biography
| name: |
Noyes, John Humphrey
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| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1811–86)
|
| biography:
| Minister and social reformer, born in Brattleboro, Vermont, USA. A first cousin of President Rutherford B Hayes, he was inspired by revivalist preacher Charles Grandison Finney, and he abandoned law to study divinity, eventually at Yale. Founding a revivalist ‘free’ church there, he maintained that Christ's Second Coming had already occurred and that some beings could now live in ‘perfect’ holiness. Forced to leave Yale, and deprived of a licence to preach, he formed a community of Bible communists (1836) in Putney, VT to realize his message, which also included advocacy of spousal sharing. To escape prosecution for adultery, he fled to C New York and formed the Utopian Oneida Community (1848). He wrote extensively on social and economic experiments and advocated limiting the permission to procreate to an advanced elite. In 1879 he fled to Canada to avoid a charge of statutory rape. Oneida, the most successful of the American Utopian communities, was later reorganized as a business community. |
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