Healthy vs. Unhealthy Communities:
A Partial Checklist

v     Healthy: Recognition, both in word and action, that the community itself is only one community, not the "end-all, be-all" community for humankind.
Unhealthy: claims made by leaders and/or members that the community is somehow "higher" or alone in its merit, purity, level of sacrifice, or "calling."

v     Healthy: Ability to rejoice and feel special in uniqueness of the community and one's own involvement with that community. (This is different than any elitist mentality, but has as a parallel the ability to rejoice in one's own individual uniqueness and specialness.)
Unhealthy: Attempt to minimize or eliminate any special meaning of community, either for oneself or someone else.

v     Healthy: A community's treatment of those exiting the community. Any community should be able to accept the fact that some people who join it will eventually move on to other relationships / activities.
Unhealthy: A community that labels all exiting members "traitors" or "apostates." That sort of absolutism places the community in an unrealistic and rather godlike position of authority over the individual's own free will, reason, and existential (i.e., felt) need. Communities must not posture as mind readers who know "better" than the individual, even if at times they actually may as observers see more clearly than a person that his/her choices are dubious. Some exiting members do seem to find it needful to create an "enemy" of the community in their own minds, whether or not the community actually behaves properly toward them. There is no known solution for that problem; it is the great bugaboo of communal life.

v     Healthy: Perceived power balanced between the many and the one, the community and the individual. The community's leadership, as "keepers of the flame" or vision and purpose of the community, need not alter that vision when and if certain individuals within the community decide they want the vision to change. Likewise, the community's leadership should acknowledge the sovereignty of the individual over her/his own personal vision of what is "right" for her/him. Disagreements can be negotiated, and if not resolvable, hopefully can result in an amicable parting of the ways without denigration by either party of the other. Unfortunately, this in practice often approaches the painful feel of a marriage breaking up, esp. if the member is a long-time member. Both the many left behind and the one leaving feel hurt and misunderstood.
Unhealthy: Power imbalance, leading to one of two extremes – (1) a form of dictatorial leadership in which the individual is vilified, demonized, and dehumanized by leaders, (2) a form of community where individual members make life miserable for the majority by their demands and attempts to overpower the existing leadership/membership. The first extreme can lead to violence and various forms of documentable abuse, while the second extreme can lead to a community which slowly dissolves due to internal strife.

v     Healthy: Consistent, kind, and intelligent treatment of the community's weakest and/or most troubled members.
Unhealthy: A community which is so ingrown or elitist that it rejects the poor, the less-gifted, and the psychologically or physically handicapped. One caveat here: Some individuals may be beyond the community's ability to care for, and it would in fact be unloving / unrealistic of the community to embrace such a person if the person's needs cannot be met by it. Historian and friend Timothy Miller (University of Kansas) agreed with and expanded upon this point:

Yes, some individuals are beyond the community's ability to help. Too many less severely disturbed individuals can also be a problem. I know of one small community that took in an emotionally disturbed member, and in a community of, say, fifty people or more they probably could have dealt with her. In a community of under ten, however, she was just too big a presence to handle. So both severity of the individual's physical or mental state and proportion of communal membership [fairly functional members vs. fairly dysfunctional members] are potential limitations.

v    Healthy: A life-affirming, clearly-defined goal, set of goals, or focus that is shared by the community's members, which involves not just the community but the surrounding neighbors and even the world at large.
Unhealthy: A community which exists solely for the sake of community, with no real goal beyond existing. Like other of my points, this is a subjective judgment, but one I feel compelled to include. All communities are a part of the human community, and owe it a debt. "No man is an island," wrote John Donne, and no community is an island, either.

v     Healthy: A decision making process that is deliberate (as in slow!) yet definite and fairly well-defined.
Unhealthy: Snap decisions made in a communal context often are both wrong and hurtful to individuals within the community and the community itself, and are usually rooted in one or two people's emotional state rather than calm, thoughtful planning. Likewise, when individuals within a community act completely on their own without taking others in the community into account, disaster can strike. "Community," Tim Miller observes, "means working with others."

