Abstract
In the proverbial Puritan mind’s eye, two visions were frequently at play: the ‘godly community’ in the present and the ‘millennial world’ of the future. By ‘godly community’ early separatist Pilgrims to Massachusetts meant not only a purified ecclesia — a fully-reformed Church of Christ — but also an authentic polity of God’s elect in the wilderness, freed from the clutches of ‘ungodly’ Europe. Among more moderate Calvinist clergy, gentry and artisans, in Britain and later New England, a broader commonwealth and Reformed Church on an inclusive parish model retained the concept of the covenanting community and, in places, the restriction of political rights to male church members. These duly bound ideas of godliness with citizenship and obedience to divine commands with social reciprocity.
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Notes
J. K. Jue, ‘Puritan Millenarianism in Old and New England’, in J. Coffey and P. C. Lim (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism (Cambridge, 2008), pp. 259–76.
C. Gribben, Evangelical Millennialism in the Trans-Atlantic World, 1500–2000 (Basingstoke, 2011), pp. 20–50.
The first Plymouth Colony was originally founded as a ‘partnership’ with a ‘common course and condition’. Contemporary sermons indicate the New Testament precedent of the Apostle Paul’s teachings on charity and shared sacrifice were more influential than conditions described in Acts; D. S. Lovejoy, ‘Plain Englishmen at Plymouth’, New England Quarterly 63 (1990), pp. 232–48.
For a notable revisionist view of Puritan discipline and asceticism, see Theodore Dwight Bozeman, The Precisionist Strain: Disciplinary Religion and Antinomian Backlash in Puritanism to 1638 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004).
T. J. Saxby, The Quest for the New Jerusalem: Jean de Labadie and the Labadists, 1610–1744 (Dordrecht, 1987). An earlier group of Dutch Mennonites, led by a Socinian, Pieter Cornelius Plockhoy, formed a short-lived community in the Valley of the Swans up the Delaware River in 1663. This community is often cited as America’s first ‘utopian community’. However, its brief existence (it was destroyed by the British navy in 1664) makes it difficult to relate to any broader historical trend.
D. F. Durnbaugh, ‘Communitarian Societies in Colonial America’, in D. E. Pitzer (ed.), America’s Communal Utopias (Chapel Hill, NC, 1997), pp. 15–17.
L. and M. Harder, Plockhoy from Zurik-zee: The Study of a Dutch Reformer in Puritan England and Colonial America (Newton, KS, 1952).
G. L. Gollin, Moravians in Two Worlds (New York, 1967).
B. P. Smaby, The Transformation of Moravian Bethlehem: From Communal Mission to Family Economy (Philadelphia, 1988).
Clarke Garrett, Origins of the Shakers: From the Old World to the New World (Baltimore, 1987 and 1998).
Examples include Pitzer (ed.), America’s Communal Utopias; R. S. Fogarty, Dictionary of American Communal and Utopian History (Westport, CT, 1980).
R. P. Sutton, Communal Utopias and the American Experience, 1732–2000 (Westport, CT, 2003).
The Pietist origins of the Neu-Täufer and their distinction from Anabaptists were debated during the 1960s in response to new studies of the Mennonite tradition which recognised their opposition to Pietism. For a useful summary of this debate, see J. Bach, Voices of the Turtledove: The Sacred World of Ephrata (University Park, PA, 2003), pp. 28–9.
In addition to Bach’s now standard study, Voices of the Turtledove, see K. Rexroth, Communalism: From Its Origins to the Twentieth Century (New York, 1974), pp. 177–8.
S. J. Stein, The Shaker Experience in America (New Haven, CT, 1992), pp. 87–90.
P.J. Brewer, ‘The Shakers of Mother Ann Lee’, in Pitzer (ed.), America’s Communal Utopias, p. 39; R. R. Ruether, ‘Shakers and Feminist Abolitionists in Nineteenth-century North America’, in Women and Redemption: A Theological History, second edition (Minneapolis, 2012), pp. 121–45.
Clarke Garrett has made an engaging case for the Shakers’ place within a diffuse culture accepting ‘spirit possession’ as a means of divine knowledge, located alongside the apocalyptic ‘French Prophets’, radical Quakers, Pietists and others within the religious tumult of the eighteenth century. Garrett, Origins of the Shakers, pp. 141–7. See also Richard Francis, Ann the Word (London, 2000), pp. 53–71.
Valentine Rathbun, An Account of the Matter, Form and Manner of a New and Strange Religion, Taught and Propagated by a Number of Europeans, Living in a Place Called Nisqueunia, in the State of New-York (Providence, RI, 1781); Stein, Shaker Experience, pp. 10–14.
Brewer, ‘The Shakers of Mother Ann Lee’, p. 39. It is common to link Ann Lee’s tragic experience of losing all her children young and the subsequent Shaker obsession with avoiding sex; see Lawrence Foster, Religion and Sexuality (Oxford, 1981), pp. 21–71.
T. S. Kidd, The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America (New Haven, CT, 2007), pp. 313–19.
On American millennialism in the revolutionary era, see R. Bloch, Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought, 1756–1800 (Cambridge, 1985).
J. W. Davidson, The Logic of Millennial Thought: Eighteenth-century New England (New Haven, CT, 1977).
S. A. Marini, Radical Sects of Revolutionary New England (Cambridge, MA, 1982), pp. 47–8.
W. Plumer, ‘The Original Shaker Communities in New England’, in F.B. Sanborn (ed.), New England Magazine 22 (Boston, 1900), p. 307.
