Idyllic, Exotic, Dangerous: Race, Gender, and the Frontier in News Coverage of Communal Religions

ABSTRACT: At least three times during the latter third of the twentieth century, American television network newscasts took an extended look at communal religions that had grown out of the 1960s hippie-adjacent Jesus Movement. The approaches they took toward the Children of God and the Love Israel Family varied depending on the contexts in which coverage took place, but they aligned with a set of three themes about pioneer life initially identified by historian Lillian Schlissel and applied to new religions by sociologist Susan J. Palmer as the myths of the Garden, the Carnival, and the Gothic. This article argues that rather than embrace a generally secularized suspicion of new religions, newscasters unconsciously relied on this shifting set of frontier myths to uphold a notion of respectable religion based on moderate, White, middle-class Protestantism that was in turn indebted to racialized and gendered notions of civilization.