The controversial founder of a utopian religious community in Oneida, New York, John Humphrey Noyes (1811–1886) was most notorious for his radical teachings on sex and marriage. But his community also embodied a new sense of religious optimism that spurred a revival of American Christianity in the nineteenth century.
Born in Brattleboro, Vermont, where his father was a state legislator, Noyes attended Dartmouth College. After graduating, he briefly practiced law in New Hampshire, but decided to enter divinity school after hearing an inspiring sermon by the preacher Charles Grandison Finney (1792–1875).
At Yale Divinity School, Noyes immersed himself in the Bible and found himself drawn to one particular passage in the Gospel of John. Based on the passage, Noyes concluded that the second coming of Christ had already occurred in AD 70, meaning that the millennium—the period of human perfection that would follow Christ’s return, according to the Bible—must have already begun.
Noyes’s assertion countered mainstream Christian belief, and Noyes was expelled from Yale for heresy in 1834. However, his doctrine of “perfectionism” found an audience in New York and New England. He formed his first “holy community” of followers in Putney, Vermont, in 1840 and moved the group to Oneida in 1848.
Because Noyes believed that humans were perfect and free from sin, he renounced traditional sexual norms and declared that there was no “reason why sexual intercourse should be restrained by law.” Noyes led by example, exchanging his wife, Harriet, with another member of the community in 1847, and was arrested for adultery.
Although Oneida became best known for “group marriage,” the community was also a thriving and self-sustaining economic enterprise that produced suitcases, thread, and the famous Oneida silverware. Members were expected to share in the work and the rewards, creating one of the few successful utopian communities in nineteenth-century America.
Noyes fled to Canada in 1879 to avoid a charge of statutory rape, and he died in Ontario at age seventy-four. The Oneida community formally dissolved in 1881 but was resurrected as the Oneida silverware corporation, which remains in existence.
ADDITIONAL FACTS
- One of Noyes’s cousins was Rutherford B. Hayes (1822–1893), the nineteenth president of the United States.
- Under the rules instituted by Noyes, men at the Oneida community were solely responsible for contraception. They were expected to practice “continence,” or self-control, to avoid pregnancies.
- Most of the members of the Oneida community adhered to a strict vegetarian diet and were forbidden from drinking alcohol and smoking tobacco.
