You’ve heard it right. On this small community of Christians, there is no crime, no debt, and no homelessness.
Houses there are surrounded by acres of forest. On a warm day, they can swim in a lake, with no worries of their mortgage, as it is paid. Evenings are spent at a communal barbecue, where the community sing songs around the fire.
People chat and read books. No one is glued to a phone and children don’t fight over the Xbox because no one has a computer or TV.
In a lot of ways, this can be a person’s ideal utopia.
The women are dressed modestly – scarves cover their hair while their long skirts and shirts look like sackcloth.
The lives of the 300 people here are not their own because they’re serving a higher being: Jesus.
They must ask permission to start ‘courting’ a person who has caught their eye, no one can divorce and they can’t choose their jobs or have any possessions.
Most people have never heard of the Bruderhof, unsurprising as there are just 3,000 members of the small Christian sect in the world, spread across the UK (there’s another in Nonington, Kent, and a small one in Peckham, south London), the US, Germany, Australia and Paraguay.
‘We have a different vision for our society,’ says Bernard Hibbs, 38, the community’s outreach director who has let in TV cameras for the first time.
Can you live like this?
(Image Credit: BBC/ CTVC/ Danny Burrows)
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"No crime." Ha...I guess you can't have crime if people are too scared to speak up and there's no law enforcement to report it to.
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