A Celibate Vow That Emptied the Society by 1905

George Rapp's Harmony Society, a German Pietist communal sect that held all property in common, built New Harmony on the Wabash River beginning in 1814 to await what its members believed was an imminent Second Coming. Two years into the settlement the Society formally adopted celibacy, a commitment members had begun observing informally even earlier, and that decision quietly determined the community's long term fate more than anything Rapp preached about the millennium. Rapp sold New Harmony to the Welsh industrialist Robert Owen in 1825 and led the Society back to Pennsylvania, where they built Economy, but a celibate religious community has no next generation of its own, and by the early twentieth century Economy's membership had dwindled to a handful of aging believers. The Harmony Society formally dissolved in 1905, on the exact hundredth anniversary of its founding, its remaining assets distributed among its last members rather than any religious body inheriting them.

New Harmony itself changed character entirely once Owen took it over, becoming a secular utopian social experiment rather than a religious one, so the same small Indiana town hosted two of the country's most ambitious communal projects within a single decade under two completely different founding logics. Richmond's Quaker community, centered on Earlham College, and a large 1920s Ku Klux Klan revival drawing on Protestant nativist rhetoric round out a state where Evangelical Protestant identification runs to thirty two percent of adults per Pew's 2023-24 study.