It was early afternoon on a sunny winter Thursday, and the Fox Hill community looked like a well-manicured ghost town abandoned in the 1950s. Stately multistoried homes were scattered across a parklike landscape of gently rolling hills and ponds, a bucolic settlement of 60 acres in the Hudson Valley of New York State. But where was everyone?
Then lunch let out from the communal dining hall. Women in long, loosefitting dresses, some wearing head scarves in muted colors, looked as if they had just stepped out of a Currier and Ives print from the 19th century. The men wore jeans and winter jackets. A band of adolescent boys dashed among knots of sober-seeming elders. Nobody was staring at a cellphone, and there wasn’t a car on the road.
The people were members of the Bruderhof, a Christian pacifist movement founded during the 1920s in Germany. After the Nazis expelled them from their homeland, the Bruderhof (German for “place of brothers”) migrated abroad, ultimately settling in 26 communities on five continents. Today, about half of the roughly 3,000 Bruderhof scattered across the world live in six villages squirreled away in the hollows of the Hudson Valley. Fox Hill is in Walden, an hour and a half northwest of Manhattan.
To outsiders, the Bruderhof share a passing resemblance to the Mennonites and the Amish. Like those groups, the Bruderhof see their communities as refuges from the materialism and inequities of the modern world. They live simply and share their wealth.
But after the lockdowns prompted by the coronavirus pandemic, the Bruderhof were forced to revisit their longstanding mistrust of digital devices and online communication. It has proved to be a unique challenge that the Bruderhof wrestle with in their families and during community meetings: How does an enclave modeled after Christian communities of the first century engage with the modern world? And will young Bruderhof be able to adhere to the group’s values in the face of increasing exposure to the outside world via the internet, or will it lead them to reject what some regard as 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, for keeping in touch, but every night they leave the devices in a small basket on the kitchen counter as a reminder not to use them.
They are also new parents, and they want to pay full attention to each other, and to their 1-year-old son, Ashton. The Hinkeys have already decided that they won’t give Ashton a smartphone until he graduates from high school. Like other Bruderhof children, he will grow up without video games, social media or cruising the internet.
“We are selfish people and we do have our egos,” Mrs. Hinkey said. “But here we are committed to battling that in our own hearts, and we’re also committed to living for something bigger than our own selves.”
Living not so far from Wall Street, the global epicenter of high finance, these Bruderhof members 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 afflicts the world beyond their borders. They support themselves mainly by making furniture, and their farms produce roughly half of the food they consume. Members share sprawling multifamily homes, and many material items — cars, lawn mowers, a community credit card — are held in common.
Bruderhof doctors are available on site. The community pays for health insurance to cover hospital expenses. Education is available at church-run schools from kindergarten through high school. For young Bruderhof who choose to go to college, the community pays tuition.
There is no dating in the usual sense among the Bruderhof. Sexual contact outside marriage is forbidden, as are homosexuality and divorce. Alcohol is allowed in moderation; perhaps not surprisingly given their Germanic heritage, the Bruderhof brew their own beer. Mr. Hinkey and a friend have created 20 different varieties in their free time, but only for the community and not for sale.
The Bruderhof take pride in the solid-wood school furniture their company, Community Playthings in Fox Hill, produces. Mr. Hinkey is a product designer at the other large Bruderhof business, Rifton Equipment, which makes adaptive equipment for people with disabilities.
Most Bruderhof adults have more than one job. Alan Koppschall, who has lived all of his 24 years at a variety of Bruderhof communities, is an editor at their Plough Publishing House, which produces books and an attractive literary magazine. Mr. Koppschall is also a youth group leader and a home health care aide for older people and works a shift at Community Playthings. (Disclosure: The Plough 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 pitch in at least a few hours a day at one of the factories. Nobody receives a salary, and many management decisions in this radically egalitarian business are made by a consensus among workers. While this usually works out, there are occasional disagreements.
At the Community Playthings plant, a building the size of an aircraft hangar, a line of men were assembling wooden chairs and packing them into cardboard boxes on this Thursday afternoon. The mood on the factory floor seemed genial and relaxed, which Mr. Koppschall said was not always the case.
