Theology Today - Vol 41, No. 4 - January 1985 - BOOK REVIEW - Religion and Sexuality: The Shakers, the Mormons, and the Oneida Community

476 - Religion and Sexuality: The Shakers, the Mormons, and the Oneida Community

Religion and Sexuality:
The Shakers, the Mormons, and the Oneida Community
By Lawrence Foster
University of Illinois Press, 1984. 363 pp. $9.95.

What do polygamy, group marriage, and celibacy all have in common? Lawrence Foster, in this book, believes that each of these seemingly radical alternatives was practiced as a communitarian approach to a perceived breakdown in pre-Civil War American society.

Rumblings about the "breakdown of the American family" are not unique to our age, nor are solutions to shore up this institution. But in contrast to our age, with its "'focus on the (nuclear) family," the pre-Civil War period witnessed the rise of several very different solutions. The Oneida community experimented with "complex marriage" in which the whole group lived as though jointly married. The Mormons promoted their religiously-based ideal of polygamy until this practice was outlawed by the state. And the Shakers prospered with and attracted many to their lifestyle of communitarian celibacy.

But as radical as these ideas seem in relation to the current stress on traditional family roles promoted today in certain sectors of our society, they were actually, Foster maintains, very conservative reactions to a perceived breakdown of society. Society was in such peril, the charismatic leaders of these groups believed, that only divine intervention and a very unique plan could salvage anything. And yet in this process of salvage, or reconstruction, the three groups never really departed from certain basic Victorian ideals, for example, that of sexual self-control. But to the Victorian observer, these groups appeared radical indeed, for these common ideals were expressed in very different ways.

It is Foster's goal to determine why such large numbers of people were willing to depart from their traditional upbringing and join groups which essentially revolutionized the most basic part of their lives, their sexuality. By asking this question, and by treating these groups seriously and with compassion, he departs from previous scholarship, which, he says, "caricatured" or "patronized" these communities.

Perhaps we had to wait for the current age, with its own proliferation of communitarian experiments and new religions, to appreciate better the motives and satisfactions that contributed to the success of these past religious ventures. Foster deliberately approaches his task as one who lives in a similarly unsettled age and who asks many of the same questions, having derived his concern from an exposure to the countercultural movements of the late 1960s.

Associate Professor of American History at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Foster uses both the descriptive and the comparative methods. The first and last chapters compare the millennial impulses, the creation of alternative family systems, the roles of women, and the

478 - Religion and Sexuality: The Shakers, the Mormons, and the Oneida Community

causes of decline in the three communities. But the middle four chapters (with two devoted to the Mormons, who, Foster says, warrant extensive treatment due to their complexity and longevity) describe the historical beginnings, daily life, ideology, and distinctive features of each group individually.

Each group had a charismatic founder, an Anglo-American ethnic base, a geographic and chronological overlap, a millennial faith, and a similar attitude toward the world. But each took a different approach toward resolving the social crisis which prompted their action. Although each of the three ultimately gathered together in community, their structuring of sex-roles and econonomic activity, as well as their religious ideas, differed greatly.

For instance, although the Shakers did little to change the traditional sex-based division of labor, they had a most egalitarian authority structure and conception of God. In the Oneida community, on the other hand, ultimate authority resided solely in the founder, John Humphrey Noyes, who believed in a dual Father-Son God and the innate superiority of males, but the community's economic life was fairly free of sex-role stereotypes.

The Mormons actually conformed -to the Victorian understanding of sex roles more closely than the other two groups. Even their experiment with polygamy confirmed the cultural stress on male dominance, and any female factor in the divine got there only through marriage. Economically, however, women had great latitude. Foster determines from this that economic life in these groups conformed more to expediency than to ideology, but that religious authority, family practices, and community beliefs were more closely linked.

These and other thoughtful conclusions make Foster's book valuable reading for those concerned with the interplay between religious ideas, social structure, and sex-roles. Written in a relatively non-technical way, though with ample references to satisfy the scholar, this book would be useful in American history, sociology, and women's studies classes. But it will also intrigue anyone who contemplates our own struggles over the nature of religion and sexuality.

Linda A. Mercadante
Princeton Theological Seminary
Princeton, New Jersey