Significantly for questions over Shaker origins, this is an appropriation of an historic Quaker term; L. L. Wilson, Essays on the Quaker Vision of Gospel Order (Philadelphia, 2002).
Stephen Bowe and Peter Richmond, Selling Shaker: The Commodification of Shaker Design in the Twentieth Century (Liverpool, 2007).
Karl J. R. Arndt’s studies of the Harmony Society remain unequalled; see especially K. J. R. Arndt, George Rapp’s Harmony Society 1785–1847 (Philadelphia, 1965).
For the Pietist context of the Society’s emergence, see K. J. R. Arndt (ed.), George Rapp’s Separatists, 1700–1803 — the German Prelude to Rapp’s American Harmony Society: A Documentary History (Worcester, MA, 1980).
On the longer history of Harmony, Indiana, see A. Taylor, Visions of Harmony: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Millenarianism (Oxford, 1987), pp. 34–5.
A. Hessayon, An Introduction to Jacob Boehme: Four Centuries of Thought and Reception (New York, 2014).
A. Weeks, Böhme: An Intellectual Biography of the Seventeenth-Century Philosopher and Mystic (Albany, NY, 1991), pp. 114–21.
See also A. Hessayon (ed.), Jane Lead and Her Transnational Legacy (Basingstoke, 2015).
The best English-language introduction to Arnold is P. C. Erb, ‘Gottfried Arnold (1666–1714)’, in C. Lindberg (ed.), The Pietist Theologians (Oxford, 2005), pp. 175–89.
Alternatively, see J. Buchsel, Gottfried Arnold, Sein Verstaendnis von Kirche und Wiedergeburt (Witten, 1970).
Bach, Voices of the Turtledove, pp. 27–8; Buchsel, Gottfried Arnold, pp. 31–9. Some ascetic practices were influenced by Gottfried Arnold’s portrayal of the early church. See P. C. Erb, Pietists, Protestants, and Mysticism: The Use of late Medieval Spiritual Texts in the Work of Gottfried Arnold (1666–1714) (Metuchen, NJ, 1989), pp. 124–8.
The earliest public explication of this dispensational schema appears to have been [Joseph Meacham], A Concise Statement of the Principles of the Only True Church (Bennington, VT, 1790), pp. 3–15.
J.F. Sachse, The German Sectarians of Pennsylvania 1708–1742: A Critical and Legendary History of the Ephrata Cloister and the Dunkers (Philadelphia, 1899), i. 375–6.
Sachse, German Sectarians of Pennsylvania, i. 375; B. Jabez, A Tale of the Kloster: A Romance of the German Mystics at the Cocalico (Philadelphia, 1904), p. 115.
Stein, Shaker Experience, p. 48; P. J. Brewer, Shaker Communities, Shaker Lives (Hanover NH, 1986), pp. 16, 21, 52–3.
Benjamin West, Scriptural Cautions against Embracing a Religious Scheme, Taught by a Number of Europeans, Who Came from England to America in the Year 1776, and Stile Themselves the Church (Hartford, CT, 1783), pp. 3–8, 10–13.
Anon. ‘A Short Account of the People known by the Name of Shakers, or Shaking Quakers’, Theological Magazine I (1795), pp. 81–7; Stein, Shaker Experience, p. 67.
For a relevant study of anti-Catholicism in this period, see J. K. Duncan, Citizens or Papists? The Politics of Anti-Catholicism in New York, 1685–1821 (New York, 2005).
Ralph Waldo Emerson to Charles Chancy Emerson, 1 January 1828, in Ralph L. Rusk (ed.), The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York, 1936), i. 224–6.
An abridged version of ‘Narrative of Four Months residence among the Shakers at Watervliet’ is reproduced in G. R. Wergland, Visiting the Shakers, 1778–1849 (Clinton, NY, 2007), pp. 79–96 (p. 81). For a later comparison of Shaker and Roman Catholic confession, see Marie Thérèse de Solms Blanc, ‘Le Communisme en Amérique: Le Communisme dan la Réalite’, in The Shakers through French Eyes, trans E. R. McKinstry (Clinton, NY, 2011), pp. 160, 164.
K. J. R. Arndt (ed.), A Documentary History of the Indiana Decade of the Harmony Society, 1814–1824. Volume II 1820–24 (Indianapolis, IN, 1978), p. 526.
M. Birkbeck, Notes on a Journey in America, from the Coast of Virginia to the Territory of Illinois (London, 1818), pp. 135–7.
W. Faux, Memorable Days in America (London, 1823), quoted in Arndt, George Rapp’s Harmony Society, p. 276.
Thomas Hulme, ‘A Journal of a Tour in the Western Countries of America — September 30, 1919-August 8, 1819’, in W. Cobbett, A Year’s Residence in the United States of America, 3rd edn (Andover, 1828), p. 290.
William Hebert, A Visit to the Colony of Harmony in Indiana (London, 1825), pp. 3–4.
M.A. Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (Oxford, 2002), pp. 31–50.
Hartmut Lehmann, ‘Pietism in the World of Transatlantic Religious Revivals’, in Jonathan Strom et al (eds), Pietism in Germany and North America, 1680–1820 (Farnham, 2009), pp. 13–22.
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Lockley, P. (2015). ‘With the Papists They Have Much in Common’: Trans-Atlantic Protestant Communalism and Catholicism, 1700–1850. In: Gribben, C., Spurlock, R.S. (eds) Puritans and Catholics in the Trans-Atlantic World 1600–1800. Christianities in the Trans-Atlantic World, 1500–1800. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137368980_12
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