The Hutterites: To Care and Not to Care

Gateway Films, Vision Video, Worchester, PA, 1984, 60 minutes, DVD

While other utopian societies die, the Hutterites have grown in North America to more than 40,000 living in over 300 self-sufficient villages. They are a society where faithfulness to Christ's teachings is more important than self-advancement or worldly comforts. By yielding themselves completely to community, the Hutterites have rid themselves of poverty, homicide and anxiety about the future.

Although maintaining their medieval culture, the Hutterites farm over a million acres of land in Canada and the United States using the most advance farm equipment, and even computers.

Surviving harassment from those around them, the Hutterites have lived strict communal lives based on the teachings of the Bible. In their schools, they continue to teach their children eternal values, in German, despite government regulation of education.

"This film is an extraordinary achievement. It is a sensitive and illuminating document that provides strong visual evidence for the apparent contentment and security enjoyed by people who eschew individualism in all its forms. Holding values so different from those of other North Americans, the Hutterites, as portrayed here, provide a strong case for an alternative way of life in the midst of American industrialism."

George L. Hicks, Brown University
in The American Anthropologist