The Rainbow Family: Peace, Community, Spirituality and the Problems of a Leaderless Utopia

Every once in a while, while researching one part of the Pagan and alternative-spirituality world, I stumble across another community that has apparently been sitting just off to the side all along.

This time it was the Rainbow Family of Living Light.

Not to be confused with The Family International, formerly known as the Children of God. Completely different group.

The Rainbow Family is harder to define because, in a very deliberate way, it does not really want to be defined as an organization at all. There is no conventional membership list, central headquarters, president, governing board or universally recognized leadership. Participants have sometimes jokingly described it as the world’s largest “non-organization” of “non-members.”

Yet for more than fifty years people associated with the Rainbow Family have managed to create enormous temporary communities known as Rainbow Gatherings. Researchers have consequently described the Rainbow Family as an intentional community, countercultural movement and spiritual community rather than a conventional religious denomination or organization (Berger, 2006; Walker, 2008).

And that makes it particularly interesting from a Pagan perspective.

Where Did the Rainbow Family Come From?

The first major Rainbow Gathering took place in Colorado in 1972. Its roots lay squarely in the American counterculture that had developed during the 1960s and early 1970s: communal living, opposition to consumer culture, experimentation with alternative spirituality, environmental consciousness, music festivals and the idea that people might temporarily create a different way of living together.

Cornell University’s archival collection on the Rainbow Family traces the first Gathering to Strawberry Lake, Colorado, and notes the influence of the large communal music festivals of the period. Instead of merely attending a concert and going home, however, the idea was to create a functioning temporary community based around peaceful alternatives to mainstream consumer society.

That first experiment did not disappear.

Gatherings continued. Regional Rainbow communities developed. Eventually Rainbow Gatherings appeared outside the United States as well. Canada has had its own Rainbow activity, including regional Ontario gatherings and the attempted 2013 World Rainbow Gathering on northern Vancouver Island.

So What Do They Believe?

This is where things become wonderfully complicated.

There isn’t a Rainbow catechism.

There isn’t a sacred book telling everyone what a Rainbow must believe.

You can find people influenced by Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Paganism, Indigenous spirituality, New Age traditions, anarchism, environmentalism, yoga, psychedelia, communalism and various combinations of all of the above.

Anthropologist Adam Berger, who conducted doctoral research on the Rainbow Family, described it as an intentional society devoted to the pursuit of world peace through spiritual healing. Other academic research examining Rainbow Gatherings found significant religious characteristics without concluding that Rainbow represents a single conventional religion (Berger, 2006; Walker, 2008).

That distinction is important.

Rainbow is less about believing the same thing and more about temporarily attempting to live according to certain shared ideals.

Peace.

Community.

Sharing.

Non-commercialism.

Connection with the land.

Personal spiritual exploration.

Resistance to hierarchy.

And the idea, perhaps idealistically, that strangers can come together and construct a functioning community without reproducing all of the institutions of the society they temporarily left behind.

Building a Town Without a Government

This is probably the part of Rainbow culture I find most interesting.

A Rainbow Gathering isn’t simply several thousand people pitching tents independently in the woods.

Infrastructure develops.

There are communal kitchens. Water systems have to be established. Sanitation must be dealt with. Food needs to be transported. Medical problems occur. Disputes happen. Lost people need assistance. Camps develop around particular interests or functions. People arrive before the Gathering to establish the site during what is commonly called Seed Camp, and others remain afterward for cleanup and restoration. Academic descriptions of Rainbow infrastructure document kitchens, sanitation, water systems, work crews and numerous other functions required to make the temporary settlement work.

But theoretically there is no mayor.

Instead, people who take responsibility for making something happen are often called focalizers.

Decisions are generally supposed to emerge through councils and consensus rather than through majority rule imposed by an executive authority.

Need something purchased from outside the Gathering?

There is traditionally the Magic Hat, into which people voluntarily contribute money. That money can then be used for communal necessities. Internally, however, Rainbow culture has traditionally discouraged ordinary commercial buying and selling in favour of sharing, gifting and barter.

