Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8 Page 9 Page 10 Page 11 Page 12 Page 13 Page 14 Page 15 Page 16 Page 17 Page 18 Page 19 Page 20 Page 21 Page 22 Page 23 Page 24 Page 25 Page 26 Page 27 Page 28 Page 29 Page 30 Page 31 Page 32 Page 33 Page 34 Page 35 Page 36 Page 37 Page 38 Page 39 Page 40 Page 41 Page 42 Page 43 Page 44 Page 45 Page 46 Page 47 Page 48 Page 49 Page 50 Page 51 Page 52 Page 53 Page 54 Page 55 Page 56 Page 57 Page 58 Page 59 Page 60 Page 61 Page 62 Page 63 Page 64 Page 65 Page 66 Page 67 Page 68 Page 69 Page 70 Page 71 Page 72 Page 73 Page 74 Page 75 Page 76 Page 77 Page 78 Page 79 Page 80 Page 81 Page 82 Page 83 Page 84creature but a man could be capable of, and that is by the strength of his understanding. Could there have been a direct connection between Utopia and the ideas of Jakob Hutter?  7 We can only speculate. In any case, the tracks of Erasmus can be traced among the early Anabaptists, and education played a major role in the Hutterite communities, as was the case among the Utopians. Some of the earliest descrip- tions of Hutterite life come from the pen of one Christoph Andreas Fischer, a Jesuit. To say that he was not a fan of theirs would be an understatement. One of his polemical tracts against the Hutterites, written in 1607, is titled “What the Anabaptists think of the commu- nity of goods: must all possessions be shared in common?”  8 He answers, of course, with a resounding negative. Fischer’s sharp criticism of communal living is particularly interesting because at exactly this time, his fellow Jesuits were launching another “communistic” experiment in South America. Just as with Hutterite communities, this was a utopia that sprang out of troubled circumstances.  9 The indigenous Americans, for whom the Jesuit missionaries felt a pas- toral responsibility, had been oppressed and enslaved by the Spanish conquistadors. In response, in 1600 the Jesuits began to organize them into large communities that, thanks to their status as Jesuit settlements, were prom- ised freedom from persecution and slavery. These settlements were not individual estates, but large social structures that became known as “Jesuit Missions,” as memorably portrayed in Roland Joffé’s 1986 film The Mission. Like the Hutterite colonies, they were an explicitly “communistic-theocratic experiment,” 10 one that survived for more than one-and-a-half centuries until their suppression in 1768. In a total of thirty-one villages, called reducciones, lived more than a hundred thousand indigenous people with around one hundred and fifty Jesuits. All non-Jesuit ­ Europeans were prohibited entry. The head of every family received a piece of agricultural land on which he could work for two days a week to maintain himself and his family; the remainder of the time he worked on the com- munal fields, which provided produce for the elderly and widows. Hundreds of thousands of cattle and sheep grazed on the pasture lands and provided in abundance for all the house- holds. The Jesuit authorities made sure all were cared for, and organized the education system, labor, the building of houses, church services, and celebrations. No one in the reducciones was ever sentenced to death or life imprison- ment – something rare in human history. When the Spanish government extinguished the Jesuits’ “holy experiment” 11 as a result of the envy, jealousy, and greed of the colonists, the desperate indigenous residents wrote letters appealing to be allowed to continue their com- munal way of life. A 1768 letter to Governor Bucareli reads: “We have to tell you that we are not slaves in any way, no more than were our ancestors. We do not like the way in which the Spaniards live without working themselves and without supporting each other.” 12 The stories i have told of these historical utopias are from long ago, and the memory of them has largely been lost. But the questions raised then – as theory in More’s Utopia and as praxis among the Hutterites and in the Jesuit Missions – still beg for answers, perhaps now more urgently than ever. At the end of 1933 in Berlin, two strange visitors appeared on the doorstep of Pastor Martin Niemöller, a leader in the Pastors’ Emergency League, a network of clergy Plough Quarterly • Winter 2017 33