How John Alexander Dowie and Wilbur Glenn Voliva turned Zion, Illinois Into a Theocratic Epicenter of the Flat‑Earth Movement

If you’ve ever driven through a quiet Midwestern town and thought to yourself, “This place seems nice, but what it really needs is a self-declared prophet, a flat-earth zealot, and enough lawsuits to wallpaper the Sears Tower,” then buckle up. You’d fit right in with the early days of Zion, Illinois. This is the story of two men whose ambitions were larger than their theological training and whose grasp on reality was, generously, optional. It is also the story of a town that began as a utopia, detoured into a theocracy, flirted with becoming the international headquarters of Flat Earth Truth™, and eventually settled for being a normal city that occasionally wonders why the history books keep whispering about it.

Let’s be clear: America has produced a dazzling number of eccentrics, visionaries, hucksters, and religious entrepreneurs over the centuries. But few can match the theatrical flair of John Alexander Dowie and Wilbur Glenn Voliva, the spiritual tag-team who built Zion, Illinois into a place where dancing was considered a straight path to ruin, medical care was suspicious at best, and carrots were briefly elevated to a loosely messianic status. If you’re thinking this sounds like the world’s weirdest HOA run by two competing messiahs, you’re not far off.

The Making of a Prophet (Self-Appointed Division)

John Alexander Dowie arrived in the late 19th century with impeccable timing. America was in the midst of the Gilded Age—railroads were booming, industrialists were inventing new ways to be wealthy, and people were lining up to attend revival meetings, faith-healing tent shows, and anything promising miracles at a low introductory price. Dowie, who had been born in Scotland and raised in Australia, landed in the United States with a confident stride and the belief that he had been personally selected by God to repair Christianity. He founded the Christian Catholic Church in 1896 and announced, with breathtaking modesty, that he was the one true representative of divine authority on Earth.

His signature teaching was divine healing. Dowie’s sermons were persuasive, his meetings were theatrical, and the healings were staged. People flocked to hear him and were quick to believe. His explanation of how his faith healing worked was fairy ingenious: it worked only on those who were truly faithful. In other words, if your kidney infection didn’t clear up, don’t blame Dowie; the problem is clearly with your abyssmal lack of faith. Donations poured in. So did criticism, lawsuits, and the attention of state authorities who questioned whether Dowie’s theology was also his business model.

Yet Dowie didn’t want to be merely a preacher. He wanted to create a community—a shining city on a hill where righteousness reigned, vice was extinguished, and every single business could be quietly owned by the church treasury. In 1901, he purchased six thousand acres of farmland north of Chicago and christened it Zion City, the headquarters of his new theocratic empire. Every resident would lease their property from the church. Every business would answer to church leadership. Every moral decision—great or small—would be reviewed by Dowie himself. It was divine monarchy, except with more paperwork.

Zion City: The Utopia With a Very Long List of Prohibited Activities

Before you imagine Zion as some sort of harmonious commune, let’s talk about the banned items. Dowie forbade alcohol, tobacco, pork, oysters, dancing, theater, circuses, doctors, modern medicine, and “secret societies,” which included everything from the Freemasons to the Elks Lodge to anything involving a costume animal mascot. Zion was planned like a utopia, but administered like a religious theme park where all the entertaining rides had been closed for spiritual refurbishment.

Zion isn’t the only community established with optimistic idealism. Consider, for example, that Hollywood was founded to be an idealistic center of Christian virtue, and Chicago was intended to be a quiet place of solitude. You can guess that the hopes for Zion turned out about as well.

The town’s street names came straight from the Bible—Elijah Avenue, Ezekiel Avenue, Gabriel Avenue. Had the town planners not run out of space, one imagines “Leviticus Boulevard,” “2 Chronicles Circle,” and “Habakkuk Highway” might have made an appearance. Zion also had no saloons, no theaters, and absolutely no chance of earning a reputation as a nightlife destination.

