Synanon Vs. Free Love

Blog #1

Free love Vs. Synanon 

If both communes weren't so strict about their relationship/family rules, could they have lasted longer?

The Oneida Community:

The Oneida Community also called the Perfectionists, was a religious commune in New York founded in 1848 by a man named John Humphrey Noyes. He was a firm believer in perfectionism, the second coming of Christ and that Heaven could be made on earth. One of his main beliefs was about “free love” where sexual relations were strictly regulated. He believed a person should not be committed to one single person, that the more relationships a person had the closer to God they could be. He did not think marriage was a good thing because that kept people from getting close with their spirituality. Some people were allowed to have children and reproduce while others were not. Everything about relationships and sex were very strict in this community. This worked for a while and people listened to what Noyes said but he started to get older and other generations were getting older and could not really understand his reasoning behind what he was telling them. People started leaving the commune and starting their own families and getting married because that is what they wanted to do. The decline in followers of the commune is what caused the end of the Oneida Community. 

Synanon: 

Then when looking at the Synanon commune things are a little different. At the beginning in 1959-1968 when Synanon was just starting up, the nuclear family was not looked at as a bad thing. Families could be there, with their kids, or a mom could live at the commune and have their kids come visit and stay with them for a while in the commune and leave after. They were also aloud to go outside the commune and be basically normal human beings without feeling like they were trapped in their little community all of the time. The rules were pretty fair and flexible and if the person in the commune was willing to cooperate with Synanon’s rules they could see their family, inside or out.

  But that all changed later on in the years of 1969-1975. The idea of a nuclear family was not accepted anymore because the founder Charles Dederich had his own personal experiences and hated the family idea so then he decided it was not okay anymore. He blamed his family and said they were the reason for his addictions and his problems causing his life to be where it was. After 1975 it got even worse for the family life and how it was looked at. Synanon became a family and child hating cult. In 1977 men were FORCED to have vasectomies making it impossible for them to have children, abortions were mandatory, and divorce was highly practiced. If people already had kids in the commune, contact between the two were highly discouraged and the children were in a really abusive environment. On top of all that during this time period, sometimes children were forced to participate in confessions, haircuts, and humiliation. The children's schooling went down hill from caring about their education to just teaching them what would be helpful and important in the Synanon community. All of this caused tons of problems for the Synanon community. Children were in an unsafe environment causing them to run away, turn to drugs, or think they have no future. This is also around the time when the government got involved with the commune causing conflict and issue leading to the commune ending in 1993.

When looking at both these religious communes we can see they are very different yet at the end are very alike and the end result are the same. The beginning beliefs and how they go about things in the Oneida community and Synanon community are very different but by the end before both communes end are very much the same. Right before both communes ended they both said that nuclear families were not okay, the leaders or people in charge did not agree with being married, or having kids, or anything of that kind. It was looked at as holding a person back. And because of this, people stood up for themselves, left the commune, and the commune ended.

Oneida Community Mansion House: Historic Structure Report