A Countercultural Religious Left response to the Dominant Culture’s Religious Right

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A. Allen Butcher • The School of Intentioneering • Denver, Colorado • November 4, 2020

http://www.Intentioneers.net • AllenInUtopia@consultant.com • over 16,000 words in 5 Parts

For definitions of terms and explanations of concepts see the glossary at the end of Part 5.

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Toward an Age of Equality ­– Part 4 of 5 ­– Time-Based Economics

Non-Monetary Labor-Gifting and Labor-Sharing

Frank and Fritzie Manuel state that while Marx and Engels used the term “utopian socialist” as “an epithet of denigration to be splashed onto any theoretical opponent,” they then point out that Marx’ and Engels’ Communist Manifesto itself is utopian, and that, “on occasion even they might lapse into utopianglossolalia.” (Manuel & Manuel, p. 699) For an example there is Engels’ preface to the German 1883 edition of the Manifesto in which he states that the “… oppressed class … can no longer emancipate itself … without at the same time forever freeing the whole of society from exploitation, oppression and class struggles—this basic thought belongs solely and exclusively to Marx.” This is at the same time another slur against communitarian society, a cooptation or appropriation of utopian wishful thinking, and a justification for violent extremism by Marxist communists. (Tucker, p. 472)

Robert Owen brought the labor notes idea to America with his communal experiment at New Harmony, called by the present author a “class-harmony community” as it was comprised of one or a few owners [note: Owen answered to a board-of-directors] with others as workers. However, every attempt to use forms of labor notes in intentional communities through the 19^th century in America (as in Canada, England, Wales, Ireland, and Scotland), such as at New Harmony in Indiana (1825-27), and at Kaweah (1885-92) and Altruria (1894-5) both in California, resulted in the labor notes system being the first thing to be abandoned as the communities began to fail.

It was Josiah Warren (1798-1874), called by his biographer the “first American anarchist,” who would be inspired by his time at Owen’s New Harmony community to develop the labor notes idea into a successful time-based economic system in America, although as a labor-exchange system as developed in England and not as a communal economy. Donald Pitzer refers to Warren’s labor exchanges as the “Time Store Cooperative Movement” (1833-63), involving first his time-store at New Harmony, then in Cincinnati (1827-30), then the Equity Community (1833-5) and Utopia (1847-51) all in Ohio, and Modern Times (1851-63) in Long Island, New York. Other people adapted Josiah Warren’s Time Store model in Ohio and in Philadelphia, PA, where it was called the “Producer’s Exchange of Labor for Labor Association,” yet always as exchange systems, not for communal economies. (Cress, pp. 72-3; Pitzer, pp. 120, 130 n.68, 489)

By Pitzer’s count, there were a total of 29 Owenite communities: nineteen in the U.S., one in Canada, and nine in England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. They developed collective childcare systems and pre-schools, and at various times and to different degrees, experimented with communalism. At twelve years Modern Times was the longest lived. The intentional communities created by Owen and those applying his theories are called by the present author “class-harmony communities” since they involve both an owner-class and a worker-class, while most of the communities in which Warren participated were more like cooperatives or land trusts in which workers were also owners. (Pitzer, pp. 122-3) The class-harmony form of intentional community has existed since the time of the ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras, with the largest class-harmony community today, known to the present author, being Ganas on Staten Island, New York.

As Kenneth Rexroth explains, Josiah Warren anticipated many of the French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s (1809-65) theories. Proudhon published What is Property? in 1840, popularizing the phrase, “property is theft.” Karl Marx’s criticism of Proudhon assured Proudhon’s reputation as the founder of anarchism. Yet as Rexroth explains, Warren’s work predated Proudhon’s, saying that, “Warren not only anticipated Proudhon, but he was a far clearer thinker and writer, and a man who believed in testing all of his theories in practice. Marx was right about Proudhon. He was a confused thinker and a confusing writer and far from being a practical man.” (Rexroth, pp. 226, 238)

Murray Bookchin writes that Proudhon’s anarchism envisioned the exchange of products without competition or profit, with small craftsmen and collectively-owned industries organized into local and regional federations with minimal or no delegation of power to a central government. This is the basis of Bookchin’s theories of “confederal municipalism,” which he later called “communalism” in his 2015 book The Next Revolution, confusingly using the French political definition of the term referring to governmental subdivisions like neighborhoods, city wards, or boroughs, as opposed to the more familiar English economic definition meaning commonly-owned property. The educational organization created by Bookchin and friends called the Institute for Social Ecology continues Murray Bookchin’s confusing word choice, probably intended to emphasize the first use of the theory in the 1871 Paris Commune.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon created a “mutual credit bank” using “labor-value certificates” which neither charged nor paid interest, similar to Warren’s time stores which functioned as Rexroth writes as “an interest-free credit union [with] loans in labor and commodities and eventually money.” (Bookchin, pp. 20-1; Dolgoff, p. 67; Hyams, pp. 85-6; Rexroth, p. 238)

While Edward Bellamy never stated the sources for the ideas which he included in his utopian fiction Looking Backward published in 1888, it is entirely possible that he was familiar with Josiah Warren’s publications, primarily his 1847 book Equitable Commerce, since both lived in Massachusetts in the 1860s and ‘70s, and Bellamy was known to have an extensive library.

