Perhaps the most successful—and notorious—experimental community was John Humphrey Noyes’s Oneida. A lawyer who was converted in one of Charles G. Finney’s revivals, Noyes believed that the millennium would occur only when people strove to become perfect through an “immediate and total cessation from sin.” In Putney, Vermont, in 1835 and in Oneida, New York, in 1848, Noyes established perfectionist communities that practiced communal ownership of property and “complex marriage,” in which each member of the community was married to every...