On the economic side, Dowie launched an ambitious plan to build Zion Industries, a collection of church-owned businesses designed to keep the town financially independent. The jewel of this empire was the Zion Lace Factory, which aimed to produce fine lace and generate rivers of revenue. It generated something, all right—mostly debt, bankruptcy filings, and a deep appreciation among investors for the humble power of financial reality.

Meanwhile, Dowie continued to expand his spiritual authority. In 1901 he proclaimed himself the fulfillment of the Old Testament prophecy about the coming of “Elijah the Restorer.” Many of his followers accepted this announcement with startling equanimity, perhaps the way one politely acknowledges a relative who confidently claims they could have gone pro in baseball “if the scouts hadn’t been biased.” Others began to question whether Dowie’s leadership had drifted into something less like reverent devotion and more like cult administration with a scriptural garnish.

The Great Prophet Meets the Great Inconvenience: Mathematics

By 1905, Dowie’s utopia had developed a small problem that theologians and economists alike refer to as “being insolvent.” His businesses were drowning. His Australian missionary venture was evaporating money like a humidifier on high setting. Creditors circled. Lawsuits multiplied. Ultimately, his health began to fail—an ironic twist for a man who had forbidden medical treatment and said that it was unnecessary for those who were truly faithful.

Into this moment stepped Wilbur Glenn Voliva, a senior church official with the ambition of a Roman consul and the subtlety of a marching band at a library conference. When Dowie suffered a stroke that left him partially incapacitated, Voliva executed a leadership takeover with the smooth efficiency of a corporate raider. He accused Dowie of mismanagement, immorality, financial malpractice, and general unfitness to lead. Dowie protested, naturally, but the courts sided with Voliva. The original prophet of Zion was deposed, disgraced, and left largely penniless.

Zion City, meanwhile, moved from the era of a prophet to the era of a preacher who believed the Earth was flatter than a Kansas horizon.

Wilbur Glenn Voliva: The Flat-Earther in Chief

If Dowie was eccentric, Voliva was… let’s call it “geometrically ambitious.” It was as if he made it his personal mission to provide topics for future Commonplace Fun Facts articles. Under his rule, Zion became the headquarters of the early 20th-century flat-earth movement. Voliva didn’t just quietly believe the Earth was flat; he promoted the idea with the enthusiasm of someone trying to win a door-to-door theology sales competition. He declared that the sun was only 3,000 miles away. The North Pole, he insisted, was the literal center of the world. Australia? Dubious at best, a century before the “Australia Isn’t Real” hoax became a thing. And gravity? A dirty lie spread by spherical propagandists.

Voliva loved publicity. He used the church-owned radio station, WJAZ (and later, WLS—originally run by Sears!) to broadcast flat-earth science to a nation that, with varying degrees of politeness, declined to be persuaded. His broadcasts included everything from scholarly lectures to unhinged taunts and challenges for scientists to debate him publicly. Several accepted. It went badly. For Voliva.

When asked why ships disappear over the horizon, Voliva explained this was due not to curvature but to “perspective limitations,” which is the theological equivalent of telling a math teacher that algebra is a government conspiracy. When the airship Italia did, in fact, disappear during an expedition to the North Pole in 1928, he claimed that as proof of his geographic interpretation, because the airship obviously had sailed over the edge of the earth.

The Dietary Gospel of Saint Carrot

In addition to flattening the Earth, Voliva also flattened Zion’s nutritional diversity. His most controversial health policy—if we politely avoid discussing his views on doctors—involved carrots. Lots of them. Voliva insisted that eating large quantities of carrots could cure nearly everything, especially poor eyesight. Zion’s children were instructed to consume daily carrot rations, turning the entire town into an orange-tinted experiment in beta-carotene overexposure.

This worked about as well as you’d expect, which is to say: all the nearsighted kids still needed glasses, but now they also hated carrots.

A Theocracy With an Annual End-of-the-World Countdown

No Voliva retrospective would be complete without acknowledging his habit of predicting the end of the world. Like many apocalyptic leaders (see “It’s the End of the World As We Know It… And We’re Still Waiting”), he circled dates on the calendar and confidently proclaimed that global destruction was imminent. predicted the end of the world would come in 1923, 1927, 1930, 1934, and 1935. Each prediction failed, prompting him to perform theological gymnastics impressive enough to qualify for the Olympics.

