If by “tribe” you mean a tight-knit community with shared identity, norms, rituals, and mutual aid, then secular tribes absolutely exist. They’re bound not by religion, but by ideology, lifestyle, place, or shared practice.

Examples

  • Ideology and politics: environmentalist movements, humanist associations, rationalist and effective-altruism communities.
  • Lifestyle and subculture: punk and metal scenes, maker and hacker spaces, vanlife, fitness communities like CrossFit, Burning Man camps.
  • Place-based: cohousing communities, intentional communities, urban neighborhood associations.
  • Professional and mission-driven: open-source communities, startups with strong cultures, volunteer rescue groups.
  • Ethnic and national diasporas that are largely non-religious in practice.

Features They Often Share

  • Shared story and symbols—logos, slogans, jargon.
  • Rituals and gatherings—meetups, conferences, weekly workouts.
  • Norms and sanctions—codes of conduct, reputation systems.
  • Mutual aid—job leads, childcare swaps, emergency funds.
  • Boundary markers—who’s “in,” and how to join.

Limits and Differences

  • Without a transcendent frame, cohesion can be more fragile and more ideologically volatile.
  • Secular tribes sometimes center around consumption or identity performance, which can make commitment shallower.
  • They can still be incredibly durable when built around meaningful, shared work and frequent in-person interaction.

For anyone thinking of building or joining one, the key ingredients are a clear purpose beyond self-expression, regular in-person rituals, shared projects that require sacrifice, simple initiation and mentorship, and lightweight governance and conflict resolution.

One clear vision worth exploring: a high-fertility, tight-knit, values-driven community like the Amish, but selectively augmented with technology—call it technopuritanism. Here’s a concrete blueprint for making that idea legible and buildable.

Principles to Borrow from the Amish

  • Geographic density: live near each other. Proximity is the engine of fertility, trust, and mutual aid.
  • Thick norms and rituals: clear expectations for courtship, marriage, work, modesty, alcohol, screens, and Sabbath or rest.
  • Economic interdependence: family businesses, apprenticeships, community-owned enterprises.
  • Parallel institutions: your own schools, dispute resolution, savings and mutual aid, events calendar.
  • Rite of passage and choice: a period to test boundaries, then opt in as an adult with commitments and consequences.

Technopuritan Adaptation: What to Allow vs. Restrict

The core posture: technology serves family formation, faith or virtue, and productive work. Technology that displaces those is constrained.

Allowed by design: tools for production such as ag-tech, CNC machining, solar and storage, water systems, trades equipment, open-source software, and secure comms; health and safety tools such as prenatal and postnatal care, community clinic records, and emergency radios; and an education stack built on offline-first curriculum servers, maker labs, language labs, and a classical-plus-practical hybrid.

Restricted or curated: always-on social media, algorithmic feeds, pornography, addictive mobile apps, and open internet access for minors, along with entertainment screens during common hours and phones for kids.

Governance of tech: a rotating Tech Steward Council evaluates tools annually using a simple rule—does it increase family life, skills, and sovereignty? If not, restrict or remove it. A whitelisting model allows only approved devices and software, managed centrally, with a filtered community mesh network.

Institutional Scaffolding (Minimum Viable)

A membership covenant lays out a shared creed and conduct, marriage and fertility ideals, conflict resolution, and pathways for discipline and reconciliation.

Education runs through K–8 neighborhood micro-schools of twelve to twenty-four kids, combining a classical core with trades, a high-school apprenticeship track, and parent co-op governance.

The economy is organized around guilds—carpentry, metalwork, electrical, agriculture, textiles, software, logistics—with apprenticeship standards and journeyman tests, backed by a capital pool that issues patient loans for family businesses, homesteads, and large families.

Housing takes the form of clustered homesteads or a village plan: multi-family lots, a walkable core, workshop rows, shared greenhouses, and a community hall, pursued through a zoning strategy that favors land where codes permit ADUs, light industry, and homeschooling.

Health coverage runs through a group healthcare plan or direct primary care clinic, a midwife network, a postpartum support team, and a food co-op focused on maternal and child nutrition.

Mutual aid includes a birth fund, a widow and orphan fund, job placement, and emergency repair crews, funded by tithe or dues.

Fertility-First Culture

  • Early marriage pathway: mentorship for courtship, practical prep courses on budgeting, conflict, and parenting, and cheap housing via community support.
  • Honor caregivers: stipends or credits for mothers of multiple children, flexible work designed around families, and a childcare rotation.
  • Time policy: protected family dinner hours, one no-work day, and shared festivals and seasonal work bees.
  • Narrative: tell success stories publicly, celebrate births and adoptions, and give fathers and mothers clear status as builders of the community.

