CULTS

CULTS. Scholars and religious leaders, as well as the public, often have debated the defining characteristics of religious groups known as cults. Many Christian leaders, disturbed by the increase in such groups, label almost all variations from mainstream religion as cults, contending that they have a disruptive effect on society and on their followers. Others divide religious movements into three categories: churches, sects, and cults. All agree that churches represent mainstream religious authority. Mainstream religious leaders disagree on the characteristics of sects and cults. Some contend that sects represent a variation of Western religions and that cults adopt belief systems from non-Western sources. Others argue that all religious movements, Western or non-Western, begin as cults and, as they grow in popularity and power, evolve into sects and, finally, churches. Using this second argument, one could identify the Seventh-Day Adventists, the Mormons, and the Christian Scientists as groups that successfully shed their cult status and acknowledge utopian communities like Oneida, Amana, New Harmony, and the Shakers as religious groups that failed to survive as churches. Basically, the categorization of religious alternatives as cults rests on the extent to which they challenge mainstream religious institutions.

Historically, the United States has seen a variety of religious movements. Since the earliest years of European colonization, tension has existed between members of churches and adherents of smaller and less empowered religious beliefs. The nation's ensurance of disestablishment (that the state would not designate a particular religious group as favored by civil authorities) and the First Amendment guarantee of religious freedom allowed a number of alternative religious groups to take root and flourish in the United States. Indeed, the same national guidelines that allowed nontraditional religious groups to establish themselves in the United States also created a climate favorable to religious expression and may account for the generally religious character of most Americans. Religious groups identified as cults proliferated during the twentieth century. Decline of religious authority, increase in contact between people of diverse backgrounds, and development of mass communication allowed cult leaders to gain personal followings through newspapers and other periodicals, radio, television, and computerized mailing lists. Cults appeared in all regions of the United States, often in areas receiving an influx of migrants. In the early 1900s the West Coast, a region experiencing massive immigration, became known for religious experimentation. Mainstream religious denominations were not well established there, and migrants formed groups with beliefs reflecting their new lives. Cults often arose from groups virtually excluded from mainstream denominations and even from society at large, such as people of color, women, the young, and the poor. Marginalized, they found strength through religious alternatives. Cults also appealed to people seeking to restore their physical and mental health, having found little hope from mainstream religion.

One of the first mass cults was Father Divine's Peace Mission Movement. An African American minister who taught the power of positive thinking and encouraged his disciples to recognize him as God, Father Divine built a national and international following beginning in the 1930s and lasting through the 1950s. Known for elaborate ceremonies that often consisted of extravagant banquets, he attracted much attention. Other African American religious leaders, such as Daddy Grace, founder of the United House of Prayer for All People, and Guy W. Ballard, leader of the I AM, came to national prominence during these same years.

Cults increased tremendously in the 1960s and 1970s. In this era of rebellion and reform, many people were inspired to question authority. A variety of faiths appeared, with Eastern mysticism gaining much popularity. Probably the most notable new group was the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), better known as the Hare Krishnas. A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada had established the ISKCON in India and brought it to the United States in 1965, when he began proselytizing in New York City's Tompkins Square Park and attracted followers associated with the hippie movement. He opened a temple and commenced publication of Back to Godhead, devoted to yoga, meditation, and vegetarianism. A resurgence of interest in Christianity in the 1970s led to the Jesus People movement, which sponsored Bible studies and revivals. Several of its groups established communes. Out of this cult came the Family of Love, better known as the Children of God. A highly controversial group, the Children of God borrowed features from the Christian holiness movement. The cult was accused of recruiting by brainwashing and through a technique

known as flirty fishing, which involved securing converts through sexual favors.