Not until Kat Kinkade developed the vacation-credit labor system at Twin Oaks Community in the summer of 1967 would a successful communal labor-credit system be invented. Edward Bellamy had included a time-based “credit card” system in his Looking Backward utopian fiction, and from this the Harvard psychologist B. F. Skinner got the idea that a community could use ledger accounts for managing individual labor contributions with no form of exchange of anything like coins or scrip [i.e., paper bills]. In his utopian fiction Walden Two (1948) Skinner wrote, “Bellamy suggested the principle in Looking Backward.” (Kinkade, p. 45; Skinner, 2005, p. 46)

Warren, Bellamy, Skinner, and others have also suggested rewarding labor differently for different types of work in communal society. For about ten years Walden House in Washington D.C., Twin Oaks Community in Virginia, and East Wind Community in Missouri all experimented with “variable-credit labor systems” from 1966 until about 1976, rewarding some work done with more labor-credits than other work, until members decided to value equally all labor that benefits the community. It is an important lesson to keep in mind that variable compensation for labor is an aspect of monetary economics, while being both impractical and anathema to time-based economics, which values all labor equally, from childcare to corporate governance.

Building upon Skinner’s idea of ledger accounts, Kat Kinkade’s brilliant innovation, called by the present author the “vacation-credit labor system,” involves the whole community agreeing to set for themselves a weekly work quota that all members agree to meet, with vacation time earned when a member works over-quota. Working “under-quota” requires making up the difference in following weeks. This time-based economy, called at Twin Oaks simply the “labor-credit system,” became as Twin Oaks member Mala stated to a reporter, “the glue that keeps this community together.” (Mala, quoted in Rems, 2003) Different versions of the vacation-credit labor system have since been adopted by other communal groups, many of which have been or are networked in the Federation of Egalitarian Communities (FEC).

It is phenomenal how for 140 years the thing that was usually given up first when communal groups failed, their time-based economy, became the most important thing that now makes them successful! Kat Kinkade essentially created the first complete alternative economic system to that of monetary economics, existing now over 50 years, with versions practiced in a number of different communal groups, and sadly, very few people outside of the egalitarian communities movement know anything about it! It would seem that such an achievement would be worthy of much pride and promotion, yet most people think nothing of it. Reporters, academicians, and even members of the communal societies come and go and rarely ever understand the significance of the vacation-credit labor system’s place in the centuries-long effort to enable economic and gender equality.

While feminism may be the primary organizational ideal of the communal societies comprising the Federation of Egalitarian Communities, as the Indiana University psychologist Jon Wagner wrote in his 1982 book Sex Roles in Contemporary American Communes, “They have deliberately eschewed charismatic leaders and monolithic ideologies in favor of a pluralistic ethos, rational social planning, and participatory democracy.” In her correspondence with Wagner, Kat Kinkade wrote, these communities “ … make a strong point of absolute sexual equality, … This idea is fundamental to our idea of ‘equality,’ and equality is fundamental to our approach to changing society. There is no platform of our ideology that is more central.” Wagner points out that these egalitarian communities make a point to avoid sexist language by using the gender-neutral word “co” and the possessive “cos” for third-person pronouns, as coined in 1970 by Mary Orovan, a feminist writer in New York City. Jon Wagner concludes, “These communities may be among the most nonsexist social systems in human history.” (Wagner, pp. 36-8)

Extending equality in America from the political system to the economic system was the whole point of Bellamy’s Looking Backward, which was immensely influential around the end of the 19^th century. Today, the time-based, labor-credit system innovations made by Kat Kinkade have successfully enabled the very thing that has eluded social reformers and revolutionaries since the early Industrial Revolution—a truly egalitarian economic system—which would seem to be exactly what Winstanley, Morelly, Owen, Warren, Proudhon, Marx & Engels, Bellamy, Skinner, Bookchin, and many others have sought!