There is something fascinating about this.

Whether you believe it works perfectly is another question entirely.

But Rainbow Gatherings are effectively repeated experiments in temporary community building.

What Happens When Something Goes Wrong?

Here we encounter another piece of Rainbow terminology: Shanti Sena.

The phrase roughly means “peace army.”

It isn’t supposed to function like a conventional police department. There isn’t necessarily a permanent Shanti Sena force wandering around with badges. Instead, conflict and emergencies can produce a call for Shanti Sena, with capable people responding and attempting to de-escalate the situation.

Researchers have studied this as an unusual form of internal social control within an intentionally decentralized community. The system has sometimes worked cooperatively with authorities, while at other Gatherings the relationship between Rainbow participants, informal peacekeepers and law enforcement has been much more confrontational.

And this begins exposing the central contradiction of Rainbow culture.

If nobody is in charge, who is responsible?

That question follows the Rainbow Family almost everywhere it goes.

The Permit Problem

The Rainbow principle of having no official leaders creates a fascinating philosophical problem when it encounters the modern administrative state.

Someone has to sign the permit.

The United States Forest Service requires permits for large non-commercial groups using National Forest lands. Rainbow Gatherings have historically resisted that requirement, in part because participants maintain that there is no authorized leader who can sign a permit on behalf of everyone else.

The Forest Service does not accept that as an exemption. As recently as 2026 it reiterated that large gatherings require permits and that courts have upheld the government’s authority to enforce those requirements.

This has produced decades of tension.

From the Rainbow perspective, forcing someone to become the legally responsible representative of a leaderless gathering arguably destroys the very structure the gathering is attempting to create.

From the government’s perspective, thousands of people cannot simply arrive on public land and declare that nobody is accountable for sanitation, environmental protection, emergency access or damage because the group doesn’t believe in leaders.

I can understand both arguments.

Canada Has Seen This Problem Too

Canada isn’t outside this story.

In 2013 a World Rainbow Gathering was proposed for Raft Cove Provincial Park on northern Vancouver Island. Thousands of people were reportedly expected or invited to attend the remote location.

Local residents and provincial authorities raised concerns about environmental protection, sanitation, emergency response and the sheer difficulty of accommodating a large population in an isolated provincial park.

B.C. Parks ultimately closed the park. Authorities stated that rapidly increasing visitor numbers created risks involving public health, safety, environmental protection and preservation of park values. The Gathering at that particular location consequently broke apart.

Ontario, meanwhile, has developed its own regional Rainbow community. Public Ontario Rainbow Family material discusses recurring gatherings and the practical work involved in organizing them.

So this isn’t merely an American historical curiosity.

Where Paganism Enters the Picture

Now we get to the reason the Rainbow Family is interesting to me.

The Rainbow Family itself is not a Pagan organization.

But spend enough time looking around Pagan festivals, alternative spirituality gatherings, yoga communities, ecstatic dance, kirtan, transformational festivals, intentional communities and environmental spirituality and eventually some of the circles begin overlapping.

That isn’t especially mysterious.

They share cultural territory.

Nature as spiritually meaningful.

Community outside conventional religious institutions.

Ritual created through participation rather than clergy.

Drumming.

Fire.

Song.

Shared meals.

Circles.

Alternative healing practices.

Personal religious experience.

An often eclectic willingness to borrow concepts from several spiritual traditions.

Academic research into Rainbow spirituality describes precisely this kind of loose association of spiritual seekers rather than a unified creed (Berger, 2006).

That makes Rainbow culture familiar territory to anyone who has spent enough time around modern Pagan festivals.

Familiar, however, does not mean identical.

And Here We Need to Talk About Cultural Appropriation

This is one of the less comfortable parts of Rainbow history, but ignoring it wouldn’t produce an honest article.