“Some of our factories introduced computer-controlled routers, and productivity soared,” he said. New orders poured in faster than they could fill them. At most companies this would have been great news. But it caused anxiety at Fox Hill. Workers complained that the increasing demand was creating stress and destroying the sociability of the factory floor.
“We felt like the business was running us, rather than we running the business,” said John Rhodes, the factory’s manager at the time. Mr. Rhodes, 72, is now a community business consultant and a teacher at the Bruderhof-run private high school, the Mount Academy, in Esopus, N.Y.
“The automation was having a bad influence on our young men, who should be working with their hands more,” he said. “But they were just stuck behind their computers programming the routers.”
The workers decided to scrap the routers and return to their earlier, more labor-intensive manual assembly line. Profits plummeted. It was a sacrifice the community was happy to make.
“We value relationships over profit and efficiency,” Mr. Rhodes said.
He recalled when email was first introduced into the business to help keep in touch with buyers and suppliers. “When somebody was upset at somebody else, instead of talking to them or picking up a phone, they would shoot off an angry email,” he said. Rather than enhancing communication, email was becoming a substitute for the face-to -face encounters that had maintained harmony in the community for decades.
A collective decision was made by the workers: Email at the factory was for business use only, not for personal communications.
But the digital world has proved difficult to hold at bay, and attitudes have been changing among the Bruderhof in recent years. The pandemic lockdowns compelled them to introduce Wi-Fi into homes and expand the use of smartphones. Laptops, which had previously been off limits for young people, were introduced to allow them to attend online classes.
Franklin Arnold, 17, was given one for the first time as a high school senior. He said it was a real temptation when there was a sports event he wanted to watch (the computers are technically blocked from nonacademic websites). He is a member of an intentional Christian community, but he is still a teenager. “You can get by the blocks easily,” he said. “They are not very secure.”
Like his peers, Franklin doesn’t have a smartphone. But he’s chagrined at how teenagers he plays sports with outside the community use them. “If you are in a situation where you feel a little uncomfortable, the first thing you do is reach into your pocket and look at your phone to avoid contact,” he said. “Instead of making friends, you’ll just hop on Instagram and zone out.”
After graduating from high school, many young Bruderhof leave for an extended period to attend college, or to work in the world, a practice roughly comparable to the Amish rumspringa, (literally “running around”), during which adolescents engage in freewheeling exploration before they decide whether or not to commit to the church.
Full exposure to the outside world can be a shock. One woman who left a Hudson Valley Bruderhof community at 15 said it was disorienting at first to be surrounded by computers and DVD players that she did not know how to operate. (She asked that her name not be used because she still has relatives in the community.)
Once she mastered digital technology, however, she was able to explore ideas and lifestyles that had been closed off to her when she was growing up. Exhilarated, she decided not to return.
“The Bruderhof is not a place for independent thinkers,” the woman said. “One’s individual values may be tolerated up to a point, but if they differ too much from the central dogma, you’ll find yourself in trouble. It’s an intensely collective society, pretty much the opposite of American culture.”
A growing community of “leavers” congregates on the Afterhof Facebook page, which has more than 600 members. Many share nostalgic memories of “life on the Hof,” but others are more critical of what they see as rigid sexual roles and oppressive restrictions on personal freedom.
The Bruderhof freely admit that their way of life requires an unusual degree of self-sacrifice, and that it is not for everyone. The woman who left a Hudson Valley Bruderhof community said that living outside the supportive, secure environment she had grown up in was a wrenching experience but that it ultimately liberated her to live a more authentic life.
Still, more than two-thirds of the young people who leave to experience life in the outside world eventually return, said John Rhodes, the teacher and former factory manager. Bruderhof communities are growing at a slow but steady rate, he added, in part because families tend to have many children.
When she was 19, Shannon Hinkey went to Houston to do volunteer work with immigrants from Mexico and Central America. “I just needed to discover what life outside was like,” she said. She had expectations of working hard, but was surprised by the sheer amount of gossip and backbiting at the nonprofit where she volunteered.
What made her even more uncomfortable was the vast gap between the rich and the poor in the outside world — something she was not accustomed to at home.
“I knew that another life exists,” she said.
Audio produced by Sarah Diamond.
