Oneida community

The Oneida Community was a utopian commune founded by John Humphrey Noyes in 1848 in the town of Oneida in Madison County, New York. Noyes, born in Vermont in 1811, attended Dartmouth College, Andover Theological Seminary, and Yale Theological College and received his license to preach in 1834. He formed his first utopian community in 1836 in Putney, Vermont, practicing "complex marriage" in which every male was considered married to every female. In 1847 pending arrests for adultery spurred Noyes and several other Putney members to move to Oneida, New York, where they established the Oneida Community.

The Oneida community practiced communal property and possessions and believed in a form of Perfectionism -- Christ's Second Coming had occurred in the year 70 CE thus making it possible for them to bring about Christ's millennial kingdom and be free of sin and perfect in this world. (Noyes' declaration in 1834 that he himself was "Perfected" had resulted in the revocation of his license to preach.) To help members overcome character defects, all members -- including Noyes himself -- were subject to formal constructive criticism by committee, or by the community as a whole, a practice known as "mutual criticism."

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