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Conclusion
- State University of New York Press
- Chapter
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Conclusion The Family is a novel religious movement in considerable tension with the surrounding sociocultural environment, yet its members are very similar to nonmembers in many respects. Of course they differ from outsiders in some of their religious beliefs and practices, and in those aspects of their lifestyle that are grounded in their distinctive religion. Yet perhaps the biggest surprise from our analysis comparing members with respondents to the General Social Survey is how similar they are on so many variables. Some readers may also be surprised to see how much members of The Family differ from each other in their responses to most questions. Clearly, this is a group with considerable diversity of opinion, very much like that found in the encompassing society. We found no sign of the “brainwashing” or “mind control” that the mass media or extreme secularists might have expected. If these results seem puzzling, then it is worth noting that the Family is a community as well as a faith. Members must work together and rely on each other to accomplish the practical tasks of life, as well as to carry out their difficult missionary activity. Success requires competence, cooperation, and realism. To cooperate successfully, members must be trustworthy, and the greatest benefits of cooperation come when a diversity of people contribute their complementary skills and perspectives to achievement of the group goals. Three decades of survival are a very substantial measure of success for such a high-tension religious movement. My colleague Rodney Stark has criticized social scientific studies of new religious movements for focusing on idiosyncratic features of the groups they study, rather than collecting systematic data that would be of real comparative value: “Thus, studies of the Children of God (now known as the Family) are almost certain to discuss ‘flirty-fishing,’ but are unlikely to try to explain why the movement grew rapidly to about 10,000 members and then stagnated.”1 169 This study has sought to be both systematic and comparative, and now I will attempt to satisfy Stark’s challenge to explain the membership trajectory of The Family. A qualification is in order first. Careful examination of a single case can identify factors that might, logically, be responsible for a particular set of outcomes , but it is seldom able to test a theory with any great confidence. A single case could provide a counterexample to a sweeping theory, as Malinowski’s ethnography of the Trobriand Islanders refuted the supposed universality of the Oedipus complex in Freud’s psychoanalytic theory.2 But proving that a theory is true is not feasible with a single case, and we must be content with a reasonable but tentative analysis. In a sense, the Family was created by a cultural collision between the holiness movement and the hippie movement of the late 1960s. Thus, in the words of Steven Tipton, people who initially joined the Family may have been merely “getting saved from the sixties.”3 Proverbially, the 1960s were a decade of unusual radicalization among young people that left thousands of them drifting unattached through society in pursuit of impossible goals and open to a particular style of salvation. In this analysis, the Family was so well adapted to the period of its birth that it lost the capacity to recruit new members in significant numbers once the surrounding culture had changed, a few years into the 1970s. This does not necessarily mean that the birth rate of new religious movements dropped markedly after the 1960s, but rather that the kind of religions created in a particular period or cultural milieu will bear the mark of the environment in which they were born. Bryan Wilson has noted that new religions tend to recruit from relatively narrow constituencies, and the Family’s distinctive constituency may simply have vanished, bringing the movement’s growth to a halt.4 While somewhat plausible, this explanation is rather too facile. Interviews with many people who joined the Family in its early days reveal they were a highly diverse group, and few fit the stereotype of “hippies.”5 Certainly, people like the hippies continue to exist, and it should have been possible for a vigorous missionary campaign to locate enough of them to sustain growth had other factors been propitious. A different explanation is that the Family stands at too high a degree of tension with the surrounding sociocultural environment, to recruit through conventional social networks. Religious movements need some tension, because they must be strict enough to...