‘The thought of the cult represents the very core of the American Dream’
Susan-Mary Grant is Professor of American Historical past at Newcastle College
In the context of American historical past fluctuate broadly. Describe one thing as a cult to a contemporary viewers and what is going to most definitely spring to thoughts is the Manson Household murders (1969), the 900 Jonestown murder-suicides (1978), the Department Davidian murders and mass suicides (Waco, 1993), or the Heaven’s Gate suicides (1997). These examples are extremes, the dramatic and subsequently seen tip of an iceberg of some 10,000 cults that exist in America. However they’ve led to the assumption that throughout the nation, at numerous factors in its historical past, harmful cults, centred on a charismatic however violent and corrupt chief, are warping souls, controlling our bodies, and destroying lives. The trendy cult is, as popularly portrayed, about thoughts management and, in its worst manifestation, homicide.
But there’s extra to the thought of the cult than this. Continuously grounded in an apocalyptic ideology, the fashionable American cult is in some ways a focus, and a corruption, of the utopian impulses that shaped the nation itself. Because the Separatists, higher generally known as the Pilgrim Fathers, set out on the Mayflower in 1620 it was with the intention of creating a separate spiritual neighborhood inside which they might practise their religion freely. The Puritans, too, regarded themselves as particularly godly, ‘Seen Saints’ who would set up a extra superb Christian neighborhood wherein the elect alone have been predestined for salvation. Their neighborhood, in lay preacher John Winthrop’s well-known phrases, would function a ‘Metropolis on a Hill’. So blessed by the ‘God of Israel’ would the Massachusetts Bay colony be, Winthrop assured them, that it might grow to be ‘a reward and glory’ to the world.
On this respect the secessionist impulses that knowledgeable the primary European settlements in North America within the seventeenth century formed the character of the nation finally created there, the emotional drivers at its coronary heart. Such was the character of utopia as Thomas Extra first conceived of it in 1516: the inhabitants of his imaginary, superb world juxtaposed with the privations of these past its partitions. Within the want to be distinctive, totally different, and higher, town on a hill, separate from however seen to the folks round it, grew to become a really perfect to which they may aspire, but additionally a neighborhood from which they have been excluded. The thought of the cult, in brief, represents the very core of the American Dream.
‘Tales about “cults” fascinated the general public’
Joshua Paddison is creator of Unholy Sensations: A Story of Intercourse, Scandal, and California’s First Cult Scare (Oxford College Press, 2025)
Like every part, the time period cult has a historical past. Earlier than 1890 English audio system used the phrase to refer merely to non secular veneration. Nevertheless, within the early Eighteen Nineties, American newspapers began utilizing cult to check with small spiritual actions outdoors the Christian mainstream. Cyrus Teed, the chief of a celibate cooperative society in Chicago, and Thomas Lake Harris, spiritualist poet, prophet, and chief of the Fountaingrove colony in California, grew to become the primary examples of a brand new kind of villain: the cult chief.
In what would grow to be generally known as ‘yellow journalism’, newspapers within the early Eighteen Nineties employed more and more sensationalistic ways to draw city readers. Editors shortly realized that tales about ‘cults’ fascinated the general public by providing glimpses into the margins of American spiritual perception – the Chicago Day by day Tribune complained, in 1890, of the ‘kaleidoscopic cults and crazes’ that had arisen throughout the previous century. Drawing on traditions of anti-Catholicism, anti-Islam, and anti-Mormonism, cults have been demonised as not simply unusual, however dangerously un-American. By the mid-Eighteen Nineties Protestant ministers had joined journalists in denouncing the menace that cults represented to morality and democracy. Non secular actions comparable to spiritualism, Christian Science, and Theosophy have been described as cults. Mixing spiritual and racial intolerance, writers additionally described ‘Shinto cults’, ‘Buddhist Tibetan cults’, ‘Hindu cults’, and ‘Voodoo cults’ in Asia and the Caribbean. The true and imagined sexual practices of cults attracted consideration, marking their members as wicked. With its historical past of Asian immigration and spiritual range, California grew to become particularly related to cult exercise.
The thought of the cult took maintain on the flip of the century as a result of it encapsulated fears held by People throughout an period outlined by industrialisation and immigration. Cults may exist wherever, luring extraordinary People by preying on their want for spirituality and neighborhood. White girls have been thought-about particularly weak, an expression of anxieties over altering gender roles as girls gained political and financial energy. As soon as established, the ‘cult’ label could be utilized repeatedly.
