A cabin remains in the former utopia, Harmony, Pa. (Photo Courtesy of Jim Burklo)
Special to United Methodist Insight | Oct. 1, 2025
This past weekend, after officiating at a wedding in western Pennsylvania for dear family friends, I drove country roads over hummocks and dales, past farms and verdant woods, taking care while passing Amish folk in their horse-drawn buggies, to the little burgh of Harmony. I parked and walked its streets, and stopped for a hot chocolate at a bakery where I found a book of the town’s history on a table.
“Harmonie” was founded by a Pietist German religious sect led by George Rapp, who broke away from the Lutheran church. He was of course but one of many religious “non-conformists” who ended up in America to escape the corruption that inevitably follows when there is no institutional separation of church and state. (A lesson we do well to remember today.) The Mennonites/Amish, the Moravians, the Hutterites, the Quakers, the Baptists, the Congregationalists… the list was long.
Rapp’s theology was elaborate. For him, Adam was a giant who was both male and female, and able to reproduce. But when Adam sought a mate, God was displeased and separated Adam’s male and female aspects in creating Eve. For Rapp, the Virgin Sophia (Wisdom) was the manifestation of the spiritual reunion of the male and female aspects in the divine: images of a woman’s head with wings were placed over doorways in the town. He taught a mashup of alchemy, astrology, the esoteric Christianity of Emmanuel Swedenborg, and the German mysticism of Jacob Boehme.
He led his followers to Harmony, a lovely spot in the wilderness tucked into a bend of Connoquenessing Creek, to establish a commune over which he was both the temporal and spiritual head. Quickly they constructed log cabins, a few of which remain, and went about farming, milling, and spinning. One for all, and all for one, they prospered.
As other settlers encroached on their splendid isolation, they sold the town to Mennonites and moved to Indiana to set up New Harmony, where they also prospered. They decided it was too far away from markets for their goods, so they sold their town to another utopian socialist leader, Robert Owen, whose communal experiment failed after only a few years.
George Rapp
Rapp’s community moved back to Pennsylvania and founded the town of Economy on the Ohio River, where they remained. They were very successful in their business ventures and became more of a wealthy corporation than a commune as time went on. Rapp preached that celibacy was the ideal, given his belief that the “end-times” were near. He predicted that Christ would return in glory to rule the world on September 15, 1829. Many of his followers gave up on him after that. Lacking children to maintain its population, the community slowly died out.
From the start of European settlement of this country, Americans fueled with high-octane religious or philosophical zeal have quested for utopia. The story of Harmony is the story of Brook Farm, the Shakers, Oneida, The Farm in Tennessee, Holy City in California, and very many others, very few of which lasted for very long. That long list of ultimate failures never slows down the up-and-coming visionaries who start the next iteration of the ideal communal society.
But this overwhelming impulse animated not only the likes of George Rapp. It manifests abundantly in our politics today. People who believe that untrammeled capitalism will result in an ideal society where everyone prospers are utopians. People who believe that state ownership of the means of production will result in abundance for all are utopians. The fundamentalist Christians today who are grasping at control of the “seven mountains” of culture so they can establish a theocracy are utopians. And people like myself, who hope for a market-based economy with a strong governmental health and social safety net, can get carried away with the utopian impulse, assuming that a perfect balance of individualism and communitarianism can be achieved.
The root of the word “utopia” means “nowhere,” and for a reason. After two thousand years of waiting for the harmonious New Jerusalem of the book of Revelation to descend onto the earth, utopia has not yet arrived. Jesus didn’t come back on September 15, 1829. Jesus didn’t come back on September 24, 2025, contrary to the latest “rapture” declaration.
Sophia, Mother Wisdom, gazing down from the transoms of the front doors of Harmony, Pennsylvania, invites us to pursue the ideal social arrangement without ever assuming we’ve finally achieved it. One for all, and all for one: good in principle, ever and always tricky in practice.
For a decade I taught public policy at the graduate school of Social Work at the University of Southern California. Prepping for my classes, I was continually reminded of the tradeoffs that accompany every public policy proposal. How do we prevent homelessness and hunger without dampening individual initiative? How do we protect the civil rights and liberties of those who suffer from severe mental illness, while assuring they get the care they need and mitigating the impact on the public of behavioral problems? How do we provide health care to all, regardless of ability to pay, while still giving people substantial choice of providers? How much pain at the gas pump are we willing to accept in exchange for a more rapid shift to carbon-free energy? Every social and economic arrangement will need to be tweaked continually due to changing circumstances and unforeseeable events.
As I walked along the banks of Connoquenessing Creek, I thought I invented a word: protopia. But upon returning home and looking it up, I discovered that the futurist Kevin Kelly, whom I’ve admired for decades, had already coined it to refer to a society that improves incrementally over time rather than succumbing to the hubris of utopia or to the despair of dystopia.
Utopian Harmony was a really nice experiment that left a pretty little town in its wake. Remembering its lessons, may we work together, one for all and all for one, for protopian harmony in America…