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Heavens on Earth: Christian Utopias in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century America
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 January 2016
Extract
In the rich and complex history of American Christianity, utopias in one form or another have played a constant part. From the early puritan settlements onwards, North America has played a distinctive role in the Christian imagination — as a place of refuge, as a place for experimentation, as the founding-spot for new sects, churches, and denominations. Among the experimenters have been many groups of Christians in America who have, over more than two centuries, gathered themselves into communal organizations — what participants and commentators now call ‘intentional communities’. Their numbers have been almost impossible to measure accurately; one authoritative listing counts about six hundred communal groups with over fifteen hundred separate settlements in the USA before 1965, and there will have been thousands more communes formed since then. Membership figures are even harder to pin down, but it is certain that the numbers of people who have at one time or another lived in an American intentional community runs into the hundreds of thousands.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Studies in Church History , Volume 46: God’s Bounty? The Churches and the Natural World , 2010 , pp. 396 - 418
- Copyright
- Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2010
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