While the vacation-credit labor system is the most advanced form of time-based economy, there are also much less involved and structured time-based economies in use. Volunteerism can be considered the simplest time-based system, often justified as “giving back” and “paying it forward.” There are also many time-exchange systems, often computer-assisted, like Time Dollars, and many alternative currencies facilitating the exchange of services as well as commodities. During the Great Depression it was found that labor-exchanges were utilized far more than alternative currencies. (See chapter VI:7 in The Intentioneer’s Bible) At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in England many self-help, solidarity, and mutual aid projects began among the population, since government had not yet understood the necessity of social welfare programs. These had various names, like “Friendly Societies” and “Odd Fellows.” What was so odd about the Odd Fellows? It was the practice of helping others for mutual benefit within a dominant culture of competition, thought to be odd even at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the 18^th century! In response to the Industrial Revolution came the entire cooperative movement, including consumer, producer or worker cooperatives, the labor union movement, mutual insurance companies, and many more initiatives, many of which are still with us. One might expect that initiatives arising today will also become established anti-capitalist programs in the future, a likely contender being the Mutual-Aid Network (MAN), which is using easily accessed online tools such as Zoom for group communication and Slack for small and large work-group coordination.

Egalitarian Religion: Answer to the Anguish of the Ages Caused by Patriarchy and Property

In his 1965 book Utopias and Utopian Thought Frank Manuel compared the imagining of, and the attempts to build utopian or ideal societies, as being like “dreams generated by denied needs and repressed wishes.” In his analogy Manuel suggested that as people project their denied and repressed lifestyle desires into utopian fiction writings and into their designs for intentional community, they are essentially responding to the problems of their contemporary culture, saying “… the utopia may well be a sensitive indicator of where the sharpest anguish of an age lies.” (Manuel, 1965, p.70)

While repressed and denied cultural desires and needs have been expressed in different ways through the ages, much of the distress can be attributed to the anguish caused by the negative aspects of patriarchy and property. These two sources of personal anxiety and cultural stress are closely related, and it can be said that patriarchy as a lifestyle was specifically created to affirm and justify private property held by men, including women and children as well as material wealth.

The answer to the anguish of the ages is to provide the option of choosing a common-property lifestyle over the dominant culture’s emphasis upon the private-property lifestyle, or a specific balance of the two, and to provide the option of choosing a gender-partnership over the dominant culture’s emphasis upon patriarchy. People typically need to know that they have choices in order to be happy with whatever they choose. The freedom to choose is often more important than the particular choice, because people’s needs and desires change with time and circumstances.

In matriarchal cultures family names and wealth were both passed down from mother to daughter, while men often did not even know which children of the village were their own, since a woman’s brothers helped to raise her children, not the children’s biological fathers. While women ruled the domestic scene men ran the businesses. Evidently, not all men liked that cultural arrangement, so some adopted patriarchal culture to enable men to control women’s reproduction in order to assure that men would be able to pass their private wealth to their biological sons. This is a simplistic explanation for why the dominant culture is what it is today, while there is certainly much more to be said, although I’ll keep it brief in this paper!

While the switch from matriarchal to patriarchal culture happened at different times around the world, for Western Civilization the change is thought to have begun with three large migratory waves from about 4400 to 2800 B.C.E., of Proto-Indo-European, patrilineal, semi-nomadic, militaristic, mounted warriors from the Russian steppes north of the Caucasus Mountains into the lands of peaceful, sedentary, matrilineal cultures from Ireland to Chinese Turkestan. These invaders, named “Kurgans” by Marija Gimbutas after the Russian word for their burial mounds, where most of the evidence of their culture is found, imposed their hierarchical culture upon the “equalitarian Old Europeans” and other peoples they encountered. The only surviving indigenous Old European culture today is the Basques of the western Pyrenees Mountains of northern Spain and south-western France, home of the Mondragon Cooperatives, who have maintained much of their ancient language and culture. (Gimbutas, 1991, p. 348; Gimbutas, 2001, pp. xv-xvi, 53)

A little more recently, just after 2000 B.C.E., Abraham, from the polytheistic Sumerian city of Ur in Mesopotamia, joined a back-to-the-land movement headed for Palestine, where his descendants, the Hebrew Tribes, Israelites, or Jewish people, made patriarchy into a monotheistic religion, later to inspire patriarchal Christians, Islamics, and others.

With the change from matriarchy to patriarchy the cultural pendulum essentially swung from one extreme to the other, while today we may hope for a happy medium in order to enjoy a cultural partnership of the genders. For men, DNA tests now take care of the need for proof-of-paternity, while women are continually making advancements in their rights and freedoms, such as with the recent “MeToo” movement.

