Intentional Communities and Their Survival

Religion as a Factor in Longevity

Members of religious communities have often believed that God personally protected and guided their unique way of life, thereby ensuring its survival. For example, Calvin Green and Seth Wells said of their own Shaker movement, “It is certain that nothing short of Divine Wisdom could ever have devised a system of equalization, so just and equitable, and yet so contrary to the partial, aspiring and selfish nature of man” (Green & Wells 1823, p. 62). In 1870, however, John Humphrey Noyes, the clergyman intellectual who led the Oneida commune, suggested that shared religious principles could strengthen a community, quite apart from any divine intervention associated with them.

There are many ways in which religion might strengthen a community. Shared beliefs legitimate the unique customs of the group and fortify members mentally against the criticism of outsiders. Faith engenders hope that can carry a group through rough times, such as economic deprivation or conflict. A creed sets standards of behavior that impose discipline on leaders and followers alike. Supernatural beliefs endow the community with a sense of special purpose and render life supremely meaningful. Whatever the psychological mechanisms involved, statistical research by sociologists Karen and Edward Stephan showed that religious communes tend to last much longer than secular ones. Data on seventy-one religious communes revealed that 63 percent lasted a decade or more, compared with only 17 percent of seventy-two secular communes.

Previous Acquaintance as a Factor in Longevity

Noyes said that, in addition to religion, a second factor was important: the previous acquaintance of members. That is, an intentional community will be strong if the people who establish it have already been friends or family members for years beforehand. This is a way of saying that the strength of social bonds between members is important. There is a vast social-psychological literature on the effect of social relationships between members on the cohesion of groups of all kinds, and the findings are somewhat contradictory. Strong relations within a group help unify it, especially if relations with nonmembers are very weak. But intense relations among a few members of a community can produce a subgroup that is the basis of a schism splitting the larger community.

Several researchers have noted that a romantic relationship between two members of an intentional community is like a rudimentary conspiracy. When an individual leaves a community, he or she may be forced to give up all-important ties to other people. But a couple in love who leave a community together take their most important relationship with them. Therefore, many intentional communities have tried to avoid exclusive romantic relations between members, either by becoming celibate, as did the Shakers, or by constantly changing sexual partners, as at Oneida.

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