Roland Robertson for Contemporary Sociology wrote that "the book is, for all of its theoretical disorganization, a helpful contribution to our understanding of modern American society".

[3] Thomas Robbins for the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion noted that the authors "exhibit a kind of detached evenhandedness" which "places the views of the concerned parents, clergy, deprogrammers, ex-devotees and clinicians... on the same ontological level as the notion of cultist zealots".

[4] Joe E. Barnhart for the Journal of Church and State calls the work a "major contribution to the study of a slice of American religious and organizational life in the 1970s".

Arthur A. Dole for Journal of Religion & Health – who noted their paternal relationship with a former Unification Church member – believed that the movement is "too complicated and the facts too sparse to justify any comprehensive universal theory about cult and anti-cult".

[8] In reviewing this work, "Moonies" in America, and Shupe and Bromley's Strange Gods (1981), Jack C. Ross for the Canadian Journal of Sociology argues that their methodology relies too heavily on trusting that the authors conducted the interviews and observed the events as they say.