The Twelve Tribes was founded by Elbert Eugene Spriggs, a former carnival worker and schoolteacher, who opened a coffeehouse ministry in Chattanooga in 1972 and gathered a community from the Jesus movement. The group now has settlements in several countries and runs businesses — cafés, bakeries, farms, construction — that are often well regarded locally.
Its members hold property in common, live communally, and educate their children at home.
The allegation that has followed the group for four decades concerns the discipline of children.
The group's own published teaching endorses corporal punishment of children as a religious duty, using a thin rod, beginning in infancy, for disobedience and for failures of attitude. Former members have described its frequency and severity in detail, and it has been the subject of investigations and removals in the United States, Germany, France and elsewhere. German authorities removed forty children from two communities in 2013 after covert footage recorded beatings; the group challenged the removals in the European Court of Human Rights and lost in 2018.
The mechanism this case contributes to the guide is the reframing of harm as care, which is a specific and durable move.
The practice is not defended as necessary discipline that regrettably hurts. It is presented as an expression of love, obedience to which is what a loving parent owes a child — and a parent who fails to administer it is failing the child. This is Bandura's euphemistic relabelling applied inside a family, and it has a property that makes it unusually stable: it inverts the emotional signal. A parent's distress at hurting their child becomes evidence of their own insufficient faith rather than a warning.
Normalization across the whole community removes the corrective. In an ordinary setting a parent who beat an infant would encounter another adult's reaction, and the reaction would be information. In a community where every family does it, the only available comparison confirms.
Information closure sustains that. Children are educated within the community, external media is restricted, and the group's businesses provide employment so that adults need not work outside.
And shunning enforces it. Members who leave or who are expelled are cut off, and members who remain are expected to cut them off. Naomi Eisenberger's neuroimaging work found that social exclusion activates regions overlapping with those responding to physical pain, which is the physiological basis for something every group in this part of the guide uses: exclusion is not a metaphorical punishment.
The group disputes the characterization of its practices and describes the allegations as persecution. Litigation, custody proceedings and labor investigations continue in several jurisdictions.