# The Second Generation · The Cult Dossier · The Atlas · The Congregation of Tomorrow

Source: https://congregationoftomorrow.org/atlas/library/cults/177-the-second-generation/ · The Congregation of Tomorrow · the Atlas · language: en
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The Cult Dossier · No. 177 · Second Generation / Born In
The Second Generation
SGAs; second-generation adults; the born-in
Wherever a group lasts twenty years · Every group in this dossier that outlived its founding cohort
XVIII. THE SECOND GENERATION — THE ONES WHO NEVER CHOSE
Whatever the group taught. THE POINT OF THIS ERA IS THAT THE CONTENT OF THE BELIEF MATTERS LESS THAN THE FACT THAT NOBODY CHOSE IT.
### Who led it
### What it worshipped and taught
### Who was in it
### How it ended, or where it stands
### The dead
### Of note
### Its timeline
- Roughly year 20 of any group THE SECOND GENERATION APPEARS, and the group's problem changes. Recruiting adults requires persuasion. Retaining people who were born there requires only that nothing else ever becomes thinkable.
- 1970s–1990s The anti-cult movement (150) argues almost entirely about ADULT CONVERTS — whether they were coerced into joining and whether they could be taken out. THE CHILDREN INSIDE THOSE GROUPS ARE LARGELY ABSENT FROM THE ARGUMENT, and from the litigation it produced.
- 2000s–2010s Survivor memoirs by born-in members begin appearing in numbers, and SECOND-GENERATION ADULT (SGA) comes into use in the counselling literature.
- 2013 A GROUNDED-THEORY STUDY OF FIFTEEN SECOND-GENERATION ADULT FORMER MEMBERS, by CYNTHIA MATTHEWS and CARMEN SALAZAR, is published online in the INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF COUNSELLING (vol. 36, 2014). It records harms converts do not carry in the same way — abuse and neglect across the whole of childhood, disrupted attachment, missing education — and notes how little attention the born-in had received.
- Present The distinction is standard in the recovery literature and almost invisible in the law, which still asks whether an adult consented.
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