John Humphrey Noyes' Doctrine of Complex Marriage

John Humphrey Noyes founded the Oneida Community in upstate New York in 1848 on the doctrine he called complex marriage, which held that every man in the community was married to every woman and every woman to every man, so exclusive pair bonding, along with the private property in a spouse it implied, was abolished as a form of selfishness incompatible with the perfected Christian life the community believed itself already living. Bible Communism, the community's own compilation of its founding theological reports, presents complex marriage as the logical extension of holding all property in common: if believers had already given up private ownership of goods and land for the community's shared benefit, Noyes argued, consistency required giving up exclusive ownership of a spouse as well, since the New Testament nowhere specifically institutes monogamous marriage as a permanent Christian requirement. In practice, any adult member could request relations with any other consenting adult member through an intermediary system intended to prevent exclusive attachments, which the community's leadership actively discouraged and at times formally intervened to break up when a couple showed signs of preferring each other over the wider community, since special love for one partner was itself treated as a doctrinal failure.