Of all groups to gain prominence during this era, the Unification Church, founded by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, proved the most controversial. Oriented toward fundamentalist Christianity and politically conservative, the Unification Church supervised the lives and activities of followers and focused on preparing the world for God's kingdom on earth. On joining the church, single members practiced celibacy and devoted themselves to missionary work. At the end of their initiation, church leaders paired members with suitable mates and married them in mass ceremonies. Throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s, the Unification Church recruited on college campuses and gained a foothold in publishing through ownership of the Washington Times, while building a large portfolio of business investments. Reverend Moon alarmed many members of mainstream churches through the authority he exerted and his claim of being the Lord of the Second Advent, a role analogous to Christ.

An anticult movement developed during this time, targeting so-called destructive cults. According to anti-cultists, destructive cults exhibited three characteristics: demand for unquestioning acceptance of a leader, recruitment through brainwashing, and maintenance of secrecy. Anticultists received enormous attention in the mid-1960s with the publication of The Kingdom of the Cults by an Evangelical Christian author, Walter Martin. The book underwent thirty-six printings between 1965 and 1985 and was still in print in 2001. It heightened concerns about the possible use of brainwashing in cults.

The anticult movement developed methods of de-programming, designed to reorient cult members toward mainstream spirituality, but in many ways the methods of deprogrammers resembled the tactics of the supposed programmers. In the 1970s there were frequent reports of families who hired deprogrammers to kidnap their children from a cult, take them to secluded places, and spend days, sometimes weeks, breaking down their acceptance of cult teachings.

The rise of the anticult movement in the United States led to tensions and sometimes even violence. One of the most alarming incidents occurred in Guyana, South America, where the San Francisco cult minister Jim Jones had relocated his Peoples Temple in the hope of establishing an interracial religious commune and farming cooperative. In November 1978, shortly after U.S. Congressman Leo Ryan and four members of his party were killed by Jones's cult members, Jones presided over a suicide ceremony in which his followers drank cyanide.

Academics who study groups targeted by anticultists prefer the term "new religious movement," to the term "cult" and criticize anticultists for jeopardizing religious freedom in the United States. They emphasize that destructive cults are rare, that few cult members are coerced into joining, and that most cult followers leave groups of their own accord.

Incidents at the close of the twentieth century again increased fears of cult activity. Concern over the dangers presented by cults that stockpiled arms achieved national prominence in 1993 when a clash occurred between federal authorities and the Branch Davidians, a Bible-based cult led by a former rock musician named David Koresh, who claimed to be a messiah. Another armed cult, the Church Universal and Triumphant, led by Elizabeth Clare Prophet, received attention for its activities and ownership of bomb shelters in Paradise Valley, Montana. The group's presence generated a great deal of hostility from the local population. In March 1997, members of the Heaven's Gate cult engaged in a mass suicide, believing their souls would enter higher beings in a spaceship traveling behind the comet Hale-Bopp. The group, led by Marshall Herff Applewhite, used the Internet to recruit members and supported itself by designing World Wide Web sites. Its use of contemporary technology led many anticultists to fear the potential reach of the Inter-net as the millennium approached, but nothing on the scale of the Heaven's Gate suicides ocurred in the United States between 1997 and 2001.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bromley, David G., and Anson D. Shupe, Jr. Strange Gods: The Great American Cult Scare. Boston: Beacon Press, 1981.

Melton, J. Gordon. Encyclopedic Handbook of Cults in America. Rev. and updated ed. Religious Information Systems Series, vol. 7. New York: Garland, 1992.

Melton, J. Gordon, and Robert L. Moore. The Cult Experience: Responding to the New Religious Pluralism. New York: Pilgrim Press, 1982.

Washington, Joseph R., Jr. Black Sects and Cults: The Power Axis in an Ethnic Ethic. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1973.

JillWatts/f. b.

See alsoAfrican American Religions and Sects ; Jonestown Massacre ; Nativist Movements (American Indian Revival Movements) ; Religion and Religious Affiliation ; Waco Siege .

