Bible Communism and Its Corporate Afterlife

John Humphrey Noyes founded the Oneida Community in New York in 1848 on a reading of Acts that he pushed further than most communal groups before him. Spencer Klaw's history and the community's own compiled tracts, published under the name Bible Communism, describe a system in which property, labor and even exclusive marriage were treated as a single fallen structure to be dissolved together, not two separate reforms. Noyes argued that private property and monogamous marriage were the same sin of exclusive possession applied to different objects, so a community that renounced one while keeping the other had not actually restored the New Testament church at all. The result was the most controversial version of Christian communalism in nineteenth century America, its complex marriage practice drawing far more outside hostility than its shared ownership of land and workshops did on its own. Legal and public pressure forced the community to abandon complex marriage in 1879, and two years later its members converted the communal property itself into a joint stock company, Oneida Community Limited, the silverware manufacturer that carried the group's name and capital forward long after its religious communism had ended.