Membership figures are even harder to pin down, but it is certain that the numbers of people who have at one time or another lived in an American intentional community runs into the hundreds of thousands. Here is Mother Ann Lee, the prophet of the Shakers, who grew up in newly industrialized Manchester, Englandand would come to build a quiet but fierce religious tradition on the opposite side of. Their numbers have been almost impossible to measure accurately one authoritative listing counts about six hundred communal groups with over fifteen hundred separate settlements in the USA before 1965, and there will have been thousands more communes formed since then. In Paradise Now, Chris Jennings tells the story of five interrelated utopian movements, revealing their relevance both to their time and to our own. Among the experimenters have been many groups of Christians in America who have, over more than two centuries, gathered themselves into communal organizations - what participants and commentators now call ‘intentional communities’. From the early puritan settlements onwards, North America has played a distinctive role in the Christian imagination - as a place of refuge, as a place for experimentation, as the founding-spot for new sects, churches, and denominations. In the rich and complex history of American Christianity, utopias in one form or another have played a constant part.
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