In the same way that more than two millennia ago the Jewish priests, in order to replace matriarchy with patriarchy, re-mythed earlier stories of the Goddess, the Creatress of the Earth and Queen of Heaven (Eisler, p. 85), who according to myth instructed women in the domestic arts of agriculture, food processing, pottery, weaving, healthcare, child-raising, and language, people may now re-myth the Judeo-Christian-Islamic stories and traditions to affirm a gender-partnership culture affirming a Partnership Spirituality. Such a gender-equal culture may combine all the masculine aspects of God, Jesus, and priests, along with the feminine attributes of the Goddess and priestesses found in women’s spirituality, to create a new binarian monotheism in the same way that trinitarian monotheism (i.e., Trinitarian Christianity) was created: We say it is so, then for us, so it is!

Women and men creating a partnership culture have the potential for ending the anguish of the ages caused by the imbalances of male-gender-dominance and exclusive male property ownership. Gender equality is not a new idea since many traditional cultures had a form of binarian polytheism, as they honored both gods and goddesses, such as the Mongols and some Native American tribes affirming both a male sky-god and a female mother-earth goddess. (Weatherford, 2004, pp. 20, 33)

With an egalitarian, binarian spiritual-religious foundation, people may more likely be able to construct and enjoy an egalitarian political-economic system, with or without the use of money. As explained in the previous section “LIVE FREE!,” non-monetary, time-based economies go the furthest toward valuing income-generating labor and domestic labor equally.

In the earlier section, “The Communal Ideal of 19^th century Marxist Communism Realized in 20^th century Egalitarian Communities,” I explained that the second stage of Marxist communism as a projected classless, moneyless utopia already exists in the Federation of Egalitarian Communities, with member communities now over fifty years old. Marxists typically do not accept that communal societies like those in the FEC represent what Marx and Engels talked about with regard to the second and end stage of communism, since they disparaged intentional communities of all types, and because the largest FEC groups are only about a hundred adult members. The scale of intentional communities is much smaller than that of nation-states, and even smaller than any micro-state like Vatican City (population 800), so it could be said that Twin Oaks and other intentional communities are nano-states nested within nation-states. Yet since utopian communal societies are internally moneyless and classless they are the closest thing to Marxist utopianism, attained without a prior stage of violent revolution!

The Federation of Egalitarian Communities (FEC) skipped the violence of Marxist communism and went straight to the second level of the proverbial Marxist classless society and moneyless economy, which is essentially the model of the non-monastic communal society inclusive of children.

**End of Part 4 of 5**

Portions of this article were previously published in the author’s 2016 e-book The Intentioneer’s Bible

(see: Amazon.com), and other portions are to appear in the author’s forthcoming book.

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A Countercultural Religious Left response to the Dominant Culture’s Religious Right

***

A. Allen Butcher • The School of Intentioneering • Denver, Colorado • November 4, 2020

http://www.Intentioneers.net • AllenInUtopia@consultant.com • over 16,000 words in 5 Parts

For definitions of terms and explanations of concepts see the glossary at the end of Part 5.

***

Toward an Age of Equality ­– Part 5 of 5 ­– Communitarian Mysticism

So Here We Are In Utopia! 😊

Welcome to a lifestyle expressing your highest ideals and most cherished values! People can make any kind of agreements they like, creating many different forms of intentional community. Designing and living in a communal society presents four primary challenges of communal organization: governance, economics, children and family life, and land and legal structure. A fifth, optional challenge is religion and spirituality, unless the communal society is incorporated as a Religious and Apostolic Association (IRS 501(d)), in which case a statement of religious belief is required. Aspects of these five challenges are characteristic of other non-communal intentional communities as well.

• Participatory governance: consensus, sociocracy, planner-manager, democracy, and democratic decentralism. There are communal societies, like monasteries, using authoritarian decision-making processes yet those are not participatory and therefore are not egalitarian.

The planner-manager system, similar to sociocracy, involves the whole group delegating responsibility for decision-making in particular areas of the community to individuals, crews, or committees, which may be self-selecting rather than elected positions, yet open communication, agreement-seeking, petition, overview, and recall make this a participatory form of governance.

Democratic decentralism provides participatory governance for large numbers of people like towns divided into neighborhoods, with each having separate decision-making bodies, all sending representatives to a central coordinating body. This is basically how the Federation or FEC is organized, although those communities are not contiguous and instead are some distance from each other, while the largest communal societies tend toward subdividing in this way as well. Representatives of neighborhoods or communities may be delegated the authority to make decisions as they think is best for their constituents in delegate assemblies, or may be limited to only casting votes in representative assemblies according to instructions received from their constituents. Although they all mean the same thing, the term “democratic decentralism” is used in the School of Intentioneering in part to differentiate from the terms with the same meaning used by the Institute for Social Ecology, including: “confederal municipalism,” “democratic confederalism,” and the French meaning of “commune.”

