Can "cult" be defined?

Joseph Laycock endorses a dubious academic habit in Defining "Cult," Defining "Christian" Religion Dispatches 10/12/2011, of refusing to use the word "cult" to describe cult group. Academics tend to prefer the term "new religious movements". Referring to the concept of cult, Laycock writes, "This term is never defined in a coherent way."

Actually, defining cults may be a challenge, but it's far from impossible. A number of countries define cults by law, including Germany and Austria. And scholars like Janja Lalich, Michael Langone and the late Margaret Thaler Singer have done quite a good job of defining cults in scholarly terms. The International Cultic Studies Association (ICSA) provides continuing research on cults, including their annual International Journal of Cultic Studies.

Tags: cults

An Australian Jesus-and-Mary cult

Via Skeptical Inquirer's Facebook feed, a 32-minute Australian TV report on a potentially violent and destructive/self-destructive Australian cult, led by a man name Alan John (AJ) Miller, who claims to be Jesus. He calls his group Divine Truth. It's a good examination of a cult group, in which reporter David Millikan asks the kinds of questions that someone investigating a cult needs to ask.

The YouTube video is dated 09/18/2011. It's from an Australian news program called Sunday Night. The Australia's chilling cult transcript is available at the program's website. There is an accompanying story, Inside Australia's chilling new cult, also dated 09/18/2011.



At about 4:30, it shows an apparently public ritual in which the follower is encouraged to stage an emotional regression to childhood. Such ceremonies are not unusual among cult groups. We see a similar ceremony at around 8:00, 14:20, 18:25 and 19:15 (with Mary).

His "Mary" (Mary Suzanne Luck) bears some resemblance to the actress Eliza Patricia Dushku, though it's certainly not her. Miller is a former Jehovah Witnesses minister who made a lot of money with land dealings and computer business.

One thing that strikes me in several of the interviews, including with Mary, is that they seem emotionally fragile, in the sense of being easily brought to tears. The Millikan notes that impression from his interviews to Miller/Jesus at around 25:00:

DAVID MILLIKAN: If I gather 10 of your people...

AJ Miller: Yes.

DAVID MILLIKAN: ..and start talking to them, within a minute they are talking about the struggle and just about everyone I talk to is on the verge of tears.

AJ Miller: But you notice that I don't view it as a struggle.

DAVID MILLIKAN: Look at poor Alex.

AJ Miller: Sorry?

DAVID MILLIKAN: That poor guy, he is just consumed...

AJ Miller: He is. And I have talked to Alex many times about him allowing the spirits to almost completely control his life.

I see that, like the New Apostolic Restoration (NAR), the Divine Truth cult has a system of apostles and emphasizes the activity of evil spirits among the believers. He also forecasts an apocalyptic disaster which will leave him as the world's leader.

See also A Current Affair, The second coming? 05/16/2011

See also A Current Affair, Aussie messiah questioned 05/17/2011.

David Murray, Jesus and Mary cult followers buy up land around Kingaroy The Courier-Mail 05/15/2011

David Murray, Reincarnation couple in cult friction The Sunday Mail (Qld) 05/22/2011

Tags: aj miller, cults

A three-part series on Scientology

The St. Petersburg Times has run a three-part series about Scientology (h/t Digby). I wish the press would do more of this kind of serious investigation of cults and cult-related issues: Scientology: The Truth Rundown, Part 1 of 3 in a special report on the Church of Scientology by Joe Childs and Thomas C. Tobin 06/21/09.

Links to the other two articles in the series and other related pieces are found at the bottom of Part 1.

Tags: cults, scientology

White racism and the FLDS polygamy cult

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) gives us an example of how the mass media often fall short in the reporting on cult groups and on white racism in Racism of Raided FLDS Cult Ignored by David Holthouse, Hate Watch 04/07/08:

Three days after the raid of a polygamist compound in Eldorado, Texas, the media is still atwitter about the arrest and search warrants served at the YFZ (Yearning For Zion) ranch, which was occupied by 400 followers of Warren Jeffs (right), the incarcerated “prophet” of the Fundamentalist Church of the Latter Day Saints.

But so far none of the dozens of stories and broadcast segments about Texas authorities taking 219 children and women from the YFZ compound into protective custody have even mentioned the fact that along with advocating child brides and plural marriage, FLDS doctrine is venomous with anti-black racism.

As described in a major feature on the FLDS published in the Spring 2005 issue of the Intelligence Report, Jeffs preaches to his estimated 10,000 followers that all blacks are the descendants of Cain, "cursed with a black skin," and selected by God to be the "servants of servants." It was on the basis of that unvarnished racism, preached as official FLDS doctrine, that the Southern Poverty Law Center began listing FLDS as a hate group in 2005.

Tags: cults

Juan Cole on terrorist cult dynamics

Juan Cole has a good piece in Salon focusing on explaining what to many people is surprising, that doctors like the ones arrested in connection with the London car bombing plot, would turn to terrorism since they had dedicated their lives to a healing profession, Inside the minds of killer doctors 07/09/07. Cole doesn't use the word "cult". But what he describes are cult dynamics.

