Few smartphones, some beer: a Christian village struggles with modernity
It was early afternoon on a sunny winter Thursday and the Fox Hill community looked like a well-manicured ghost town that had been abandoned in the 1950s. Stately, multi-story homes dotted a park-like landscape of gently rolling hills and ponds, a 60-acre rural settlement in New York State’s Hudson Valley. But where was everyone?
Lunch is then distributed in the communal dining room. Women in long, flowing dresses, some with headscarves in muted colors, looked as if they had just stepped out of a 19th century Currier and Ives print. The men wore jeans and winter coats. A group of teenage boys rushed through the groups of sober-looking elderly people. No one was staring at a cell phone and there was no car on the road.
The people were members of the Bruderhof, a Christian pacifist movement founded in Germany in the 1920s. After the Nazis expelled them from their homeland, the Bruderhof (German for “place of brothers”) migrated abroad, eventually settling in 26 communities on five continents. Today, about half of the 3,000 or so Bruderhof spread around the world live in six villages tucked into the hollows of the Hudson Valley. Fox Hill is located in Walden, an hour and a half northwest of Manhattan.
To outsiders, the Bruderhof bears a passing resemblance to the Mennonites and the Amish. Like these groups, the Bruderhof views their communities as refuges from the materialism and inequality of the modern world. They live simply and share their wealth.
But following the lockdowns caused by the coronavirus pandemic, the Bruderhof were forced to reconsider their long-standing distrust of digital devices and online communications. It has proven to be a unique challenge that the Bruderhof grapple with in their families and at community gatherings: How does an enclave modeled after first-century Christian communities cope with the modern world? And will the young Bruderhof be able to stick to the group’s values in the face of increasing exposure to the outside world via the Internet, or will this lead them to reject what some consider an oppressive way of life?
Shannon Hinkey, 28, and her husband, Pete Hinkey, 31, live in Woodcrest, a Bruderhof community on a ridge above the New York State Thruway, a short drive from Fox Hill. Like others in their community, they do not own a television set. They do use a laptop, which they reserve for work, and smartphones, to stay in touch, but every evening they leave the devices in a basket on the counter as a reminder not to use them.
They are also new parents and want to give their full attention to each other and their 1-year-old son Ashton. The Hinkeys have already decided that they will not give Ashton a smartphone until he graduates high school. Like other Bruderhof children, he will grow up without video games, social media or surfing the Internet.
“We are selfish people and we have our egos,” Ms. Hinkey said. “But here we are determined to fight that in our own hearts, and we are also determined to live for something bigger than ourselves.”
These Bruderhof members live not far from Wall Street, the global epicenter of the financial industry, and are part of the last fully functioning socialist societies on earth. The tight-knit settlements, where everyone is on a first-name basis, exist virtually without crime, homelessness, debt, or the epidemic of loneliness that plagues the world beyond their borders. They support themselves mainly by making furniture, and their farms produce about half of the food they consume. The members share sprawling multi-family homes, and many material items – cars, lawnmowers, a shared credit card – are held in common.
Bruderhof doctors are available on site. The community pays for health insurance to cover hospital costs. Education is available at church-run schools from kindergarten to high school. The community pays the tuition fees for the young Bruderhof who chooses to study.
There is no dating in the usual sense of the Bruderhof. Sexual contact outside marriage is prohibited, as are homosexuality and divorce. Alcohol is allowed in moderation; Perhaps unsurprisingly given their Germanic heritage, the Bruderhof brews their own beer. Mr. Hinkey and a friend have made twenty different types in their spare time, but only for the community and not for sale.
The Bruderhof are proud of the solid wood school furniture that their company, Community Playthings in Fox Hill, produces. Mr. Hinkey is a product designer at Bruderhof’s other major company, Rifton Equipment, which makes adaptive equipment for people with disabilities.
Most Bruderhof adults have more than one job. Alan Koppschall, who has lived in various Bruderhof communities for all his 24 years, is an editor at their Plow Publishing House, which produces books and an attractive literary magazine. Mr. Koppschall is also a youth group leader and home care assistant for the elderly, and works shifts at Community Playthings. (Disclosure: The Plow Quarterly published two of the author’s poems online in 2020 and paid him a nominal fee.)
All community members – including seniors and the disabled – are expected to spend at least a few hours a day working at one of the factories. No one receives a salary, and many management decisions in this radically egalitarian company are made by consensus among employees. Although this is usually successful, there are occasional disagreements.
