The Moral Career of a New Religious Movement

The Family’s emphasis on the Bible and its attempt to reinstate such early Christian practices as “sharing all things in common” and full-time dedication to evangelize the world for Jesus “without purse or script,” taking “no thought for the morrow,” are sectarian Christian themes. At the same time, its radical sexual teachings and practices, its origins in the prophetic claims of David Berg, and its continuing dependency on direct revelatory guidance from Jesus (as well as Dad’s departed spirit) clearly mark The Family as a new religious “cult movement” in the sociological sense.