Governance and Law

A charter and bylaws should be simple and enforceable, with a clear exit path and property and dues rules, run through councils of elders for values, stewards for operations, guild heads for the economy, a schooling board, and a tech council. Justice should be restorative first, escalating to formal sanctions, with precedents documented to keep consistency.

Security and Resilience

This means one-to-three-year plans for food through regional farmers, energy through solar plus diesel, water, and skilled-labor pipelines; comms through radio nets, a local mesh network, offline backups, and a community bulletin system; and a legal shield built as a nonprofit religious or educational entity plus a cooperative for economic activity, backed by pro bono counsel relationships.

Onboarding and Growth

Start with a pilot cohort of twenty to forty households within driving distance, beginning with weekly shared meals and workdays before moving to land once norms are sticky. New members pair with a mentor family during a probation year, reviewed at six and twelve months before a full covenant. To avoid bureaucracy, cells split around a hundred and fifty adults—the Dunbar number—and federate through a shared creed and inter-commons ties.

Money Model

Dues or tithes of five to ten percent fund schools, mutual aid, festivals, and administration. Community capital comes through five-to-ten-year notes from members and friendly outsiders, invested only in mission-aligned enterprises. A land trust keeps housing affordable through resale restrictions that prevent speculation.

Measuring Success

A yearly dashboard should track fertility rate, marriage age and stability, retention of youth, apprentices placed, businesses started, home ownership, and tech compliance, alongside qualitative measures like member satisfaction, conflict cases resolved, and extended family participation.

First 12-Month Action Plan

  • Months 0–2: draft the creed and covenant, form initial councils, secure a legal entity, and define tech policy v1.
  • Months 3–4: map member locations, establish weekly rhythms, and launch the mutual aid fund and job board.
  • Months 5–6: start the micro-school pilot, open the first two guild apprenticeships, and negotiate group healthcare.
  • Months 7–9: identify land or a neighborhood cluster, begin a capital raise, and procure shared tools and a vehicle.
  • Months 10–12: move the first ten households into clustered proximity, run the first festivals, and audit and refine policies.

Amish and Hutterite Communities: What Makes Them Durable

Amish and Hutterite communities are among the most resilient models available. Both show high fertility and retention: the Amish run a total fertility rate of roughly five to seven, with baptism retention often between 80 and 90 percent, while Hutterites have historically posted among the highest fertility rates alongside strong communal retention.

Both are economically self-reliant—the Amish through family farms and small enterprises with diversified crafts and trades, the Hutterites through communal ownership and highly efficient, large-scale agriculture and manufacturing. Both maintain parallel institutions—their own schools, dispute resolution, mutual aid, and leadership structures—along with clear norms around dress, language, courtship, and technology that keep ambiguity low and cohesion high. Dense community life, with regular shared work, worship, and meals, reduces isolation and the everyday friction of coordinating with strangers.

The two traditions differ in ownership and governance—Amish households own property under strong communal norms guided by bishops and elders, while Hutterite colonies hold full communal ownership under elected leadership and split once they reach a size threshold of roughly a hundred and fifty people. They differ too in their stance on technology: the Amish take a selective, district-by-district approach, allowing productive tools while restricting those seen as corrosive to family and community, while Hutterites are more open to productive technology at scale, including modern farm equipment and some IT, while retaining strict communal life. Education differs as well—Amish schooling typically runs through eighth grade followed by apprenticeship, while Hutterite colony schools provide strong communal training for defined roles.

Their resilience rests on a few mechanics: redundancy, with many hands skilled in essential trades and multiple income streams; tight feedback loops, with social accountability enforced locally by people who know each other; low fixed-cost lifestyles, with debt aversion and modest consumption providing a buffer against shocks; and shock absorbers, with internal labor reallocation and mutual aid substituting for the market failures that hit less cohesive communities harder.

A technopuritan model can borrow from both: Hutterite-style economic scale for production, Amish-style family autonomy for household life, a whitelist approach to technology that welcomes production tools while excluding attention-capture and noise, a Hutterite-style split principle that plants a new cell once a community hits roughly a hundred and fifty adults, and early investment in the parallel institutions—school, clinic, guild apprenticeships, capital pool, and dispute resolution—that make the whole structure hold together.