Henry Imler May 11th, 2007

Without Sin is an attempt by the late Spencer Klaw to chart the development and downfall of the Oneida community in northern New York. The book, published in 1993 succeeds in several respects. The book follows the life and times of John Noyes, charting out his spiritual journey and that of the communities he founded. Klaw drew off of many sources for his book. In the afterword, he discusses the sources he used. He focused primarily on the primary sources that the Oneida community left behind. However, he also considered resent scholarship on the community. Written for a more popular level and containing no footnotes, the work by Columbia University’s professor of journalism, engages its readers and challenges them to figure out what was going on in Oneida without resorting to sensationalism.

The book opens with the self-imposed exile of John Noyes, the creator and sustainer of the Oneida community that was originally based in Putney, NY. The book then jumps into his early years leaving the reader with the question, “Why?” This dangling question keeps the reader’s interest no matter how monotonous some of the descriptions of life at the commune are for the reader. It was at Yale that he developed his brand of Christian Perfectionism, that true Christians could live without sin. This is not to say that he was free from mistakes or doing God wrong, but that a true Christian could live without ever having the intent to sin ever again. People that did not subscribe to this were considered false or half-way Christians. He was asked to leave for his views. His teaching capitalized not only on the religious fervor of the 1830’s, but also on the annoyance people in the “burned over district” had with the standard revivalist preaching methods. He was able to gather a small group of followers that opened a commune that lived what Noyes was to call “Biblical Communism.” This communism, which worked off of notions that Noyes had of the Primitive Church, held that since the end was near the members should hold everything in common. All selfishness and egoism was to be eradicated. This included bonds with other people, husband and wife, daughter and son. They were to share them as common property as well. In this regard, Oneida was similar to many other communes that sprung up at the same time, but unlike the others, it lasted for a third of a century. The book’s primary strength lies in how it answers the question of why Oneida lasted as long as it did.

Klaw attributes the relative longevity of the community to a particular innovation by Noyes, that of sexual supervision. For Klaw, this is the key to understanding why the community lasted for thirty years when the average lifespan for a commune was vastly shorter than that. In controlling the sexual behavior of the members, Noyes was able to keep the community unified. Because of his ability to introduce the young girls to sexuality, he forged a bond with them and they looked to him as a mentor. This allowed him to influence the sexual mates that the sough-after members of the commune consented to having sex with. Because of the interviewing system and veto power of Noyes in matters of sexual partners, no one wanted to run afoul of him and sexual jealousies were headed off. Later on, when his libido waned, Noyes was unable to foster such a connection over the young women of the commune. As such, they no longer sought his advice, not did it hold sway, over their consent in sexual matters. This lead to greater courage for members had conflicts with Noyes. This degradation of influence coupled with a sense that Noyes seemed no longer concerned with input from other members and renewed pressure from the outside world lead to his exile from the community.

Klaw was able to write an objective account of the Oneida community avoiding the temptation to paint the community in only in hues of scandal, as other popular writers have been guilty of, most notably Jon Krakauer’s book on Mormon fundamentalism. Klaw not only focuses on Noyes, but also on the day-to-day lives of Oneida’s members. He takes their religious views seriously – but not to the point of being naiveté about some of the communities appeal. The book is an attempt to get inside the head of both Noyes and his community and to explain why things developed the way that they did. It would have been quite easy to paint the Oneida community as Noyes own personal sexual playground where his whim was law. In examining how Noyes viewed and practiced sex before and after the Oneida experiment in terms of his stated beliefs, this notion is dispelled. Noyes and his followers really bought into the belief that while there was no marriage in heaven, that does not mean there was no sex, and as members of true Christians reestablishing the Primitive Church, the same should be true for them. In addition to exploring their religious beliefs, Klaw sidetracks into discussions about how they viewed women, coming to the conclusion that while they still scribed to the superiority of males over females, females enjoyed greater freedoms there than anywhere else.

The book does not discuss in depth the material aspects of their culture, nor go into much detail about the theoretical influences on Noyes commune structure, such as Plato’s Republic. Klaw briefly looks at both in the work, but he intended it to be primarily a study of how and why these people lived they way that they did. What Klaw accomplishes is a fascinating look at community that usually exists only as a side note in history text books. He gives a much needed nuanced look at how these people came to be and disappear.

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