88 International Journal of Cultic Studies ■ Vol. 10, 2019
a state of mind resulting from negative thoughts.
Ms. Israel describes a hepatitis outbreak, dubbed
“yellow fever” (p. 427), that ravaged the
community for months but went untreated
except for prayer and herbal remedies (it also
remained unknown to authorities). Later, Love
did make a few compromises, such as allowing a
member (conveniently, a dentist) to open a
dental clinic at the Family ranch, but other forms
of modern medicine remained off-limits, even as
members got older and more women were
getting pregnant.
The most interesting medical development was
the emergence of otherwise devoted women who
secretly violated both the prohibition against
medical care and the agreement not to use
artificial birth control. This was deviance at the
highest level, primarily among the elder ladies,
and it was abetted by some of the highest
ranking women, who had access to vehicles
required to get to a hospital. Their actions
signaled a growing gap between ideal and reality
that spread throughout the Family in the late
1970s and early 1980s.
The Family’s belief in living in the present left it
unprepared for the baby boom that began in the
mid-1970s. Shared parenting was the ideal, but
in reality, it didn’t work well. Though every
adult was expected to be a parent to every child,
parenting styles varied greatly. And in any case,
the burden fell on the women, particularly low-
ranking women and girls such as Ms. Israel and
her mother. But, as the author explains, the
diffusion of responsibility often meant no
responsibility, so children commonly went
unsupervised. Paradoxically, in this world where
having no self was paramount and individual
freedom was taboo, Ms. Israel was forced to
become self-reliant and highly adaptable. She,
like other kids, learned to work the system to her
advantage (and, as I found, many adults did so,
too). If she wanted to do something but was
afraid her elder lady might say no, she could
bypass her by going directly to Love. As I found
in my own research, the words “Love said” (p.
209) were perhaps the two most powerful words
in the Love Family. She also learned which
households to avoid, as the elders varied greatly
in the latitude they granted to kids and the
harshness of their punishments.
For a community based on total agreement, there
was a surprising lack of consensus on the
importance of education. The Family had its
own school staffed by dedicated teachers, but
Love put little value on formal education.
Whereas the teachers wanted to expose kids to
the world, Love and the Family conservatives
wanted to protect them from it. Love had to
approve all reading material and, at least once,
books deemed too worldly were burned. On my
first visit to the Family in 1980, I noticed
second-hand children’s readers in which all
references to conventional family roles and
worldly practices had been blacked out—not just
words, but sentences and whole paragraphs—
making the stories unreadable. Classes followed
no calendar or daily schedule and were
frequently moved from one location to another.
Science was “hit or miss” (p. 333). By
conventional standards, Ms. Israel’s education
was clearly inadequate after she left the Family,
she would struggle in the mainstream
educational system, as would her peers who also
left.
Another source of conflict was polygamy. Love
already had two wives, and he encouraged his
elders to take additional wives, as well.
Although the practice never caught on, it
became a source of tension when Rachel’s
mother, beautiful but with a low-ranking
Hebrew name, became a second wife. The first
wife, an elder lady, felt threatened but having
no choice except to submit, she took her anger
out on Ms. Israel’s mother’s by ruining her
reputation in the community. The result was
such extreme ostracism that her mother, then
pregnant with the elder’s child, had to give birth
alone. This was the ultimate insult in a
community in which every birth was a joyous
occasion attended by the whole Family.
The incident seems particularly vicious,
especially for a group called the Love Family,
but Ms. Israel sees it as just one of many signs
that the Family’s culture was breaking down. By
the end of the 1970s, constraints were loosening
and more and more people were breaking the
rules. Women and girls started wearing makeup
and Fresh Squeeze jeans, and the elder of Ms.
Israel’s household brought home a ham for
dinner newcomers weren’t being screened kids

International Journal of Cultic Studies ■ Vol. 10, 2019 89
weren’t being supervised and Ms. Israel reports
children as young as three or four being given
omelets containing psychedelic mushrooms. She
attributes these developments to strains caused
by members suddenly having to get paying jobs
to pay off Family debts. Most of the money went
to Love, but workers were allowed keep a small
amount for their households. Because some
households were more successful than others, a
divide developed between the haves and the
have-nots, along with resentment on both sides.
The most serious problem was that Love Israel
had become a cocaine addict with an extremely
expensive habit. I would like to have seen more
on this subject in the book because Love’s
addiction was the central concern driving the
palace coup that led to the breakup in 1983.
Love had created a belief system and social
structure that made him the center of everything
and gave him ultimate authority, and members
were accustomed to his micromanaging their
lives. For a while, the arrangement worked, but
once cocaine appeared on the scene, Love
became increasingly erratic, withdrawn, and
eventually inaccessible. Without him, the Family
lost its focus and cohesion. As more and more
members began disregarding the rules, it became
safe to talk about once-forbidden topics, such as
why a respected elder lady, Dedication, had
defected. Frustrated by Love’s bad business
decisions but lacking control over Family
finances, the elders secretly drafted a letter to
Love accusing him of negligence and self-
indulgence, and asking him to turn the
leadership of the community over to them.
When Love refused to budge, two principle
elders decided to leave, and their departure
precipitated the mass exit of 1983.
The Love Family didn’t disintegrate as many
expected, but instead split into factions that
continue to this day. The first but smaller faction
consists of those who remained loyal to Love
and now call themselves the Love Israel
Family.3 Love quit using cocaine and moved the
remnants of his following to the Family ranch,
the only property that hadn’t been lost in
3 For information on this phase of Family history, see LeWarne,
2009.
lawsuits brought by ex-members. Under a new
name, the Love Israel Family, the community
maintained its hierarchical structure and much of
its old culture but now its teenagers attended
public school and the adults paid rent to live
there. Outwardly the group looked much the
same, but it could never muster the enthusiasm
or collective energy of the glory days, and in
2004 mounting debts forced Love to sell the
ranch. By the time Love died in 2016, the
Family had been reduced to a handful of elderly
members living in a single house, in addition to
a few second-generation members who had
given up communal life to live in the World.
Rather than dispersing, most defectors remained
in the Pacific Northwest, primarily western
Washington, where they constitute a relatively
tight but nonexclusive network of friends and
acquaintances, within which old Family cliques
persist. A few still lead counterculture lives, but
most have been reabsorbed by the World. For
Ms. Israel, meeting members she hadn’t seen
since the breakup was surreal. Now they had
ordinary names and looked like anyone else in
the World. Even their personalities were
different.
After she left the Family, it took Ms. Israel about
ten years before she decided to reconnect with
either faction. For the second time in her young
life, she spent much of this time in culture
shock. Suddenly she had been thrust back into a
world that now seemed strange, repulsive, and
dangerous. So out of touch was she that she once
mistook a urinal for a drinking fountain. She
suffered from depression and anxiety, felt like a
misfit, and got caught up in drinking and drugs
but in the book she eschews the “victim
mentality” that she sees in many ex-members (p.
613). She found it therapeutic to write about her
experiences and eventually was able to attend
college, where she studied other communes and
also psychology and sociology. She says her
experiences with the Love Family left her with a
distrust of authority, a fear of conformity, and a
desire to avoid groups, all of which she
attributes to the Family’s stifling “mind control”
(p. 626). On the positive side, she claims to have
benefitted by learning self-restraint, the creative
power of thought, and the ability to focus by
staying present, all of which she says have made