Religion and Intragroup Cooperation: Preliminary Results of a Comparative Analysis of Utopian Communities

Several authors have argued that religious beliefs are a way of communicating commitment and loyalty to other group members. The advantage of commitment signals is that they can promote intragroup cooperation by overcoming the free-rider problems that plague most cooperative pursuits. In this article, the author tests this idea using a database on 19th century utopian communes. The economic success and survival of utopian communes is dependent upon solving the collective-action problem of cooperative labor. If religious beliefs foster commitment and loyalty among individuals who share those beliefs, communes formed out of religious conviction should survive longer than communes motivated by secular ideologies such as socialism. Preliminary results from survivorship analysis support this hypothesis; religious communes are more likely than secular communes to survive at every stage of their life course. These results are discussed with reference to a modern communal movement, the Israeli kibbutz.