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.

86 International Journal of Cultic Studies ■ Vol. 10, 2019
this truth by Satan. Satan was seen as the spirit
of separation that keeps us from loving each
other, building positive relationships, and living
together harmoniously. By rejecting Satan and
the World, and living in perfect agreement, the
Love Family could create Heaven on Earth
where members would live forever in their
physical bodies.
These ideas grew out of an LSD vision
experienced by Paul Erdmann, then 27, in 1967
during the Summer of Love in San Francisco’s
Haight-Ashbury district. The following year,
Erdmann returned to his hometown of Seattle
and began attracting young hippie seekers who
were inspired by his vision, absolute conviction,
and willingness to take bold action. Other
visions followed, including one that revealed
Erdmann’s true name, Love. Before long, Love
transformed his amorphous ideas into a simple
but coherent belief system based on the Old and
New Testaments of the Bible. Together, Love
and his followers were the resurrected body of
Jesus Christ. They were the true Israelites, called
by God to build New Jerusalem. In recognition
of their Israelite identities, they all took the
surname Israel. The key to their success was to
be Jesus Christ by living as One.
However, Oneness did not mean social equality.
The Love Family was a patriarchal kingdom
believed to reflect a divine hierarchy symbolized
by a golden pyramid. At its apex was Love, who
had absolute authority as the King of Israel. He
had complete control over who joined, who was
baptized, who got a virtue name, how money
was allocated, where members lived, whom they
had sex with, and who got kicked out. The
Family’s small size and communal structure
gave Love enormous freedom to micromanage
daily life, which he did virtually every day. Ms.
Israel portrays Love as the object of slavish
devotion, an attitude that he promoted by
constantly being attuned to and managing the
collective mood.
Assisting Love were the elders. These were men
with virtue names handpicked for their
commitment to community ideals, leadership
ability, and, most of all, their devotion to Love.
Each elder and his “elder lady” supervised a
household that consisted of up to 20 people
sharing a house or yurt. The next tier included
all other baptized members with virtue names.
Together the “virtues” made up the core of the
Family. At the bottom of the pyramid was a
servant class that consisted of newer members
such as Ms. Israel and her mother. They were
identified by Hebrew names chosen from the
Bible.
Within each stratum of the hierarchy, women
occupied a secondary position and were
expected to bow to men and do their bidding. On
one of my early visits, I was chatting with an
elder in his house when another elder man
walked in and joined the conversation. Although
the elder lady was busy cooking, folding
laundry, and feeding a baby, the man said to her,
without so much as a glance, “Charity, will you
give me a braid?” The elder lady immediately
dropped what she was doing and, without a
word, proceeded to braid his hair while we, the
men, continued to talk as if she weren’t there.
As a young newcomer, Ms. Israel quickly
realized that to fit in she had no choice but to go
with the flow so she watched what the members
did and modeled her actions after theirs.
Initially, she had been shocked at her mother’s
transformation, but soon she realized that she,
too, had become meek and submissive.
So why did people such as Rachel’s mother join
the Family? Ms. Israel addresses this question in
an excellent chapter, “Why Love? ...” (Chapter
5), She finds that members came from very
diverse backgrounds—rich and poor, good
families and bad but for the most part they were
young hippies looking for communal
alternatives to mainstream society but
disillusioned by everything they had tried. That
is, until they met the Love Family, which they
often likened to “coming home” (p. 159). By the
time Ms. Israel’s mother joined, the Family no
longer needed to proselytize because “droves of
people” (p. 156) from the counterculture were
eager to join, even knowing that total
submission was part of the deal.
Ms. Israel has no use for those who claim they
were brainwashed, and she gives little attention
to the issue. “They had all made the choice to be
there in the first place and had willingly
relinquished their autonomy,” she writes (p.