to separate themselves from the City of the Destruction

We can throughout American history find select and separatist groups who looked to a phrophetic individual claiming divine revelation, in a setting that repudiated conventional assumptions about property, family life, and sexuality.
They were marginal groups, peculiar people, people set apart from the world: the Shakers and the Ephrata community, the communes of Oneida and Amana, the followers of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young.

Philip Jenkins, Mystics and Messiahs
quoted by Krakauer, page 9, Under the Banner of Heaven.