Cults

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The term cult is derived from a Latin root meaning “to break ground,” particularly in preparing (cultivating) a field for domesticated crops. The same root is seen in culture, in both a specialized scientific sense (a bacteria culture ) and in a broader social sense (human culture ). By extension, it was originally used in a religious sense, meaning behavior glorifying a deity or saint (the “cult” of Saint James). By the nineteenth century, the word came to be used pejoratively about those who were excessively devoted to popular authors (the “cult” of Wordsworth), worshiping them as modern “saints.” Around 1900, this pejorative use influenced anthropologists to use cult to refer to ancient or allegedly primitive religious practices (as in “cult” objects or “cargo cults”).

The popularity of this negative sense makes the term difficult to define objectively, since a “cult” in an outsider’s eyes may well be a “new religion” to someone inside the group. Both the positive and negative uses of the term, however, agree that a cult is a small religious group that exists in tension with a predominant religion. In particular, such groups are highly cohesive in structure and are headed by a dominant leader who influences members’ behavior in dramatic ways. They pursue a transcendent goal, claiming that the truths they preserve will transform all of society, and encourage direct religious experience through participation in rituals intended to foster ecstatic or supernatural phenomena. Often (though not always) they are apocalyptic in nature, holding that contemporary society is hopelessly corrupt and will soon be destroyed or transformed through the direct intervention of supernatural forces.

Cult behavior in the ordinary sense needs to be differentiated from the popular image of dangerous cults, drawn from the most extreme cases. In the popular imagination, cult leaders prey on impressionable youth and use mind control, brainwashing, hypnosis, and physical and sexual abuse to entrap and hold them against their will. “Cult” activity, in the most sensationalized images, includes ritualized sex abuse, self-mutilation, and, in some unconfirmed accounts, animal and human blood sacrifice. Often the agenda of such groups is thought to be to overturn organized religion or to promote the political agenda of evil others. Contributing to such pejorative images is the faux-etymology of cult as derived from occult, although this term, originally meaning “hidden” or “concealed,” has a distinct history. Few of these claims have ever held up to skeptical inquiry; nevertheless, popular accounts frequently assume that sociopathic behavior is integral to these cults’ activities.

Most cults in the historical record have been shortlived, but some persist to become the nuclei of important religious movements. Cults in both senses have been commonplace in European history from ancient times. Mystery cults, common in the Greek and Roman world, clearly were seen as charismatic movements that presented challenges to mainstream religions. Such groups, particularly the Bacchanalia, were frequently accused of being cults in the negative, sociopathic sense. Similarly, the persecution of the early Christian church by Roman authorities was based on persistent rumors that it was a dangerous cult that abducted and cannibalized babies.

During medieval times, Christianity itself fostered the growth of locally based movements devoted to the veneration of a local saint. Many of these developed into cultlike groups, and, while most were limited to a town or region in their influence, some, like the followers of Saint Francis of Assisi (c. 1181–1226), became important institutions (the Franciscan monks) in their own right. In early modern times, a number of breakaway factions of Protestant Christianity similarly began as small, strongly differentiated cults, and then grew into persistent religious movements. Some of these groups, like the Shakers, eventually declined, while others, like the Amish and Mormons (Church of Latter-day Saints) developed into stable institutions.

During the late twentieth century, rumors of cult activities in the United States especially developed around the development of new religious movements. Rumors that such cults engaged in blood sacrifices, orgiastic sex rituals, or child abuse became especially prevalent in the second half of the twentieth century. The Process, an allegedly “satanic” organization active in Great Britain and the United States during the 1960s, was repeatedly targeted as a “cult” in this negative sense, but a detailed sociological study of the group by William Bainbridge (1978) showed that the popular image was misleading.

Yet some cults did engage in violent and abusive acts, giving warrant to these fears. Two notorious examples were the People’s Temple, founded by James Warren Jones (1931–1978) in Indianapolis during the 1950s, and the Heaven’s Gate movement, begun by Marshall Herff Applewhite (1931–1997) in the Pacific Northwest during the 1970s. Both cults ended their existence in spectacular acts of group suicide, the first in 1978, the second in 1997. Both have been extensively studied, and while both groups came to the same tragic end, the factors leading up to their self-destruction varied considerably. Both can be seen as extreme examples of cult behavior caused by each group’s isolation from outside culture and the growing mental instability of their leaders.