• Communal economics: income-generating and other production labor, such as construction, agriculture, maintenance, governance etc., and domestic or reproduction labor such as food service, cleaning, childcare, education, recreation, and healthcare, are all integrated within one time-based, non-exchange, non-monetary economy. In the time-based economy called by the present author the “vacation-credit labor system” all labor is valued equally [see the last four paragraphs of the section “LIVE FREE”]. In this way, no money or any other exchange system is used within the communal society, and all domestic labor or “women’s work” is valued equally with all other kinds of work, including income-generating labor.

Since no community is totally self-reliant, engaging with the outside world’s monetary economy is necessary for everything the community needs or wants yet cannot produce for itself. Typically, half of the community’s on-system labor supply (number of working members x weekly work quota = labor supply) is devoted to income-producing labor, either in the community’s own businesses or in jobs outside of the community.

            Distribution of commodities or services within the communal society does not require setting a value on the commodity or service, instead, a member’s right to access to services and things simply depends upon the availability, with shortages requiring additional production. To provide things to members, the community simply plans the production of them, or plans to make the money to acquire services and things, usually through annual planning processes, which includes adjusting the labor quota as desired. Distribution may be: according to need like healthcare; or according to chance like rolling dice or drawing straws; or first-come-first-served for things “up for grabs;” or by more sophisticated processes like the “double-blind preferences matrix,” in which particular things, like private rooms, are assigned to members by matching individuals to the available things in the way that assures that the greatest number of applicants possible receive their first or second choice. The “double-blind” aspect involves a set of things like rooms being given names of something like flowers, then the people desiring them are given names of something like animals, then someone who does not know how the rooms or people are coded arranges the matrix so that as many as possible of the animals gets their first or second choice of flower.

Community-owned businesses, generating income for the community, are technically owned by all the members, not just by those who work in them, so they are not simply “worker-owned business,” yet the workers are part of the ownership group and so in this way communal societies are part of the worker-owned business movement.

• Children and family life: Communal childcare is a wonderful thing for children and parents when it works, and it works best in small groups. There are at least two major problems in large-group communal childcare programs, the first being that parents tend to leave the community with their children by the time they reach school age, and the second being that if the family does stay in the community the children will usually leave once they become adults, and so community members who do not have children tend to not want to support children in the community, or tend to want to limit the number of children in the community. Part of the reason for parents taking their children out of communal society is to avoid having to struggle through annual planning processes for the support they want for their children, causing some to think it is easier to leave communal society and take their chances in the outside world. Another problem in large communal childcare programs, involving many children and adult caregivers, is the turn-over in children, parents and other caregivers as adults come and go with their children, often resulting in the whole group having to renegotiate many childcare issues with each new caregiver. The obvious solution is then to design small-group childcare around each child or family or age cohort, involving less than ten children and adults, called by the present author a “cofamily.” This is the childcare model now in use at Twin Oaks and East Wind communities. Both of these communities ended their large-group childcare programs in the mid-1990s and evolved the cofamily design, although they may not yet be using that term to describe their current model of communal childcare.

            Cofamily communities of three-to-nine persons of any age exist as either small intentional communities in their own right, or as a “nested cofamily” when joining or arising within a larger intentional community, like a communal, cooperative, cohousing, land trust or other form of intentional community.

            The cofamily concept adds to the existing forms of “family” based upon marriage or blood relations, including: single-parent, nuclear, serially monogamous, blended, and extended families. The “cofamily” then is a different type of family created around a set of affinities and agreements among the cofamily group.

Communal societies may be said to include a housing cooperative, food cooperative, childcare cooperative, etc., however, they cannot be said to include or be a cohousing community. Cohousing communities are typically designed specifically for families with children, with a particular space-use design involving each individual or family having their own apartment or house, including a private kitchen and bath, while also sharing a central building providing community services, usually including a kitchen and dining space large enough for the whole community, a childcare space, and maybe a community office, healthcare clinic, library, greenhouse, workshop, or any other amenity the community decides to provide for itself. Unlike communal societies, cohousing communities have no commonly-owned property, instead they share privately-owned property usually through a condominium or other homeowners association.

