ABSTRACT
This paper addresses a complex interdisciplinary controversy that has profound practical implications for defining the limits of religious pluralism in the Western world. As part of the cultural turmoil of the 1960s, exotic new religions, often of foreign origin, began attracting significant numbers of youthful converts. Such conversions tended to accentuate the sharp divergences in worldviews which divided the cultural innovators from mainstream cultural traditions and to give such value conflicts formal organizational boundaries. Parents and other relatives of these converts became alarmed as they saw the generation gap that they had assumed would be a passing phase in their family’s life assume the proportions of a permanent rift between them and their offspring. Their children became as strange and difficult to understand as if they were visitors from Mars.
