Twelve Tribes

The Twelve Tribes is a religious communal movement that grew out of the Jesus movement of the early 1970s, founded by Elbert Eugene Spriggs (known as Yoneq). Its members live communally, holding property in common, and seek to restore what they understand as the life of the first-century church, adopting Hebrew names and observances, keeping the Sabbath, and organizing into "tribes", in expectation of the end of the age. The movement is economically self-supporting through its businesses, most visibly a chain of cafes and delis (the "Yellow Deli") and various farms and trades, which also serve as points of contact with outsiders.

The group has attracted controversy on two principal fronts, aired through investigations, litigation, and former-member accounts: its teachings and practices regarding the corporal discipline of children, which have led to state interventions and legal action in several countries (including a 2013 removal of children by authorities in Germany), and its approach to child labor in its businesses; the group defends its child-rearing as biblically grounded and has contested characterizations of it. It has also been criticized over teachings touching on race and slavery. The Twelve Tribes continues to operate communities internationally, and is studied as a durable example of a communal, restorationist Christian movement and of the recurring legal tension between such groups' practices and child-welfare law.

Before dawn on 22 June 1984, ninety Vermont state troopers and fifty social workers entered the Twelve Tribes community at Island Pond and took 112 children into custody, acting on allegations that the group's practice of disciplining children with thin rods amounted to systematic abuse. By evening every child was home: district judge Frank Mahady, reviewing the detentions case by case in an emergency sitting, ruled the raid an unconstitutional fishing expedition conducted without individualised evidence, and refused the state's request to hold the children for examination.

The episode became a landmark in American law on state intervention against religious minorities, cited both by civil libertarians as a cautionary tale and by child welfare advocates as a failure that let concerns go untested. The underlying tension never resolved. The community openly teaches corporal discipline, and its communal schooling and child labour practices have drawn repeated scrutiny: German authorities removed some forty children from two Twelve Tribes communities in Bavaria in 2013 after covert filming of caning, and courts there upheld the removals, while investigations and inspections have recurred in the United States and elsewhere without producing comparable mass action. The group commemorates the Island Pond raid annually as a deliverance, and its members' children, now adults, appear on both sides of the argument, some defending their upbringing and some testifying against it.