v     Healthy: Community life which is adept at celebration, joy, and self-indulgence. A community that majors on joy and pleasure, esp. while also involved with serving those who are needy, alone, and often lost in self-condemnation, is to me the breath of the Holy. I ponder the image in the movie "Fiddler on the Roof," Jewish and Russian dancers slowly intermingling in a mutual celebration of a forthcoming marriage. "To LIFE!!" the dancers shout together.
Unhealthy: A community which views pleasure and diversions as evil in and of themselves fails to understand what interrelationships between human beings are about. Each community will, depending upon its moral and ethical understandings and allegiances, have peculiar specificities regarding pleasure's proper boundaries. My own community, for instance, views marriage as the proper sphere for fullest sexual expression; observers view us as balanced, puritanical, or libertine depending on their own moral maps. Despite that, a community incapable of joy is a community that is gravely ill.

v    Healthy: The community which includes men, women, and children recognizes and protects the nuclear family -- the married couple or single parent -- as a basic component of communal life. Few points here are potentially more debatable than this one among communitarians, who are often willing to experiment radically with familial structures, but from our/my point of view, the nuclear family is the first and most important community, which all human relationships begin from and emulate in various ways: "Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh" (Gen 2:24). I of course am not addressing here communal groups (including traditional Catholic monasteries / convents) which practice celibacy.
Unhealthy: A community which indiscriminately opens the borders of sexuality actually subverts its own existence. I again speak here overtly from my Christian bias, but history -- with some notable exceptions (Oneida, Kerista, as well as a few gay communities which exist today) -- supports the view that few communal groups who practice open sex survive for long. Further, the actual meaning of sexuality itself is compromised from a Christian point of view, as is the meaning of love and commitment. I have written further on this topic elsewhere. In the larger picture regarding marriage as an institution, marriage can be a place where evil flourishes (wife abuse or sexual abuse of children by one / both partners). Yet does this fact invalidate marriage or merely underscore the fact that marriage--like community!--depends upon its participants as to its quality and goodness?

v     Healthy: The place of children in community. Children often reflect the community's own health in a transparent way. What does the community teach and practice regarding its children? Are children fully human? Are they treasured and protected and educated properly? Children are, of course, products of their own parents and parents' private world (which exists in most if not all communities). Since a healthy community takes in unhealthy families, for instance, a mother whose child is a "crack" baby, not all children in any community will be emotionally or physically healthy. Yet in general, gloomy or angry children en masse likely indicate a gloomy, angry community. If the majority of children appear well-kept, happy, and filled with imagination and energy, it is more likely the community itself is internally a healthy place.
Unhealthy: Communities which routinely remove children from their parents, "reshape" children using draconian discipline, or view children as "not worth hearing from," do damage to not only children but also adults, in that adults' ability to empathize is often enhanced by listening to, and highly valuing, the smallest child. I realize some communities do rear children apart from parents much of the time, as well as practicing the idea that children should "be seen and not heard," yet still end up with kids seemingly happy and well adjusted. So, despite my own disagreement with such a form of child-rearing, I'm unwilling to say all communities taking a different route than ours/mine are somehow "evil." Another rather unrealistic idea in a community I'm aquainted with holds that imagination itself is evil, and forbids children playing with toys. That seems very extreme to me, and (though I'm not a child psychologist) likely damaging to the children involved. One obvious evil: Need it be said that any sexual interaction between children and adults is not only terribly destructive to the child, but illegal in this country as well? Prompt action must be taken by any healthy community if such abuse is found to have taken place.

v     Healthy: Whatever leadership structure is used, a system of checks and balances which is actual and not just on paper. Thus, whether using a democratic / representational form of leadership or not, there should be vigorous exchange of ideas and plans which includes input from sources other than one or a few. In my opinion, democratic forms of leadership actually work poorly in community life; they would not work in ours, for instance. But neither would a form of leadership which placed one individual "over" the entire operation. Our plural leadership structure seems adequate for our purposes. One cannot be too careful about who the leaders themselves are, as caring, selfless, yet mature individuals aren't all that easy to find.
Unhealthy: No accountability for leadership decisions and no real system of checks and balances…. This is more likely to happen in religious communities that look to their leader(s) as literal mouthpieces for God. The late 70's mass suicide/murder in Jonestown, Guyana, is one example of a community with rogue leadership. Fortunately, despite the media's fairly negative coverage of communal movements in the United States and elsewhere, most communities do not go the extreme route in this regard, for reasons both psychological and pragmatic.