Image Source: Efthymios Warlamis – CC BY-SA 3.0

The concept of “utopia” has essentially disappeared from the American vocabulary. Amidst all the 2024 electoral clamor and Donald Trump’s call to “Make America Great Again,” no candidate – including the “democratic socialist” Bernie Sanders — invoked the notion of utopia to suggest a better tomorrow. (Another democratic socialist, New York’s current mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, hints at it.) If recalled at all, utopia is remembered as a nostalgic expression of the hippie communes that flourished during the counterculture, free-love era of the 1960s and ‘70s.

During that tumultuous period, dozens of communes existed throughout the country. They included secular groups like the Sheep Ridge Ranch (aka Wheeler’s Ranch), Hog Farm, Total Loss Farm, Drop City, Black Bear Ranch, Trans-Love Energies, Morning Star Ranch, New Buffalo and Libre. They also included religious communes like the Brotherhood of the Spirit, Shiloh, Jesus People USA and Divine Light Mission.

Today, the last vestiges of earlier secular utopian movement hang on as isolated communes in rural and urban settings. Twin Oaks Community, founded in 1967 in Virginia, lives on with 100 members as does the Farm, founded in 1971 in southern Tennessee, with 150 members. In urban areas, Ganas (Staten Island, NY) and the Jesus People USA (Chicago, IL) survive. Don’t forget, religious communities like the Amish, Mennonites and Hutterites that have long persevered with their millennial beliefs.

For a half-century between 1820s and 1870s, a utopian movement involving an estimated 100,000 people flourished throughout the country. These radicals proclaimed in word and – most threatening – in deed a new era of possibility, one based on communitarian property relations, equal gender relations, free education, an appreciation of the land and unconventional sexual relations. The movement, whether embracing religious or secular values, challenged social norms and was assailed by religious leaders, politicians and the press. It marked one of the first of America’s long history of “culture wars.”

Chris Jennings, in Paradise Now: The Story of American Utopianism (2016), provides great insight into this remarkable episode of American history. He focuses on five of the nearly three-dozen utopian communities that flourished during the mid-19th century — the Shakers, New Harmony, Phalanxes, Icaria and Oneida. His profiles invoke a very different — almost unimaginable — period of American life than we live today.

The utopian movement grew out of what was known as the Second Awakening or the Great Revival, an early-19th century religiously inspired millennial movement that sought to replace austere Calvinist dogma with evangelical spiritual renewal. It began in upstate New York in what was known as the “burned over” district — named for its religious fever — and spread rapidly throughout the westward-expanding country, especially into rural America. It spawned the Mormons (followers of Joseph Smith), the Millerites (followers of William Miller), the Seventh-day Adventists (followers of Ellen White) and the Jehovah’s Witnesses (followers of Charles Tae Russell) as well as the Shaker and Oneida communities. The spirit of renewal contributed not only to the utopian movement, but the temperance movement of the 1820s, the abolitionist........

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