The Amana Colonies, founded in 1855 by the German Pietist Community of True Inspiration, held property in common and worshipped in deliberately unadorned meeting houses for nearly eighty years, a communal economic system paired directly to the religious authority of the church's inspired leaders. That arrangement ended by an internal vote rather than by outside pressure or economic collapse. In 1932, in what members still call the Great Change, the community voted to separate its religious life from its economic one, reorganizing into the Amana Church Society, which continued as a religious body, and the Amana Society, a joint stock corporation that took over the colonies' farms and workshops and eventually built the household appliance business that made the Amana name famous nationally as a refrigerator and air conditioner brand with no obvious connection, to most buyers, to a nineteenth century religious commune.
Quaker and German Reformed farming communities settled Iowa's eastern counties in the same general period as Amana's founding, and the state's smaller Mennonite and Amish communities, modest compared with Pennsylvania's or Ohio's, keep a similar plain dress and communal worship tradition in the rural east today. Mainline Protestant identification leads the state at twenty five percent of adults, per Pew's 2023-24 study, ahead of Evangelical Protestant at twenty one and Nothing in Particular at twenty two.