How Perfect Holiness Became the Doctrinal Basis for Complex Marriage

Noyes did not treat perfect holiness as a private spiritual claim with no social consequence; he argued that once believers had left sin behind, the ordinary rules by which a sinful society regulated marriage and property no longer bound a community actually living in the perfected state, and complex marriage, developed several years after his 1834 Perfectionist declaration, is presented in the community's own writing as one direct application of that earlier doctrine rather than a separate innovation. Spencer Klaw's history notes that this move set Oneida apart from other nineteenth century Perfectionist and Holiness currents, several of which taught a similar doctrine of entire sanctification, the Wesleyan Holiness movement among them, without drawing anything resembling Noyes's conclusions about marriage, since most Perfectionist teachers held that a sinless life would express itself in stricter conventional morality rather than in its revision. The distinction mattered enough to Noyes's contemporaries that Oneida was frequently treated as a cautionary example within wider Perfectionist and Holiness circles, cited by more conventional revivalist preachers as proof that a doctrine of present sinlessness needed firm guardrails, precisely because one prominent exponent of it had used the same doctrine to justify an arrangement most American Christians of the period considered scandalous.