Christine Jennings Quotes

#1. Some people just think utopians are idiots who are imagining rivers of candy and not really engaging with the world's ills, and sometimes that's surely the case, but I think that imagining the perfected society is a way of expressing your disgust with the current state of affairs.

Christine Jennings

#2. The Enlightenment faith that things are getting a little bit better each decade becomes difficult to support. People recognized that there had just been a war that was worse than the war of 1812, and worse than the Revolution; things were clearly not getting better and better.

Christine Jennings

#3. The thing that had fueled these utopian communities was a literal belief, and not just a general sense of optimism, that the earth was about to become a paradise. That idea cannot hold water after the war.

Christine Jennings

#4. Some people think God is going to guide those humans. The Oneida community and the Shakers both believed that they had received revelations about how to build the New Jerusalem that the Bible says is coming

Christine Jennings

#5. They're people who probably imagine that they would have had a better time in the past. I wouldn't imagine you'd encounter a lot of black people saying 'Oh, the '50s, that was when America was great.' It's very dangerous because the past was imperfect, and you can't go back anyway.

Christine Jennings

#6. That to me was one of the most exciting, and weird puzzles of this book: how are the most religious people and the least religious people of their time all drawn to very similar visions of utopia?

Christine Jennings

#7. But if you'd only ever lived in small wooden house in the middle of wilderness, it sounded much better. Especially because it provided intense community, and these people lived in incredible isolation.

Christine Jennings

#8. Atheist isn't really the right word because they tended to believe in some sort of Enlightenment, capital 'N' Nature kind of god. But these were people who in their times were criticized as infidels.

Christine Jennings