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.

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.

So there's that change of general consciousness, and then there's this boom after the war, this expansion into the West. It was like the 1950s. The American economy was pumping at top speed. The kinds of people who would move into these communities and organize their lives around a utopian dream now had dreams about the West.

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.

The biggest names in the Transcendentalist literary circle visited the community regularly, and supported it, but they couldn't live there happily. Hawthorne [who was briefly a resident] left for reasons I'm sure make sense to you he couldn't get enough writing done in a house full of people playing music, and arguing. It was too busy.

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.

The religious and irreligious are agreeing with each other almost all the time. Their rhetoric is the same, and their plans are the same. Through slightly different interpretations, they all think the same thing is going to happen, that the Earth is going to be perfected and that humans are going to do the work of perfecting it.

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?