The Ministers' War

The Oneida Community continues to captivate scholars and laypersons alike. Those interested in the longue durée of John Humphrey Noyes's 1848 experiment with Bible communism should consult Ellen Wayland-Smith's excellent book Oneida: From Free Love Utopia to the Well-Set Table (2016), which follows the story into the present. In The Ministers' War Michael Doyle explores the initial communal phase (stretching from the early 1840s to the late 1870s) from an illuminating new vantage—namely, that of Oneida's most dogged detractor, the Presbyterian minister John W. Mears. Mears is a fascinating character. Charles Finney's preaching left a deep impression on Mears's father, and the younger Mears exemplified the Second Great Awakening's moral perfectionism to the end of his days. He was also preternaturally serious. Doyle relates that “by the time he was twelve, while his peers were out horsing around, young John Mears was committing to memory the 107 questions and answers of the Westminster Shorter Catechism” (p. 13). Over the course of his career, Mears, who went on to become a professor at Hamilton College—just over ten miles from the Oneida Community's Mansion House—wrote a variety of books on subjects ranging from life in Madagascar to early-modern Bohemia. His interests in public morality were no less diverse. Mears was anti-Mormon, pro-temperance, and more. In many cases his crusades had a quixotic quality: he received scant votes in multiple runs for office on the Prohibition party ticket. But his campaign against the Oneida Community, with sexual practices he considered “too dangerous even to be imagined,” would eventually succeed (p. 157

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