Both cults drew much of their ideology from the doomsday worldview prevalent among charismatic groups, which have become an important factor in both Catholic and Protestant Christianity. This ideology emphasizes controlling one’s personal and social behavior strictly in preparation for an imminent, violent apocalyptic struggle against demonic forces. This mindset makes such groups potentially dangerous when contacted unwisely by outsiders. The notorious 1857 Mountain Meadows massacre, carried out in part by members of the early Mormon Church, and the bloody counterattacks taken by the Branch Davidian enclave (near Waco, Texas) against federal agents in 1993 illustrate two additional cases in which embattled cults turned to violent acts against outsiders.

Such extreme cases should not, however, distract scholars from studying objectively the many cults that continue to arise within mainstream religions and as alternatives to them. However, many more such groups remain diffuse enough that their members’ involvement in these religious groups does not separate them from their everyday work and social worlds. Such cults have been and will continue to be positive factors in the development of new religions and the modification of mainstream sects in response to the cults’ challenge. In addition to cults composed of charismatic Christians, many more such groups have become devoted to reviving neo-pagan rituals and investigating paranormal phenomena such as UFOs. According to the 2001 American Religious Identification Survey, the numbers of self-proclaimed Wiccans increased nearly seventeen-fold from 8000 to 138,000 during the previous ten years, with an additional 200,000 now belonging to a “pagan” or “new age” (Kosmin and Mayer 2001). Such new movements continue to provide individuals with creative means for pursuing religious experience.

SEE ALSO Christianity; Conformity; Groupthink; Mysticism; Religion; Social Dominance Orientation; Suicide; Unidentified Flying Objects

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bainbridge, William Sims. 1978. Satan’s Power: A Deviant Psychotherapy Cult. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Brown, Peter. 1981. The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Burkert, Walter. 1987. Ancient Mystery Cults. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Denzler, Brenda. 2001. The Lure of the Edge: Scientific Passions, Religious Beliefs, and the Pursuit of UFOs. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Ellis, Bill. 2000. Raising the Devil: Satanism, New Religions, and the Media. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press.

Galanter, Marc. 1999. Cults: Faith, Healing, and Coercion. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press.

Kosmin, Barry A., and Egon Mayer. 2001. American Religious Identification Survey. The Graduate Center, CUNY. http://www.gc.cuny.edu/faculty/research_briefs/aris/aris_index.htm

Quarantelli, E. L., and Dennis Wenger. 1973. A Voice from the Thirteenth Century: The Characteristics and Conditions for the Emergence of a Ouija Board Cult. Urban Life and Culture 1: 379–400.

Wojcik, Daniel. 1997. The End of the World as We Know It: Faith, Fatalism, and Apocalypse in America. New York: New York University Press.

Bill Ellis

CULTS

New Religions

In the open cultural climate of the 1960s and 1970s a variety of religions new to, or previously unnoticed in, the United States attracted attention from the press and the general public. Some of these organizations engaged their converts in beliefs and activities that seemed strange by traditional American standards, occupied all their time, and frequently tried to break their ties with their families. The detractors of these groups labeled them "cults" and warned of the danger, particularly to the young.

Hare Krishna

Some of these groups came from India, such as the International Movement for Krishna Consciousness, which incorporated itself in the United States in 1966. The organization attracted increasing numbers of young people, who were called Hare Krishnas by outsiders due to their chanting public worship. In cities with large numbers of hippies, passersby encountered Hare Krishnas, dressed in saffron robes and with strange haircuts, performing on the streets. Even more startling were the Hare Krishnas soliciting contributions in airport terminals and other public places. People suspected the leaders benefited from the money the young people raised.

