The Minister’s War

Books on the Oneida Community always make for entertaining reading, and this one is no exception. Written for the educated layperson, The Minister’s War is a microhistory, a book that takes a small but compelling historical episode and uses it to comment on larger themes and trends. Here that episode is the moral crusade of nineteenth-century Presbyterian minister and college professor John Mears against the Christian communitarian Oneida Community, founded by John Humphrey Noyes in New York in 1848. Mears pursued multiple moral crusades, including temperance, prohibiting street cars on the Sabbath, and combating pollution. What he objected to at Oneida was not their holding all property in common, but their holding all persons in common. The Oneida Community called this system “complex marriage,” and it was. Based on their unique reading of the Bible, all the group’s men were married to all the group’s women and vice versa. Unsurprisingly, this belief led to sexual practices at variance with traditional Protestant orthodoxy.

Morality · Orthodoxy · Political science · Protestantism · Reading (process) · Sociology · Theology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Classics · History · Law · Mormonism, Religion, and History · Philosophy · Religious studies