Trenditopia

You might have thought that the British would have stopped colonizing the United States sometime before 1776, when fledgling American nationalists declared their independence—or at least by 1815, when the War of 1812 ended and U.S. control of the land was firmly established. But I learned recently that there were Brits colonizing America at least as late as the 1880s. This particular British invasion wasn’t imperial, however; it was ideological. The people who crossed the Atlantic and founded and settled in Rugby, Tennessee, were in search of Utopia.

Led by successful novelist Thomas Hughes and motivated at least partly by the downside of primogeniture—when the family estate goes entirely to the eldest son, the younger siblings have a dramatically small pool of options left for themselves—the founding members of the Rugby community were nevertheless inspired by the thought that they could work together to build a “New Jerusalem” in the New World, in the spirit of Christian socialism. These upper-crust Brits would work the land in Tennessee, each according to their particular strengths, and enjoy the comfort and intellectual stimulation that living in close, modest quarters (by aristocratic standards, anyway) with like-minded idealists would afford them. The settlement included a church, a school and a 7,000-book library that covered a wide range of topics, including such titles as What Women Can Do, Thoughts That Breathe and The Comic History of the United States.

I visited Rugby recently, during a visit to some friends living in the foothills of Appalachia in southern Kentucky. Our hosts have deep roots in their community; their ministry, which includes making food and clothing available to desperately poor families while offering Christian education and empowerment to children and adults, is celebrating its tenth anniversary this year. Our friend Barbara grew up in the region and knows the land and the culture of its people well; “I could have told them,” she told me about the folks who settled Rugby, “that they wouldn’t be able to farm here.” Too bad she wasn’t around in 1880 to set them straight; too bad they didn’t think to ask one of Barb’s ancestors or their near neighbors. Within a decade Rugby was in serious decline; by 1900 nearly all the original colonists had moved on.

The concept of Utopia, made popular by Sir Thomas More in the sixteenth century, makes for an interesting intellectual exercise for social and political scientists, allowing them to imagine the strengths and stress points of any given theory, from free-market capitalism to eco-socialism to fundamentalist feminism. (I made two of those categories up. I think.) But alongside such theorizing regularly appear very real, audacious efforts toward a type of perfection, a heaven on earth. Places like Rugby, Tennessee, or any number of little intentional communities in any number of urban centers. One could even argue that the United States itself is a wee bit utopian; the opening line of the Constitution declares the intent “to form a more perfect union . . .”

Utopia is an understandable aspiration. People regularly assess the failings of the society they occupy—the political ideology of their country or the relational dynamics of their church—and imagine a world or a country or a church in which such failings have no place. And then set out to build that place alongside of, or even in the middle of, the place they hope to supplant.

This is how the flaws of philosophies are contended with, and how communities evolve, and I have no problem with that. But there’s a risk to such audacious experiments, not the least of which is the risk that our idealism colors our perception of reality.

The good people of Rugby failed to fully appreciate the challenges of farming in mountains and forests; they also brought with them an aristocratic understanding of modesty and simplicity that, in the foothills of Appalachia, looked suspiciously like extravagant snobbery. The good people of Rugby didn’t come to inhabit northern Tennessee, they colonized it. Their effort to establish a utopian society looks suspiciously like just another overly enthusiastic escape from realism and pilgrimage to Trenditopia.

Theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer knew something of the clash of idealism and realism. Under the shadow of the Nazi Party in Germany he founded and led a secret seminary, the philosophy of which is laid out in his book Life Together. As he set forth a rule of life for his seminary, he anticipated the kind of naïve idealism that could derail an authentic experience of community. “The serious Christian,” he cautioned, “is likely to bring . . . a very definite idea of what Christian life together should be and to try to realize it.” This definite idea, no matter how serious the Christian, no matter how firmly she holds it, is simply an idea; it’s not necessarily or even likely reality. Ideas, no matter how utopian, are ephemeral; they are limited only by our imaginations, and they dissipate as easily as they coalesce. They’re also unconsciously shaped by our prior experience; all sorts of assumptions go into the Utopia of our imagining. Without taking stock of the truth on the ground of the community we inhabit or the people we hope to gather, the dogged pursuit of that definite idea has the dangerous power to make us not the savior we might imagine ourselves to be, but what Bonhoeffer calls “the destroyer of the brethren.”

May this never be true of us. A dream of “a more perfect union” is almost by definition a charter for Trenditopia. But truth is tactile, and our ideals can only take shape if we entrust them to the stuff of truth that we find ourselves surrounded by.