Divine Light Mission

Another group with an Eastern-inspired background was the Divine Light Mission, which followed the teachings of the teenage Maharaj Ji, who attracted a large following in his personal mission to the United States in the early 1970s. He moved his world headquarters to Denver, Colorado, where about a thousand young people filled the group's communes. In 1973 the Divine Light Mission rented the Houston Astrodome for a meeting called "Millennium '73," in which Rennie Davis, one of those charged with disrupting the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, was a chief participant. The Houston rally was not as successful as anticipated, even though it brought in Maharaj Ji's followers from around the world. The movement gradually declined after Maharaj Ji married his secretary, over his mother's protests, and his family in India severed their connections with him.

TM

Another popular Indian guru was Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who taught transcendental meditation. In the early 1970s large numbers of people, an estimated ten thousand a month by middecade, went to one of the 350 training centers, where they were each given a personal mantra, a word which they used for engaging in meditation. Initially there were questions whether TM, as it was sometimes called, was a religion or a drug-free means of attaining an altered consciousness. Inspired in part by TM, physicians and psychologists began investigating the psychic value of meditation. In 1974 the Yogi bought Parsons College in Fairfield, Iowa, and named it Maharishi International University. When the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's followers began to claim that they were able to levitate and that their meditation could alter world affairs, the movement went into a decline, although meditation continued to gain in popularity.

The Unification Church

Among the most widely publicized and criticized of the new religions was the Unification church, founded and headed by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon in South Korea. As early as 1959 three of Moon's followers came to the United States to proselytize the series of revelations about Christianity that Moon called the Divine Principle, These revelations urged the unification of the Christian churches, presumably under Moon.

Vigorous Growth

Although Moon came to the United States for brief visits in 1965 and 1969, it was only when he came for an extended stay in 1971 that his church began its vigorous and controversial growth as it directed its attention toward college campuses and other centers where young people congregated.

Emphasis on the Young

The success of the Unification church in recruiting young people and the commitment of the new converts to the organization, often breaking their ties with their families, triggered wide-spread apprehension. In most cities "Moonies," as they were called, were seen selling roses or otherwise attempting to raise money for the church. Charges were made that converts were lured into the church by deceptive means and then brainwashed with Moon's teachings. Ted Patrick, who organized the Citizens' Freedom Foundation, attracted attention with his claims that he was able to deprogram converts who had been brainwashed.

Politics of Moon

The Unification church also acquired notoriety through its political and financial activities. The Unification church was militantly anti-Communist and aligned itself with conservative politics. During the Watergate crisis the church held mass demonstrations in Washington in support of President Nixon, and Moon took out advertisements saying that "at this moment God has chosen Richard Nixon to be President of the United States." More surreptitious political activity, including Moon's alleged ties to the South Korean intelligence forces, led to inconclusive congressional investigations.

Money Questions

The lavish spending of the Unification church for public and patriotic rallies, the purchase of expensive property, and Moon's expensive living costs aroused concern about the source of his funds. It was bad if those funds were from South Korean political groups, even worse if they were from the exploitation of his young American converts. In 1978 the New York Board of Regents refused to grant a charter to Moon's Unification Theological Seminary in Barrytown, New York, partly because of academic standards, partly because of financial questions, but also because of "deceptive claims." The Internal Revenue Service began an investigation into Moon's finances by the end of the decade.

Moses David

A group that started as a Christian mission to young people in the California counterculture in the late 1960s took on cultlike qualities when David Berg, the founder of Teens for Christ, began to see himself as the Messiah, and he changed his name to Moses David. While the group's name changed several times, it was best known as the Children of God. Berg and his followers established a variety of communes on the West Coast and in Texas. Berg himself went to Britain, and his movement began proselytizing around the world. Berg communicated with his followers in letters, called the Mo Letters, that spelled out the terms of his developing set of beliefs for his followers. In the course of the decade over nine hundred of the Mo Letters were published, delivering doctrines that departed increasingly from mainstream Christianity. The appearance of Children of God groups in various countries and some of the organization's tactics aroused intense local opposition from time to time, but the organization still functioned at the end of the decade.

