In the past two decades we have seen a proliferation of spiritual and utopian groups, many of which have been quite destructive to their members. There is a pressing need for a way to discriminate between the genuine and the spurious. In this article I show that we can make the necessary discrimination by paying attention to how well a group's activities are suited to its stated aims. The use of such functional criteria permits us to evaluate spiritual and utopian groups without resorting to biased standards.
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