In 1931, for example, he explained the inconvenient fact that the earth was still open for business despite being confident of its destruction the previous year by saying that he “changed his mind.” He made this announcement after completing a three-year ocean cruise to prove the earth was flat because, obviously, “If the earth were round, the water would slip off.”

Each time the sun rose over the (presumably flat) earth, the residents of Zion carried on, collectively returned to work, and just assumed Voliva would eventually explain why the universe hadn’t received the memo.

The Town Where Dancing Could Get You Evicted

Under both Dowie and Voliva, Zion operated under a moral code that made the Puritans look like a Vegas bachelorette party. Residents were required to sign leases agreeing to abstain from dancing, drinking, swearing, card-playing, tobacco, pork, shellfish, and medical treatment. Violations could result in eviction. The church owned all the land, and one can only imagine the awkwardness of explaining to your neighbors that you’re being kicked out for secretly attending a square dance in Kenosha.

On the positive side, Zion was free of saloons, brothels, gambling halls, and theaters. On the negative side, if that’s the sort of things you were looking for, you clearly picked the wrong place to settle.

The Flat-Earth Budget Problem

Voliva’s ambitions, like Dowie’s, eventually collided with the unpleasant fact that money exists and must be managed. The Great Depression hit Zion’s church-run economy particularly hard, and Voliva declared bankruptcy in 1937. The courts began dismantling his empire piece by piece. WLS radio slipped out of his hands. The church properties were sold or reorganized. The flat-earth lectures, mercifully for science teachers everywhere, more or less went into a dormant state, awaiting the emergence of the internet.

Voliva’s health faltered. He died in 1942, leaving behind a town exhausted, financially battered, spiritually confused, and presumably ready to reintroduce vegetables other than carrots.

Life After Prophets: Zion Tries Being Normal

With Voliva gone and the church’s economic grip broken, Zion gradually reinvented itself. The theocratic experiment faded. Residents bought their own property. The street names remained biblical, but the town began adding theaters, restaurants, medical clinics, and—scandalously—places where people could engage in recreational activities without Voliva’s ghost frowning at them from the cloud cover.

Today Zion is a perfectly normal Midwestern city, notable for its parks, proximity to Lake Michigan, birthplace of Gary Coleman, and lingering reputation as “that place the flat-earth guy ran.” Local officials have spent decades politely reminding outsiders that the Earth is, in fact, round and that the town’s more interesting traditions now involve things like summer festivals and high school sports rather than dietary carrots and biblical urban planning.

What We Learned From Zion’s Divine Rollercoaster

If Zion teaches us anything, it’s that utopias are easy to imagine, hard to find, and even harder to fund. Charismatic leaders can build movements, but they can also build remarkably unstable financial structures. Divine healing doesn’t balance budgets. Neither does flat-earth cosmology. And carrots, for all their strengths, cannot prevent a municipal bankruptcy.

But Zion also reveals something else: the enduring American habit of experimenting with utopian dreams, religious communities, idealistic towns, and economic experiments that make future historians sit at their desks muttering, “I’m sorry… they did what?” The town has survived prophets, scandals, lawsuits, coups, bankruptcy, and a public-relations nightmare involving the curvature of the planet and its stubborn refusal to expire on schedule. It endures because communities are stronger than the people who try to own them.

Today, visitors to Zion can stroll through peaceful neighborhoods, relax in parks, enjoy the lake breeze, and reflect upon the town’s improbable journey from theocratic company town to carrot-heavy flat-earth outpost to stable, sensible American municipality. It is living proof that even when human history takes a detour into the surreal, it usually finds its way back—eventually—to something resembling normalcy.

Some legacies are golden. Others are spherical. Zion’s at least for a time, was distinctly flat. But the people who lived there—and live there still—proved that no matter how eccentric the beginning, the ending can be grounded, steady, and refreshingly normal.