their possessions and booked passage to the New World. On a sunny July morning in 1804, three hundred Lutheran separatists from Wurttemberg, Germany, disembarked at the port of Baltimore after a long, arduous journey. Soon joined by another 260 who had arrived at the port of Philadelphia, the immigrants made their way to western Pennsylvania, where they proceeded to clear the wilderness and build a "community of equality" where members held all goods and property in common. They called their new home Harmony.
Here they lived and worshipped for ten years while waiting for the Second Coming of Christ. Rapp held that Jesus taught and commanded a community of goods. In 1805 the Harmonists signed Articles of Association by which they granted all property to Rapp and his associates, who in turn agreed to provide them with "all the necessities of life." Two years later the faithful of Harmony embraced celibacy so that they might be better prepared for the end of days. They buried those who died in the Harmony Society Cemetery without headstones, or even mounds to distinguish graves, so that none could take precedence over another.
The Harmonist Church, Economy, PA, circa 1880.
Rapp also believed in hard work and self-sufficiency. The "Rappites" or "Harmonists" as they were called, cleared and planted productive fields, built grist and sawmills, and started a variety of economic enterprises. But Harmony's long distance - twelve miles - from navigable waters, and the inadequacy of the soil for vineyards left the Rappites dissatisfied. By 1814 Rapp had decided that the community should relocate to the banks of the Wabash River in the Indiana Territory. There they established a new village of Harmony, larger, more productive, and more prosperous than the first. Harmony quickly became an important business center, but the Rappites were dissatisfied with its isolation, and its swampy waters and stinging insects brought illness and death. In 1824 they sold the property to English industrialist Robert Owen and returned to Pennsylvania.
Swiss View of New Harmony, Indiana, by Johann karl Bodmer, 1832.
This time they settled in a beautiful valley on the Ohio River, with hills on either side to protect them from cold winter winds, and good transportation by stage and river to the outside world. Here, in a town they named
Economy, the Rappites constructed a religiously based, communal economic and social system that attracted international attention.
Oversight of the community was divided between Rapp, who attended to members' spiritual lives, and his adopted son, Frederick Reichart Rapp, who ran the Association's business and temporal affairs until his death in 1834, when he was succeeded first by Jacob Henrici and then by Jonathan Lenz. Agriculture always lay at the center of the Rappites' world, but to insure their self-sufficiency, the community embraced the latest labor-saving machinery for the manufacture of their clothing, food, drink -even the repair of watches and clocks.
Hired field workers cutting hay, Economy, PA, circa 1880.
Economy soon became a manufacturing center with its own woolen and cotton mills, a gristmill, sawmill, and distillery. They built a centralized steam laundry and dairy and developed an award-winning silk industry. By the 1850s their communal economic system had generated more than a million dollars in assets, which the Harmonists invested in coal mines, sawmills, oil wells, railroads, and factories. In the 1870s Rappite enterprises employed hundreds of workers in western Pennsylvania, including more than two hundred Chinese at their cutlery manufacturing factory at Beaver Falls.
The Rappites began to attract visitors in the early 1820s. Indeed, by that time their reputation was so widespread that George Gordon Lord Byron satirized them in his epic poem, Don Juan. In the decades that followed, visitors from around the world made the trip to Economy to understand the communitarian principles that had created such economic success and social harmony. For in the rough and tumble world of nineteenth-century America, the town of Economy appeared an oasis of peace, stability, and order. As the scholar Charles Nordhoff observed in the 1870s, "Neatness and a Sunday quiet are the prevailing characteristics in Economy."
Elderly Harmonist woman–“An Economite”– in German dress, Economy, PA,...
Upon approaching the community, visitors first noticed large, well-tended fields and orchards. Economy itself was a town of about 120 brick and frame houses that lined broad, tree-shaded streets with brick footpaths and clean public benches. The Rappites devoted great attention to gardening. Water from a reservoir in the surrounding hills flowed into troughs on each street, from which residents watered the gardens surrounding their homes and the grapevines growing between first and second floor windows. Visitors were also struck by the Rappites' German attire, the men dressed in short, light-blue jackets and tall, broad-brimmed hats; the women in plain dresses and Norman caps-all made from silk and fiber grown, reeled, spun, woven, and sewn together within the community.
Upon Frederick Rapp's death in 1834, "Father" Rapp also took over the temporal affairs of Economy and was widely regarded as a practical, good-natured, active, and deeply spiritual leader. Each Sunday, sitting at a table on a platform in the sturdy brick Harmony Society Church, he preached a gospel of humility, simplicity, industriousness, self-sacrifice, prayer, and self-examination. Rapp held onto his belief in Christ's Second Coming to the end. On his death bed the ninety-year-old patriarch was reported to have said, "If I did not know that the dear Lord meant I should present you all to him, I should think my last moments come."
Harmonists Barbara Bosch and Franz Gillman, Economy, PA, circa 1902.
After Rapp's death in 1847, Economy continued to prosper. Wealth, however, did not ensure the survival of the Harmonist community. As the original German settlers grew older, they failed to attract new members, and indeed, had little desire to do so since their chief aim was to prepare themselves for the return of Christ and their ascension to Heaven. When questioned about what would become of their town and financial holdings, they would reply, "The Lord will show us a way."
John Duss, circa 1900.
The aging Rappites did, however, employ outsiders as laborers and educated their children, some of whom they adopted within their community. And it was one of these children, John Duss, who oversaw the final dissolution of the Harmonists' holy community. By the early 1890s the seven remaining Harmonists were preparing for death and the community was losing money rapidly due to poor investments and debt on its industries. Duss bought the Society a few extra years by selling off property and liquidating assets, but then made questionable use of funds to finance his own musical career. In 1905, while Duss was away on tour, his wife Susie convinced the two remaining trustees to dissolve the Society, then placed all of its assets in her own name. When Pennsylvania state officials mounted a legal challenge to the Dusses' legally questionable grab of the now defunct community's assets, a nasty eleven-year court battle ensued.
When it was over, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court divided what remained of the Harmony Society estate between the Dusses and the Commonwealth, which used its share to purchase six acres of Economy and set up the Old Economy Memorial, an historic district of seventeen original Harmonist buildings now operated by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission.