The Conversion of John Humphrey Noyes

Early on I realized that if I wanted to understand the Oneida Community I had to learn what I could about its visionary leader, John Humphrey Noyes. Older community descendants that I met generally had a favorable impression of him. I assumed their impressions were mostly influenced by their parents, but their parents' generation, if they had known him, had known him only as young children. Some of their grandparents knew Noyes quite well, but the details of that knowledge seemed to me not to have been well preserved.

At the top of the main staircase in the Mansion House hang two portraits in oils: JHN and Harriet Holton, whom he married in 1838, ten years before the Oneida Community was founded. They stare out impassively, formally, not revealing much of themselves.

How then can anyone today understand the character of John Humphrey Noyes? He left an extensive record of his religious beliefs: books, articles, tracts, and pamphlets. He frequently gave lectures and “Home Talks.” As I read through this immense record I kept expecting to encounter something that would clearly reveal his motives or his personality. Noyes wrote about his beliefs in great detail, but he was not often self-reflective. Accordingly, much of what I know of him is conjecture based on his writing and the writings of those who knew him. Today's post focuses on how he came to adopt the core beliefs that ultimately led to the founding of the Oneida Community.

John Humphrey Noyes was born September 3, 1811 in Brattleboro, Vermont. His was a fairly well-to-do family. His father, also named John, owned a general store in Brattleboro called Noyes & Mann and served a term in the US House of Representatives. He was a cousin of Rutherford B. Hayes who would later become President. His mother, Polly Hayes, was sixteen years younger than his father. By all accounts she was a deeply religious woman. She claimed to have prayed before John Humphrey's birth that someday he might become a minister.

Young John H. Noyes apparently did not share his mother's religious devotion. He entered Dartmouth College in 1826 intending to become a lawyer, graduating in 1830. He then apprenticed himself to Larkin G. Mead, Esq. of Chesterfield NH, the husband of Noyes' oldest sister, Mary. As was the custom in those days before the advent of law schools, aspiring lawyers would “read” law for a few years with a practicing lawyer, then start to practice.

The first three decades of the 19^th century was a time of profound social change in America. The population exploded from five to thirty million. The Louisiana Purchase vastly expanded the geographic reach of the nation. The early phases of industrialization began in the northeast. People were on the move. Canals, roads and then railroads crisscrossed the land. Towns and cities grew. Great numbers of people started to migrate west. The course of our relatively new nation had not yet been firmly set. Anything seemed possible.

One result of the uncertainty created by these massive social changes was a new religious fervor. In my view the rise of a new evangelical christianity, generally labeled “perfectionism,” was a response to a new American spirit of optimism and openness to possibility. The dark Congregationalist view of sinners in the hands of an angry God was supplanted by the idea that salvation can be achieved by living a righteous life. Historians call this religious movement, based on the idea of the perfectibility of the individual believer, the Second Great Awakening.

At his mother's urging, Noyes attended a four-day revival meeting in Putney, Vermont, under the ministry of the most famous perfectionist preacher of the time, Charles Grandison Finney. He was just 20 years old when he converted to evangelical Christianity on Sept. 18, 1831. Within the month he had enrolled in the Andover Theological Seminary. Then in August 1832 he transferred to the Yale Theological Seminary, arguably the leading school for religious training in the country. He finished the basic course of study for the ministry in August 1833 and received his license to preach.

While at Yale, Noyes began to question the basic Congregationalist doctrine that everyone is essentially sinful and can only be saved from damnation by the unknowable grace of God. Instead he adopted Finney's view that salvation from sin is accomplished at conversion. Noyes came to believe that God would not expect the impossible from believers, and that the moral perfection God demanded could be accomplished by living a righteous life. Perhaps one of the reasons Noyes adopted this doctrine was the fact that he never could summon up from within himself any genuine feeling of deep guilt or despair that he felt must accompany the reality of original sin.

As part of his Bible studies at Yale, Noyes also reached the conclusion that the second coming of Christ and the final judgment day predicted in the Bible had actually arrived without fanfare in 70 A.D. This conclusion was based on his interpretation of Christ's prediction that the millennium would arrive within one generation. Deriving the date of the millennium from Bible sources was a recurrent theme in revivalist preaching in the early 19^th Century, most famously with the Millerites (the original Seventh Day Adventists). The significance of the belief that the millennium had already occurred was that some part of the population unknowingly had their original sin absolved, and thus they were now spiritually capable of leading lives free from sin.

Noyes had been attending services at the perfectionist-influenced Free Church of New Haven. At the evening service on Feb. 20, 1834 Noyes announced his perfectionist views to the congregation. He confessed that at his conversion he knew he had truly been saved from sin, and that he knew it was possible for persons so converted to lead a life free from sin. In memory of the day Noyes publicly embraced the doctrine of perfectionism, members of the Oneida Community marked February 20 with a celebration called the "high tide of the spirit."

News of Noyes's statements immediately became known throughout the Seminary. In April 1834 he was summoned for questioning. When Noyes would not recant or admit any error, the church authorities revoked his license to preach and expelled him. This prompted Noyes' famous saying, "I have taken away their license to sin and they keep on sinning. They have taken away my license to preach and I keep on preaching."

Between 1834 and 1838 Noyes traveled, preached and wrote extensively. The manner in which he assembled the practical elements of his own version of perfectionism will be the subject of another post.