Page 12 - C.A.L.L. #36 - Summer 2013
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KALEIDOSCOPE
community in California, an urban them outside the United States. On the
cooperative in Hawai’i, and a shared other hand, the Bruderhof communities
household in New Jersey. don’t provide any numbers at all, and that
group of communities, with a membership
Another bit of evidence for community- thought to be in the low thousands, has
mindedness is the traffic on the enough members that its numbers alone
Fellowship for Intentional Community would have quite an impact on any total
website. As of October 2010, that site figure. And the most important skewing
attracted about 66,500 hits per month, or factor of all is that huge numbers of
about 2,200 a day, with 6.5 page views per communities choose not to be listed in the
visit, and the numbers for 2010 were up 11 directory.
percent over 2009. While not everyone
visiting the site is in the market for So I took another path toward trying to
community, surely the numbers reflect to make an estimate. The Catholic religious
some degree interest in intentional communities keep pretty careful track of
communities - if not living in one, at least their numbers; in 2007 they reported
wishing. 13,428 priests, 60,715 sisters, and 4,904
brothers, for a total communal population
The Hard Numbers of 79,048. [Source:
For all of the interest there seems to be http://www.usccb.org/comm/catholic-
in intentional communities, however, the church-statistics.shtml (4/22/2010)]
number of persons actually living in There are two other groups of
intentional communities is tiny - a very communities with five-figure populations,
small fraction of 1 percent of the the Mormon fundamentalists, who are
population. Counting the number of active thought to have perhaps 30,000 communal
communitarians is a daunting task, to say members, and the Hutterites, who have
the least, but the numbers are not large. around 15,000 in the United States. So
that puts us at around 125,000
I decided I would count up the population communitarians. Now, here is the wildest
of the hundreds of American communities guess of all: I’m going to conjecture that
in the 2007 edition of the Communities there are 5,000 other intentional
Directory (the new 2010 directory was not communities averaging 10 members apiece,
yet out when I did my counting, but I don’t which would be another 50,000. Add that
think the results there would be very to the 125,000 we already have, and, just
different) and in round numbers that to be cautious, let’s report the total as a
would come to something like 10,000 adults range: 150,000 to 200,000.
living in communities of five or more
members each in the United States. But The point of all this guesswork is to say
there are so many problems with the that not a lot of people live communally.
numbers that getting within even a couple Given an American population of over 300
of orders of magnitude is dubious. For million, 150,000 is fewer than 1 in 2,000,
example, the Adidam community lists its less than 1/20 of 1 percent of the
population at 1060. But that apparently population; 200,000 is fewer than 1 in
includes many locations, the majority of 1,500.
Recently, I was told in strictest confidence that one of my friends at the Catholic Integrated
Community, who goes by the name of Ludwig Weimer (an ex-hippy turned Catholic priest,
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