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Hutterite

Grew from
Anabaptist
From
1528 AD
Origin
Moravia
Confession
Hutterite Confession of Faith 1540 AD

Named for Jakob Hutter, who organised refugee Anabaptists in Moravia into communities holding everything in common and was burned at Innsbruck in 1536. Expulsions carried them through Slovakia, Transylvania and Ukraine before they reached the Dakotas in the 1870s; most colonies are now on the northern plains of the United States and in the prairie provinces of Canada.

What marks it out

Community of goods, taken from the Jerusalem church of Acts 2 and 4 and practised with only one substantial interruption since 1528 — the longest-running communal economy in the West. Members own no private property and colonies divide when they outgrow their land, rather than expanding indefinitely. German remains the language of worship and daily life.

Figures

Alongside it

Also from Anabaptist.

In the record

  1. 1525 AD Reform

    The Radical Reformation

    Anabaptists rejected infant baptism and state churches, and were persecuted by every established party.

  2. 1607–1750 AD Migration

    Migration to the Americas

    Puritans, Quakers, Catholics and Anabaptists carried their divisions across the Atlantic, where the absence of an established church let them multiply.

This body appears in the history but does not carry recorded doctrinal positions here, so it is absent from the comparison panels.

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