Love Family
defunct Christian commune in Seattle
The Love Family, or the Church of Jesus Christ at Armageddon, was a U.S. communal religious movement formed in 1968 and led by Paul Erdmann, who renamed himself Love Israel.
After a fractious conflict in 1984, the community was reduced to a small fraction residing on their 300-acre (1.2 km2) property in Arlington, Washington. The Love Family flourished on that acreage from 1984 until 2004, when they were forced to sell the properties due to bankruptcy.
Beliefs and practices
The group practiced meditation (often with the use of hallucinogenics) and believed that life was eternal and all people were one. Because life was 'eternal', the group did not observe birthdays or perform marriages. They placed personal revelation above traditional doctrine. The group was committed to living in the present – "Now is the time" was one of their mottoes – to the point that they avoided making appointments or incurring debt.
Additional prohibitions including smoking, owning clocks, mirrors, or watches, and reading books or magazines other than the Bible. The group did not use driver's licenses.
The group ate a predominantly vegetarian diet that they sustained in part through gardening and gleaning.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Love Family” as defunct Christian commune in Seattle. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6690548. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1968, 1984 and 2004.
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This entry incorporates text from “Love Family” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.