• Land and legal structure: land in a communal society could be said to be in a form of community land trust (CLT), yet the legal ownership structure is different from the basic CLT model, which typically uses a state non-profit corporation, and sometimes a federal tax-exempt organization. The legal structure designed specifically for communal societies is the IRS 501(d) Religious and Apostolic Association. This is essentially a form of partnership, in which the total annual community net income is divided equally on paper for each member, who then claims the income on their personal tax return. If the average personal net income is less than the taxable amount, and it usually is, then the community pays no taxes. Because the community shares so much it does not need as many cars or as much of hardly any consumer commodity that a similar number of people would have in the outside world, and so communal sharing enables practically a lower-middle-class lifestyle on poverty level income.

Communal societies emphasizing self-reliance in food, building materials, energy and other forms of self-reliance often refer to themselves as ecovillages, which is a separate network of intentional communities. The Global Ecovillages Network or GEN is comprised of communities using a range of different legal structures and design formats, including some cohousing, housing cooperatives, community land trusts, communal societies, class-harmony communities, etc. Ecovillages emphasize ecological sustainability through permaculture and related design concepts. The particular value of communalism is that the lifestyle can be one of the most efficient in the use of resources, therefore enabling one of the most environmentally responsible lifestyles.

            The IRS does require each 501(d) organization to file a “Statement of Religious Belief,” which can say practically anything since religion cannot be defined by the government. Federation communities using the 501(d) incorporation status typically write a one-page religious statement including a range of spiritual ideals and values, usually drawing from religious traditions such as: Unitarian Universalism, Native American Spirituality, Eastern religions, Christianity, Paganism, Humanism, and other sources.

An ironic aspect of egalitarian community is that while religions usually develop first and then seek to inspire and support communal expressions of their values, in the case of the Federation of Egalitarian Communities, the communal application of equality as a lifestyle was created first, with its religious expression developing as an afterthought. The design of egalitarian communalism provides a model of communal society representing the furthest expression of egalitarian religion, which then inspires people to create forms of egalitarian community in their lives providing for various degrees of private versus common property, whether communal, collective, cooperative, cohousing, coliving, cofamily, class-harmony, ecovillage, land trust or other. Any of these forms of intentional community can practice at least gender equality in governance and labor-gifting, without also being economically communal.

Mysticism and Revelation Blended in Partnership Spirituality

Egalitarian religion affirms a balance between different beliefs and lifestyle preferences, such as between private and common property ownership, between patriarchy and matriarchy, and between mysticism and revelation, all to be balanced in Partnership Spirituality. Generally, the idea of equality requires or assumes differences between at least two things, such as the two forms of property, common and private, the two primary genders, female and male, and the two forms of spirituality, mysticism and revelation. The intent is to not emphasize any one thing to the exclusion of the other, as in subsuming a lesser thing into a dominant thing, whether belief or lifestyle, yet instead to affirm and highlight opposites, such that the holistic perspective of balancing differences creates a strength greater than either alone.

With respect to religious beliefs and spiritual convictions, transforming the dominant religion in America from the Trinitarian monotheism of Christianity to a Binarian monotheism of Partnership only requires looking into how the Judeo-Christian tradition was developed and model that for creating a Partnership religion.  As discussed in the second section of Part 1, “Social Change and the Culture Wars,” in the same way that earlier matriarchal traditions were re-mythed in service to patriarchal religion, so can patriarchal religion be re-mythed in service to Partnership Spirituality. In the same way that Jesus was deified as a co-equal part of Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit, so also can Jesus’ partner Mary Magdalene be deified as Maid, Mother, and Elder. We say it is so, then for us, so it is!

Regarding Partnership Spirituality in the Old Testament, consider that Hebrew women worshipped for centuries the Canaanite mother-goddess Asherah, often quietly at home since women were excluded from many of the rites of patriarchal Judaism. William Dever explains in Did God Have a Wife? that Asherah was a patroness of women, and many terra cotta female figurines which may have been representations of the Goddess have been excavated in Palestine. (Dever, pp. 176-180) As Raphael Patai explains in The Hebrew Goddess, “of the 370 years during which the Solomonic Temple [dedicated to Yahweh] stood in Jerusalem, for no less than 236 years [nearly 2/3 of the time] the statue of Asherah was present in the Temple, and her worship was a part of the legitimate religion … opposed by only a few prophetic voices crying out against it at relatively long intervals.” (Patai, p. 50) Asherah worship often took place in hilltop groves of trees, or with the Goddess Asherah represented by a single tree, or even a simple pole in the ground, so it is not known exactly how she was represented in Solomon’s Temple. “Asherah remained in the Temple, at home alongside Yahweh, where many Israelites (perhaps most) thought she belonged.” (Patai, p. 212) There are many representations of female aspects in Judaism, often with respect to wisdom as a female trait. The most provocative is Proverbs 8:1-36. “Can’t you hear the voice of wisdom? She is standing at the city gates and at every fork in the road, and at the door of every house. … I, Wisdom, give good advice and common sense. … For whoever finds me finds life and wins approval from the Lord.” (Proverbs 8:1-3, 14, 35) Bible passages are explained in different ways, and for those seeking her the Goddess can be found among them.