‘Historical past affected cults earlier than cults affected historical past’
Megan Goodwin is author of Abusing Faith: Literary Persecution, Intercourse Scandals, and American Minority Religions (Rutgers College Press, 2020)
American historical past affected cults earlier than cults affected American historical past – America’s basis as a white Christian venture is on the coronary heart of which teams get referred to as (and handled as) ‘cults’. Radical spiritual innovation was on the coronary heart of Sixties counterculture, sparking anxieties about shifting demographics and nationwide values. The ethical panic generally known as the American ‘cult scare’ was rooted in fears about immigration and race-mixing.
A well-liked picture of the counterculture is that of younger, white folks wearing orange robes chanting ‘Krishna Krishna’, set, maybe, to the closing stanzas of George Harrison’s ‘My Candy Lord’ (launched in 1970). There have been numerous lampoons of the Unification Church’s mass weddings (some 2,000 ‘Moonies’ have been married at Madison Sq. Backyard in 1982) and the lavish excesses of the Rajneesh motion, whose Indian chief arrived within the US in 1981. Much less well-known is the Immigration Act of 1965, with out which none of those actions may need landed within the US.
The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act repealed quotas set by the Chinese language Exclusion Act (1882) and the 1924 Immigration Act, each of which had severely curtailed Asian immigration to the US. Handed by Lyndon B. Johnson, the Act facilitated a surge of Asian immigration, and an inflow of ‘jap’ religions comparable to Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, and Korean Christianity, in addition to new actions, comparable to Hare Krishnas, that have been influenced by them. Respectable dad and mom have been horrified that their youngsters have been embracing ‘cults’ that rejected conventional values. This ‘cult scare’ resulted in a number of high-profile lawsuits in opposition to the brand new actions – in 1989 the George household sued the Worldwide Society For Krishna Consciousness Of California, successful an preliminary $32.5 million (later diminished) – in addition to a growth within the ‘deprogramming’ trade (which eliminated folks, typically forcibly, from ‘cults’) and a broad dismissal of ‘cult’ members as irrational, coerced, or each. The ethical panic culminated within the 1978 Jonestown bloodbath, broadly remembered right now as brainwashed mass suicide (and low-cost punchline) somewhat than a devastating instance of anti-Black violence – nearly all of its victims have been Black girls – perpetuated in opposition to a neighborhood hoping to create a fairer world.
‘The Church of Scientology declared conflict on the federal authorities’
Edd Graham-Hyde is Affiliate Lecturer of Humanities on the College of Central Lancashire
Few actions have achieved the notoriety of the Church of Scientology (CoS), a minority faith typically denigrated because the archetypal American ‘cult’. Based in Arizona in 1954, the CoS is a psycho-therapeutic faith (recognised as such
within the US since 1993) with a fame for conspiracy and quite a few allegations of abuse.
It’s honest to say the CoS has not responded favourably to scrutiny. In 1973 the Guardian’s Workplace (GO) of the CoS started ‘Operation Snow White’ in opposition to the Inner Income Service (IRS) and different authorities businesses, with the specific intention of defending itself from the federal authorities, which, it feared, was planning to intervene with its operations. ‘Operation Snow White’ would grow to be one of many greatest embarrassments in US intelligence historical past. In 1974 the GO efficiently planted listening units in IRS workplaces, and thereby realized of an imminent audit. By 1975 it had acquired 30,000 pages of IRS paperwork. It was not till 1977 that the FBI found the operation and raided the GO. Because the historian Hugh City famous in 2011, the FBI discovered a lot materials ‘that it took a truck to haul it away’.
In retaliation to the FBI raids, the CoS ‘declared conflict’ on the federal authorities with steady lawsuits and different authorized challenges, arguing that it must be afforded the identical rights as different religions. This litigation would value each side tens of millions. When the IRS recognised the CoS as tax exempt in 1993, David Miscavige, chief of the CoS since 1986, declared that the ‘conflict is over’.
Whether or not or not the IRS must be arbitrators of deciding what’s, or just isn’t, a faith in US regulation, Scientology was declared
one. The CoS’ conspiratorial considering and shady operations had, to an extent, been justified. Thus it offered a mannequin for a way non-typical religions and conspiracy idea teams may problem their fringe standing with the federal authorities, ushering in an period wherein seemingly innocent different beliefs now gas debates about threats to social safety and the freedoms of democracy. When such teams are met with resistance, or information that contradict their opinion, the instance of the CoS exhibits that perseverance can succeed. Now we have seen how conspiracy theories and different beliefs have transitioned into mainstream US politics.
