84 International Journal of Cultic Studies ■ Vol. 10, 2019
Counterculture Crossover: Growing Up in the Love Family
By Rachel Israel
Reviewed by Robert W. Balch
Life Story Press, Maple Valley, WA. (2018).
ISBN-10: 9781732240018 ISBN-13: 9778-
1732240018 (paperback). (Amazon.com,
$25.00 Kindle, $20.00). 643 pages.
Counterculture Crossover is Rachel Israel’s
fascinating account of growing up in the Love
Family, a highly controversial religious
commune based in Seattle, Washington. In 1975,
at age 6, Ms. Israel became a member of the
Love Family when her mother joined, and she
stayed until 1983 when the Family broke up
after an unsuccessful palace coup. These were
the Family’s glory years, the classic phase
before the fall.
To its defenders, the Love Family was an
intentional community, a new religious
movement, and a beautiful utopian experiment
but to its detractors, it was a dangerous cult, pure
and simple. In 1971, two members had died
from breathing toluene, a solvent the Family
used to produce visions, which led the famous
deprogrammer Ted Patrick to describe the group
as a “collection of drugged-up, spaced-out,
wired-up mental zombies” (Patrick &Dulack,
1976, p. 152). In 1979, a National Enquirer
headline called the Family “America’s Most
Dangerous Cult—A World of Violence, Drugs
and Child Abuse” (National Enquirer, 1979).
1979 also was the year I met the Love Family,
and frankly, I was enchanted. For me, visiting
the Family was like being transported to a
magical fairy kingdom. The grounds and houses
were simple, clean, orderly, and tranquil,
brightened by flowers and well-tended gardens.
The members were distinguished by their long,
well-groomed hair, full beards, handmade robes,
gentle demeanor, and especially their names—
for example, Strength, Honesty, Courage,
Happiness—representing the virtues of Jesus
Christ. Unlike Ted Patrick’s zombies, I found
the members to be bright, alert, and genuinely
committed to their dream of building a new
society.
Enchanted though I was, my main interest in the
Love Family was sociological. Out of thousands
of communal experiments in the late 1960s and
early 1970s, the Love Family was one of the few
survivors, and I wanted to understand how it had
managed this feat. So imagine my shock when,
in 1983, the Love Family suddenly blew up over
allegations that its leader, Love Israel, had
become a self-indulgent, abusive, cocaine
addict. As luck would have it, I was able to
negotiate a leave of absence from my university,
and with the help of Janann Cohig, a sociology
student, I spent the next year in Seattle
interviewing members and defectors to find out
what had happened. I continued interviewing
over the next two summers, gradually piecing
together the Family’s history and uncovering the
roots of the discontent and corruption that led to
the big breakup. The research resulted in a few
professional articles about the community,
which today gather dust in university libraries
(Balch, 1988 1995 1998).
So I had a special interest in Rachel Israel’s
book. Not only does it describe the period that I
studied, but Ms. Israel also was one of the
teenagers I interviewed in the 1980s. She writes
from an unusual perspective. Unlike most
second-generation members, she was not born
into the Family but joined when she was old
enough to know about life in “the World.” She
and her mother had been beach hippies in
Hawaii and homesteaders living in the rough-
and-tumble backwoods of Alaska. Then
suddenly she was thrust into a radical communal
experiment where everyone was expected to be
perfect and merge with the collective mind. Her
experiences gave her a comparative perspective
that enabled her to remain an observer even as
she came to embrace the Family’s belief system.
Secretly, she kept a diary as a way of
maintaining her identity apart from the group,
and this, too, helped keep her in an observer
mode.

International Journal of Cultic Studies ■ Vol. 10, 2019 85
Although Ms. Israel writes mainly from
memory, her memory is good. Aside from
discrepancies in numbers, such as population
estimates, which sometimes vary greatly,1 her
recollections are quite consistent with my data.
She began recording her memories shortly after
she left the community, and she has been careful
to verify and supplement them by interviewing
many of the adults who played significant roles
in her life, and also many of her peers. Dating
events proved as difficult for her as it was for
me because the Family didn’t believe in time,
only the present so members’ memories of dates
and time sequences were foggy. However, Ms.
Israel identifies approximate dates by
determining when events happened in relation to
the annual Rainbow Gathering, a counterculture
festival that Family members had been attending
since the first Gathering in 1972. Unlike so
many authors of cult memoirs, Ms. Israel does
not fictionalize quotations from decades-old
conversations, but quotes only from her
interviews. Most of the names she uses are
members’ actual Family names, though she does
resort to pseudonyms in a few sensitive cases.
Her book is not simply a memoir, but also a
study of the group’s history, culture, social
organization, and inner dynamics. Her intent is
not to justify or condemn, but to make sense of
her own experiences by understanding the group
that consumed the formative years of her life.
Her analysis draws from sociology and
psychology, and from historical studies of
nineteenth-century communal societies,
particularly Oneida. She views the Love Family
not as a cult, but as an heir to America’s long
history of radical social experiments. Given that
former members remain bitterly divided over
what really caused the big breakup, her
objectivity is impressive.
The first three chapters describe Ms. Israel’s
early life as a hippie girl, the events leading to
her mother’s decision to join the Family, and her
culture shock upon entering this strange new
1 For example, Ms. Israel claims the Love Family had 600
members, whereas I estimated 300 at its largest point. I suspect her
estimate includes low-ranking members who dropped out before
the breakup in 1983.
world. She was immediately separated from her
mother and would see her again only rarely.
When she did, she was bewildered and dismayed
to find that her mother had transformed from an
assertive, self-reliant woman into a meek,
submissive follower.
Ms. Israel had entered a new society where the
old rules no longer applied. The price of
membership was steep—renouncing one’s past,
giving all assets to the Family, and working to
cleanse one’s mind of all negative thoughts and
emotions. It was a society without clocks,
watches, radios, televisions, phones, books,
magazines, or newspapers, where “the World”
was an illusion and the present was all that
mattered.2 The Family was an insular, self-
contained society in which, thanks to donations
from new members, nobody needed a worldly
job. It was a society without moms and dads or
birthdays or personal possessions a society
without privacy where all activities were group
activities, and eight to 20 people shared a house
or a yurt—hence, Ms. Israel’s difficulty keeping
a diary. Her diary was not just a possession, but
a symbol of herself as an independent being.
Soon the outside world would seem strange,
banal, and threatening.
I was happy to see that Ms. Israel mentions one
of my favorite images of Love Family
communal life. One day while visiting the
Family ranch, I needed to relieve myself and
was directed to an attractive cedar-shake
outhouse just off the trail. Much to my chagrin,
the outhouse turned out to be a three-sided affair
with three holes and no partitions, all facing out
to the trail. To be bothered by this was to be self-
conscious, and in the Love Family the ideal was
to have no sense of self at all. If a beautiful
“sister” were to sit down next to me, I should be
happy to see her because she is me and I am her
and we are One.
The idea of being One was fundamental to the
Family’s belief system. Love taught that we are
all One with God and One with each other, but
that people in the World have been blinded to
2 The Family eventually bought two televisions, one for Love’s
house and one for the ranch but their use was tightly controlled.