With regard to property, while the goal of Marxist communism may be a communal equality, which is now realized in egalitarian communalism, what has been found is that communal societies need the alternative of the private-property system of the dominant culture, as much as that dominant culture needs the alternative of egalitarian communalism. With respect to gender, the goal of androgyny or sexual ambiguity is one way of balancing female and male, while another way is valuing, honoring, and celebrating the differences between the genders such that neither overlords the other. With an appreciation for religious tolerance and pluralism a Partnership Spirituality balances the revelation of a transcendent patriarchal God with the mysticism of an immanent matriarchal Goddess, such that together the feminine and masculine aspects of spiritual and religious ideals and beliefs reflect the nature of gendered sentient life on the planet!

With the range and speed of changes occurring today this is a particularly good time to suggest alternatives to the values and systems of the dominant culture, including lifestyle, political-economy, and religion/spirituality. In 2018 and 2019 the Pew Research Institute conducted a survey of religion in America and found that significant changes are under way. The report titled “In U.S., Decline of Christianity Continues at Rapid Pace” shows that people are moving away from organized religion to “none of the above.” The report states, “65% of American adults describe themselves as Christians when asked about their religion, down 12 percentage points over the past decade. … Both Protestantism and Catholicism are experiencing losses of population share. Currently, 43% of U.S. adults identify with Protestantism, down from 51% in 2009. And one-in-five adults (20%) are Catholic, down from 23% in 2009. … Meanwhile, the religiously unaffiliated share of the population, consisting of people who describe their religious identity as atheist, agnostic or ‘nothing in particular,’ now stands at 26%, up from 17% in 2009. Self-described atheists now account for 4% of U.S. adults, up modestly but significantly from 2% in 2009; agnostics make up 5% of U.S. adults, up from 3% a decade ago; and 17% of Americans now describe their religion as ‘nothing in particular,’ up from 12% in 2009. Members of non-Christian religions also have grown modestly as a share of the adult population.” (Pew Research, 2019)

Clearly, the research shows that there is a significant ongoing shift in religious attitudes in America, so this is the time to offer a belief structure that builds upon what already exists, toward a spirituality that reduces conflict between the genders, between those who are attached to private property and those who prefer common property, and between those who only care for a patriarchal, transcendent sky-God known by revelation coming from outside our mind, and those who appreciate a matriarchal, immanent earth-Goddess known by the mysticism of intuition coming through the Earth into our body and mind.

While there is a large amount of written material about and experience of the dominant, transcendent, patriarchal religion, the conservative perspective of which is called the “Religious Right,” there is less about its opposite, the countercultural, gender-equal, Earth-based, immanent spirituality indwelling or inherent to the universe, comprising part of the “Religious Left.” Generally, the Religious Left includes forms of Christianity focused upon social justice, which would include: the Catholic Worker communities; the Protestant “social gospel” movement; and the traditions that came out of Christianity including the Quaker’s concept of the “inner light,” Transcendentalism’s “inner divinity,” and Unitarian Universalism’s religious pluralism. 

One way for a person to appreciate Partnership Spirituality would be through the common religious experience of a sudden realization or self-actualization, such as through Abraham Maslow’s concept of a “peak experience,” yet in the absence of an epiphany reorienting one’s entire perspective on reality, people can simply affirm Partnership Spirituality with the affirmation, “We say it is so, then for us, so it is!”

***

Glossary of Terms and Concepts used in the School of Intentioneering

Communal—although this term has various dictionary definitions, in the School of Intentioneering it is used exclusively to refer to the common ownership of property and wealth, whether the governance structure is authoritarian or participatory.

Democratic decentralism—participatory governance for large numbers of people like towns divided into neighborhoods, with each having separate decision-making bodies, all sending representatives to a central coordinating body. This is basically how the Federation or FEC is organized, although those communities are not contiguous and instead are some distance from each other, while the largest communal societies tend toward subdividing in this way as well. Representatives of neighborhoods or communities may be delegated the authority to make decisions as they think is best for their constituents in delegate assemblies, or may be limited to only casting votes in representative assemblies according to instructions received from their constituents. Although they all mean the same thing, the term “democratic decentralism” is used in the School of Intentioneering in part to differentiate from the terms with the same meaning used by the Institute for Social Ecology, including: “confederal municipalism,” “democratic confederalism,” and the French meaning of “commune.”