Inside the Community Playthings factory, a building the size of an airplane hangar, a line of men were assembling wooden chairs and packing them into cardboard boxes Thursday afternoon. The mood on the factory floor seemed jovial and relaxed, which Mr. Koppschall said was not always the case.
“Some of our factories introduced computerized routers, which dramatically increased productivity,” he said. New orders poured in faster than they could be filled. At most companies this would have been great news. But it caused fear on Fox Hill. Workers complained that increasing demand was causing stress and destroying workplace conviviality.
“We felt like the company was running us, rather than us running the company,” says John Rhodes, the plant’s manager at the time. Mr. Rhodes, 72, is now a community business consultant and teacher at the Bruderhof-run private high school, Mount Academy, in Esopus, N.Y.
“Automation had a bad influence on our young men, who would have to work more with their hands,” he said. “But they were just stuck behind their computers and programming the routers.”
The workers decided to scrap the routers and return to their previous, more labor-intensive manual assembly line. Profits plummeted. It was a sacrifice the community was willing to make.
“We value relationships over profits and efficiency,” Mr. Rhodes said.
He remembers when email was first introduced into the business to keep in touch with buyers and suppliers. “If someone was angry at someone else, instead of talking to them or answering the phone, they would send an angry email,” he said. Instead of improving communication, email became a replacement for the face-to-face meetings that had maintained community harmony for decades.
A collective decision was made by the workers: factory email was for business use only, not for personal communications.
But it is proving difficult to keep the digital world at bay, and attitudes within the Bruderhof have been changing in recent years. The pandemic lockdowns forced them to introduce Wi-Fi into homes and expand the use of smartphones. Laptops, which were previously off-limits to young people, were introduced to enable them to take online classes.
Franklin Arnold, 17, first got one as a high school student. He said it was a real temptation if there was a sporting event he wanted to watch (the computers are technically blocked from non-academic websites). He is a member of an intentional Christian community, but he is still a teenager. “You can get past the blocks easily,” he said. “They are not very safe.”
Like his colleagues, Franklin does not have a smartphone. But he’s disappointed with the way teens he plays sports with outside the community are using it. “If you are in a situation where you feel a little bit uncomfortable, the first thing you do is put your hand in your pocket and look at your phone to avoid contact,” he said. “Instead of making friends, you just jump on Instagram and go out.”
After graduating from high school, many young Bruderhof leave for an extended period to attend college or work in the world, a practice roughly comparable to the Amish rumspringa (literally “running around”), in which adolescents explore freely before they complete their high school education. they decide whether or not they want to commit themselves to the church.
Full exposure to the outside world can be a shock. A woman who left a Hudson Valley Bruderhof community at age 15 said it was disorienting at first to be surrounded by computers and DVD players that she didn’t know how to operate. (She asked that her name not be used because she still has relatives in the community.)
However, once she mastered digital technology, she was able to explore ideas and lifestyles that were hidden from her growing up. Excitedly, she decided not to return.
“The Bruderhof is not a place for independent thinkers,” the woman said. “One’s individual values can be tolerated to a certain extent, but if they deviate too much from the central dogma, you get into trouble. It is an intensely collective society, almost the opposite of American culture.”
A growing community of “leavers” is congregating on the Afterhof Facebook page, which has more than 600 members. Many share nostalgic memories of ‘life on the Court’, but others are more critical of what they see as rigid sexual roles and oppressive restrictions on personal freedom.
The Bruderhof openly admit that their way of life requires an unusual degree of self-sacrifice, and that this is not for everyone. The woman who left the Hudson Valley Bruderhof community said living outside the supportive, safe environment she grew up in was a heartbreaking experience, but it ultimately freed her to live a more authentic life.
Yet more than two-thirds of young people who go to experience life in the outside world eventually return, says John Rhodes, the teacher and former factory manager. The Bruderhof communities are growing slowly but steadily, he added, in part because families often have many children.
When she was 19, Shannon Hinkey went to Houston to volunteer with immigrants from Mexico and Central America. “I just had to find out what life was like outside,” she said. She expected to work hard, but was surprised by the amount of gossip and backbiting at the nonprofit where she volunteered.
What made her even more uncomfortable was the huge gap between rich and poor in the outside world – something she was not used to at home.
“I knew there was another life out there,” she said.
Audio produced by Sara Diamond.