Scientology

Another group that aroused concern due to its cultlike qualities was the Church of Scientology, founded by the science-fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard and based on his book Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health (1950). By the 1960s Hubbard abandoned his science-fiction writing to concentrate on developing his ideas, which he now insisted was a new faith he called Scientology. His many detractors insisted that he took this guise to avoid government interference and taxation. He too left the United States for Britain and continued to develop the tenets of his faith. In 1977 the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) conducted a raid on the Scientology office in Washington, D.C., to uncover evidence that the church had attempted to infiltrate the FBI and other investigative agencies. The participants in the plan were tried and convicted in federal court.

Sources:

Steve Allen, Beloved Son: A Story of the Jesus Cults (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1982);

David G. Bromley and Anson D. Shupe, Jr., "Moonies" in America: Cult, Church, and Crusade (Beverly Hills, Cal.: Sage Publications, 1979);

Mack Calanter, Cults: Faith, Healing, and Coercion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989);

Ronald B. Flowers, Religion in Strange Times: The 1960s and 1970s (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1984);

John R. Hall, Gone From the Promised Land: Jonestown in American Cultural History (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1987);

Ruth Wangerin, The Children of God: A Make-Believe Revolution? (Westport, Conn.: Bergin & Garvey, 1994).

Cults

A term used for many years in social science to refer to religious groups whose basic religious beliefs and practices differ markedly from those dominant in the particular culture in which they are found. The term cult has, however, since the 1970s become a pejorative term used to describe unpopular religious groups. Many groups labeled as "cults" are Spiritualist, occult, and metaphysical groups. The Theosophical Society, the Spiritualist movement, Christian Science, and occult groups such as the Rosicrucians were among the first groups so negatively labeled. In social science, the term has been replaced by the less prejudicial terms "new religion," new religious movement, or "alternative religion."

Contemporary use of cult was nurtured for many decades by Evangelical Christian organizations, some organized as late as the 1930s, to oppose groups that deviated from Christian orthodoxy. In the mid-1970s, a more secular anticult movement developed in the United States to oppose several new religions that focused their attention on young adult recruits. The major organization of the contemporary anticult movement is the Cult Awareness Network, which grew out of the older Citizens Freedom Foundation. It has nurtured a number of similar organizations in Europe and South America.

The anticult movement has encouraged the publication of a vast literature denouncing "cults." This literature is characterized by adoption of the "brainwashing" hypothesis to explain the destructive nature of the groups under attack. Such groups are said to have an unusual power to control the minds of their members to the extent that they lose the ability to think straight and evaluate their experience. According to the literature, members have been "programmed" and act like robots following every command of their leaders; they cannot choose to leave the harmful situation in which they have been trapped. This analysis justifies an intrusion into their lives by anticult forces. In extreme cases, such intrusions take the form of "de-programming," a forceful removal of the person from the group and the application of social and psychological pressure to convince the person to break his or her relationship with the group.

In 1987-88, the American Psychological Association examined the issue of brainwashing or mind control in relation to new religions and other groups, such as psychological training groups, that had been accused of using techniques of "coercive persuasion" against their adherents. The association concluded that such theories were based on insufficient scientific data and that the work done was severely flawed methodologically. This opinion was confirmed by the American Sociological Association and the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. Most scholars on new religions had rejected the brainwashing hypothesis shortly after its proposal in the early 1980s, and those opinions by the several scholarly bodies have been decisive in moving discussion of the so-called cults to other issues.

The anticult movement has joined the ranks of various opposition groups (anti-Catholic, anti-Mormon, anti-Semitic) that have dotted the religious landscape in recent centuries. In the meantime, scholars have noted a radical jump in religious pluralism in Western society.

Sources:

Ellwood, Robert S., Jr. Alternative Altars: Unconventional and Eastern Spirituality in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979.

——. Religious and Spiritual Groups in Modern America. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1973.

Melton, J. Gordon. The Encyclopedic Handbook of the Cults. New York: Garland Publishing, 1992.

Melton, J. Gordon, and Robert L. Moore. The Cult Experience. New York: Pilgrim Press, 1982.

Cults Abdn. Qhylt 1450, Cuyltis 1456. ‘(Place in the) nook’. Gaelic cùillte + English plural s.