Rainbow culture has sometimes incorporated supposed Indigenous prophecies, ceremonial language, talking circles, feathers, sacred fires and other practices presented as Indigenous traditions.

Some Indigenous people have strongly objected.

In 2015 Indigenous academics, writers and activists protesting a Rainbow Gathering in the Black Hills argued that participants were engaging in cultural exploitation and performing faux Native ceremonies on lands sacred to Indigenous peoples.

One particularly persistent Rainbow story concerns a supposed Indigenous prophecy concerning “Rainbow Warriors” who would someday unite humanity.

The problem is that research into the story has found that versions circulated as ancient Hopi prophecy do not have the Indigenous origin frequently claimed for them. Researcher Michael Niman traced a major source of the modern story to a 1962 publication by non-Indigenous Christian authors rather than an ancient Hopi teaching.

That is worth remembering within Paganism as well.

Something does not become authentic simply because it sounds old, mystical and Indigenous.

Respecting another people’s spirituality also means respecting their right to tell us when something isn’t theirs.

The Beautiful Idea and the Messy Human Reality

I think this is ultimately what makes the Rainbow Family worth studying.

It is very easy to romanticize it.

Thousands of people enter the woods.

They create kitchens.

They feed strangers.

People make music.

Money becomes less important.

Decisions are made through councils.

People meditate, pray, dance, sing, argue, fall in love, fall out with each other, make friendships and attempt to build community.

Then they dismantle the community and return to ordinary society.

There is something almost archetypal about that.

But human beings do not cease being human because they walk into the forest.

Leaderlessness does not eliminate power.

Consensus does not eliminate conflict.

Spiritual intention does not eliminate irresponsible behaviour.

Calling everyone family does not guarantee that everyone will behave like good family.

And believing that the Earth is sacred does not automatically resolve the very practical environmental consequences of putting thousands of people onto a piece of land.

Those contradictions have followed Rainbow Gatherings throughout their history and remain part of the relationship between the movement, public authorities and surrounding communities.

Perhaps That Is the Real Lesson

I don’t think the most interesting question is whether the Rainbow Family is good or bad.

That’s much too easy.

The more interesting question is what happens when people sincerely attempt to build a community around ideals of peace, equality, spirituality, generosity and freedom while deliberately removing many of the structures normally used to enforce responsibility.

Sometimes you apparently get something remarkable.

Sometimes you get chaos.

Frequently you get both.

And maybe that is why the Rainbow Family has survived for more than half a century.

It isn’t simply a festival.

It isn’t quite a religion.

It isn’t really an organization.

It is an ongoing experiment.

An attempt, repeated again and again, to step outside what Rainbow culture sometimes calls “Babylon,” enter the woods and ask:

Can we live differently?

The answer after more than fifty years appears to be:

Yes.

But living differently does not make the difficult parts of being human disappear.

And that, perhaps more than all the colourful clothing, drums, campfires and talk of peace and love, is what makes the Rainbow Family worth understanding.

References

Berger, A. (2006). The Rainbow Family: An ethnography of spiritual postmodernism [Doctoral dissertation, University of St Andrews].

Cornell University Library. (n.d.). The Rainbow Family of Living Light & Rainbow Gathering collection. Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections.

Falcon-Freeman, J. (2010). The Rainbow Family of Living Light: Anarchy, individuality, and community in a utopian experiment [Honors thesis, Louisiana State University].

Times Colonist. (2013, August 9). Editorial: A rainbow at Cape Scott.

United States Forest Service. (2026). Unauthorized group use: Rainbow Family Gathering incident update.

Walker, S. M. (2008). Broadening the spectrum: The religious dimensions of the Rainbow Gatherings [Master’s thesis, University of South Florida].

Suggested category: Pagan Community

Suggested tags: Rainbow Family, Rainbow Gathering, Pagan Community, Alternative Spirituality, Intentional Community, Counterculture, Spiritual Community, Festivals, Cultural Appropriation, Community, Nature Spirituality, Ontario Rainbow Family