Bible Communism: A Compilation from the Annual Reports and Other Publications of the Oneida Association

By the early 1850s the Oneida Community had already spent several years as the subject of outside rumor and suspicion. John Humphrey Noyes had founded the community in Oneida, New York in 1848, having moved his followers there after an earlier attempt in Putney, Vermont drew hostile local attention and, eventually, a threatened prosecution. The community's central and most controversial practice, what Noyes called complex marriage, in which every adult man and woman was considered married to every other rather than paired off exclusively, was exactly the kind of arrangement neighbors and newspapers were inclined to describe in the worst possible light without ever hearing the community explain it in its own words.

Bible Communism, compiled in 1853 from the community's own annual reports and other internal publications, was Oneida's answer to that gap. Rather than waiting to be misquoted, the community assembled its own account of what it practiced and why, aimed squarely at an outside reader who had already heard something alarming and deserved, in the community's own view, to hear the theological reasoning before judging it.

That defensive purpose shapes the document's tone throughout. It reads less like private doctrine written for insiders and more like testimony prepared for an audience the author expects to be skeptical, which is exactly what makes it valuable as a primary source: it is the community explaining itself on the record, in its own voice, at the moment the explanation was most urgently needed.

Bible Communism does not treat complex marriage and community of goods as separate customs the community happened to adopt. It presents both as consequences of a single theological claim: that perfect holiness, freedom from sin, was attainable in this life rather than something deferred to an afterlife most other Christian traditions of the period held it could not be reached before death.

Noyes drew his scriptural warrant chiefly from the book of Acts, which describes the earliest Christian community holding property in common, and read that early practice as a pattern meant to be restored rather than a historical curiosity. If believers could actually achieve the sinless state scripture promised, Noyes reasoned, then exclusive marriage and private property, arrangements he considered rooted in selfish possessiveness, no longer had a theological basis and could be replaced by arrangements grounded in shared ownership of both goods and intimate relationships.

That argument is why Bible Communism reads as theology rather than social experimentation for its own sake. The community was not proposing an alternative lifestyle detached from doctrine. It was arguing, in careful and deliberately biblical language, that its practices followed logically from a belief about human perfectibility that the community held with complete conviction, whatever outsiders made of the conclusions that belief led them to.