Adin Ballou was an American proponent of Christian nonresistance, Christian anarchism, and Christian socialism. He was also an abolitionist. During his long career as a Universalist and Unitarian minister, he tirelessly advocated for the immediate abolition of slavery and the principles of Christianity. His prolific writings promoted the nonviolent theory of praxis (or moral suasion). 

Adin Ballou was born in Cumberland on April 23, 1803, to Ariel and Edilda Ballou. His father was a farmer, and while Ballou craved a school and college education, his father did not have the means to send him. During the Christian ‘reformation’ sweeping through northern Rhode Island, his father became a deacon within the community.

Adin was raised as a Baptist until 1813, when he and his whole family were converted into what was then called a Christian Convection Revival. Ballou’s entire life was characterized by religious passion as he moved from Universalism to Restorationism to a Unitarian ministry. He devoted his energies to such social reforms as abolitionism, temperance, women’s rights, and pacifism.

Ballou became an advocate of Christian pacifism by 1838. Standard of Practical Christianity was composed in 1839 by Ballou and a few ministerial colleagues and laymen. The signatories announced their withdrawal from “the governments of the world.” They believed the dependence on force to maintain order was unjust and vowed not to participate in such a government. While they did not acknowledge the earthly rule of man, they also did not rebel or “resist any of their ordinances by physical force.” “We cannot employ carnal weapons nor any physical violence whatsoever,” they proclaimed, “not even for the preservation of our lives. We cannot render evil for evil… nor do otherwise than ‘love our enemies.'”

His ministry was in the Massachusetts towns north of the Rhode Island border. Ballou’s most famous experiment was the 1843 creation of a utopian community in the western part of Milford that he named Hopedale. It was based on what he called “practical Christianity,” or the application of Christian ethics into daily life. At that time, he published several essays about “Christian nonresistance.” After fourteen years, this noble experiment went bankrupt and evolved into a textile factory town dominated by the Draper Corporation.

Ballou wrote a history of Milford in 1882, four years before its Hopedale section, 5.3 square miles in area, was set off from Milford and incorporated by Massachusetts as a separate town. Hopedale remains true to what Ballou stood for, in keeping of the street names – “Peace,” “Hope,” “Freedom,” and “Union.” A statue of Ballou is in Adin Ballou Park in Hopedale, Massachusetts. The park also contains a small, weathered front doorstep and a boot-scraper, the only surviving remains of the original farmhouse the first Hopedale Settlers built.

 Ballou’s writings drew the admiration of Leo Tolstoy, who frequently cited Ballou as a major influence on his theological and political ideology in his nonfiction texts like The Kingdom of God is Within You, along with sponsoring Russian translations of some of Ballou’s works. Ballou’s Christian anarchist and nonresistance ideals in texts like Practical Christianity were passed down from Tolstoy to Mahatma Gandhi, contributing not only to the nonviolent resistance movement in the Russian Revolution led by the Tolstoyans but also Gandhi’s early thinking on the nonviolent theory of praxis and the development of his first ashram, the Tolstoy Farm. The  American philosopher and anarchist Crispin Sartwell wrote that the works by Ballou and his other Christian anarchist contemporaries like William Lloyd Garrison directly influenced Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.

Ballou, ever the reformer, died in Hopedale on August 5, 1890, at the age of eighty-seven, survived by his wife Lucy (Hunter). His first wife, Abigail Sayles, died in 1829 in childbirth after seven years of marriage. Their child, Abbie, was the only one of Adin’s four children who lived to adulthood.

Adin Ballou was inducted into The Rhode Island Heritage Hall of Fame on September 29, 2024.

For additional reading:

• Edward K. Spann in Hopedale: From Commune to Company Town, 1840-1920 (1992).
• Mace, Emily. “Ballou, Adin (1803-1890) | Harvard Square Library”. 30, 2023.
•  Master, Web (December 13, 2000). “Ballou, Adin”. Dictionary of Unitarian & Universalist Biography.