Egalitarian Communalism — the furthest expression of gender partnership in which all property is owned and controlled in common by women and men, including the means-of-production. Community-ownership or common-ownership, with women and men sharing all domestic and other labor, and facilitating gender-equality in governance, is the most egalitarian social structure. Communal members may or may not form families, cofamiles, or polyamorous relationships within the communal society.

Worker-Ownership — the means-of-production, or capital, is owned in common and profits are shared. Shared governance with open bookkeeping or transparent accounting is usually practiced.

Land Commons — “the commons” is the natural and cultural resources shared by all. In traditional societies this may be practically everything, while for the present private-property system legal designs have been created to protect various forms of commons, from land, to the electro-magnetic spectrum, to open-source knowledge. The land commons may be protected: by governments, such as for maintaining parks and waterways, or by taxing for the public good via the land-value tax (LVT) that portion of land value created not by the land owner, instead by society through population density and government services; or by private organizations called conservation land trusts for keeping land wild; or by community land trusts (CLT) for housing, schools, businesses, self-reliant homesteads, etc.

Class-Harmony Community — the means-of-production and usually most property is owned by an individual or small-group, while others rent property from the (hopefully) benevolent owners. Tenants may be individuals, families, or cofamilies.

Methods of Domestic Sharing:

Matriarchy — all or most property is owned by women who are head-of-the-household, inheriting family names and property. Typically, siblings grow up together in large households headed by a matriarch. Upon adulthood each young woman is given a bedroom in the household with one door opening to the outside and one door opening to an interior space or courtyard of the multi-room women’s house. Upon reaching adulthood the men live outside of the women’s household in smaller male-only housing, becoming male partners of any number of women, with children in different women’s households. The women would know their own children; while the men may never know which children are their own. Men run the businesses that support the family or extended family. (See: Goettner-Abendroth, 2009 & 2012).

Patriarchy — all or most property is owned by men who are head-of-the-household, inheriting family names and property. Typically, women leave their families to marry and live with their husband’s family, called patrilocal marriage. Monogamous marriage, serial-monogamy, blended families, polygamous families, and extended families, may all be headed by a patriarch. In some patriarchal cultures men essentially own women and girls like with all other property. In many patriarchal cultures women have to win and maintain their right to own property, own businesses, participate in governance, and lead religious institutions.

Partnership — property is owned by women, by men, or in common. Gender-equality is practiced in governance, business, and domestic home-life. Gender-equal or egalitarian marriage, serial-marriage, polyamory, or cofamily may be practiced.

Polyamorous families — women and/or men have two or more intimate partners, whether all of the involved adults live together or separately. The pleasure in seeing one’s partner enjoying being with their plural partners is called “compersion,” a term coined by the polyfidelitous Kerista Commune in 1970s San Francisco.

Cofamilies — three-to-nine, non-related people, with or without children, living in community. Women and men in cofamilies may or may not have polyamorous multiple intimate partners within the group. When a cofamily forms within or joins a larger intentional community, whether communal, cohousing, land trust, ecovillage, cooperative, etc, they are called a “nested cofamily.”

Cohousing — involves the sharing of privately-owned property with no or minimal commonly-owned property. The “common house” in cohousing is not owned-in-common, it is legally a form of private ownership called “undivided interest,” and is surrounded by the privately-owned housing units. The community is typically structured as a condominium or housing cooperative. Gender-equality is typically practiced in the governance structure of the cohousing community.

Ecovillage — a traditional village or an intentional community, either minimizing its impact on the natural world or enhancing the symbiosis of human and nonhuman living things, by incorporating ecological and sustainable features and practices, often called “permaculture.”

**End of Part 5 of 5**

Portions of this article were previously published in the author’s 2016 e-book The Intentioneer’s Bible

(see: Amazon.com), and other portions are to appear in the author’s forthcoming book.

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“We can dream of a culture of harmony and peace in balance with nature” . . .

Marija Gimbutas tells an origin story that at the very beginning of Western Civilization lay cultures that were peaceful and long-lasting, which she named “Old Europe.” This was the Late Stone Age or Neolithic time of southeastern Europe (Greece, Italy, the Balkans) of 10,000 years ago, give or take a few centuries, when our European ancestors lived in a female-centered culture in which the settlements had no fortifications and the people made no weapons of war. Learn how this peaceful culture existed and how it ended in the video:

Take an hour out of your life to learn of Marija Gimbutas’ lifetime of work in archeological mythology to awaken us to what we lost, by watching the video “Signs Out Of Time” by Donna Read and Starhawk.

Today the idea of “partnership” is to create an egalitarian culture which is neither matriarchal nor patriarchal in a Partnership Spirituality.