He writes, "Terrorists imagine the world in black and white, as full of demons and angels, and place themselves on the side of the angels." Although he's actually referring to religious cult groups that turn to terrorism. French resistence fighters against German occupation in the Second World War who committed terrorist acts like sabotaging bridges may have hated the occupiers of their country. But they didn't necessarily have such an extreme Manichean view of the world generally.

Identification of an enemy is a key element in the process, though as he notes, a cult can make such an identification of an enemy without becoming terrorist:

The second is the naming of the malevolent force that is harming these pure ones. The so-called Christian Identity Movement in Oklahoma, to which terrorists Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols had links, posits that the U.S. government is persecuting the vanishing band of Anglo-Saxon Christians, the pure lost tribe of Israel, on behalf of polyglot minorities. This belief appears to have been among the motivations for the two to bomb the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 168 people.

The question for true believers thus becomes how to safeguard the righteous innocents from being wiped out by the forces of darkness. Some choose peaceful paths to that goal. If they simply organize protests or join political parties, they become social activists.

And the apocalyptic element is a key one in this cult process that leads to violence against the Outsiders:

But a key motivation for the turn to terror is a sense of extreme urgency. If the true believers are convinced that an occupying force or government is committing daily mass murder, and simply cannot bear for it to continue, they may feel an impulse to do something immediate and dramatic. ...

Activists who become terrorists often view themselves as soldiers in God's army. Seeing all British citizens unsympathetic to the Salafi Jihadi cause as soldiers in an opposing army authorized the terrorists, in their own minds, to target civilians in the Tiger Tiger nightclub near Piccadilly Circus. Their intended victims were not simply late-night revelers in the mind of the would-be attackers, but rather enemy troops on rest and recreation.

Such perpetrators can also be impelled to act by a fear of imminent capture, since in their view this would spell the final victory of the forces of evil over the elect few. After the People's Temple group killed California Rep. Leo Ryan in Guyana in 1978 they were forced by their leader, Jim Jones, to commit mass suicide because Jones realized that this murder would lead to the destruction of their group, which he felt was alone in carrying the truth. Jones began as a pastor in a mainstream church and had at one point been a civil rights leader in Indiana - a dramatic example of how caring individuals can go wrong. (my emphasis)

Robert Jay Lifton in his 2000 book on the Japanese Aum Sinrikyō cult, Destroying the World to Save It, discusses how the Christian Book of Revelation has exerted a particular influence on apocalyptic cult groups, even ones far outside the Christian tradition:

It turns out that Aum was not alone in its fervor to force the end, to try to bathe the world in its own blood for its own good. For the most striking historical examples of forcing the end, it is necessary to turn back nearly a millennium and not to Asia but to medieval Europe. The connecting text spanning contintents and centuries is the Book of Revelation.

The Aum cult made the Book of Revelation one of its favorite text. (Aum is the one terrorist group who has carried out a successful terrorist attack using one of the so-called "weapons of mass destruction", unleashing nerve gas in the Tokyo subway.) Lifton also reminds us that Charles Manson also considered the Book of Revelation one of his key texts (not just the Beatles whimsical, nonsensical song "Helter Skelter"). So did Marshall Herff Applewhite, leader of the Heaven's Gate cult. Lifton also writes:

For as the historian of religion Elaine Pagels point out, it was early Jewish and Christian apocalyptic thinking that gave rise to the idea of a cosmic struggle between good and evil for the fate of the world, of a "split cosmology with the 'sons of light' allied with the angels and 'sons of darkness' in league with the power of evil." [Aum cult leader] Asahara's reliance on imagery from the Hebrew and Christian Bible, especially the Book of Revelation, is therefore hardly surprising. That polarization, that "split cosmology," tapped fundamental, death-linked, often amorphous existential fears, which could be readily manipulated by promises of collective spiritual perfection and immortality.

I assume that Pagels wasn't meaning to say that Jewish and Christian thinkers invented the notion out of thin air. Persian Zoroastrianism had a major effect on the origins of Jewish apocalyptic thought.

Lifton is not suggesting that taking the Book of Revelation seriously inevitably leads to such results. Obviously, Christians all over the world consider that book part of their Holy Scripture, and most of them don't become violent cultists. Lifton writes, "Like Asahara, Manson invoked the Book of Revelation and incorporated its details into his paranoid-megalomanic reading of history and the future."

But he does emphasize that with all the myriad sources of material for apocalyptic cult thinking:

Yet, significantly, from medieval times to our own, the Book of Revelation has consistently been a powerful organizing text for apocalyptic dreaming and for the efforts of all varieties of violent cults to "murder death."

Not all Muslim terrorism can be called cultish. But for groups like Al Qaida and its various copycat groups, understanding cult dynamics is important to understanding how they think and operate. Juan Cole has also written about cult-like aspects of the 9/11 group headed by Muhammed Atta in Al-Qaeda’s Doomsday Document and Psychological Manipulation 04/09/2003.

Tags: cults, robert jay lifton, terrorism

Christian cultism?

Cults don't always look like this (actually, this is Aaron the Exorcist from the Zorro: la espada y la rosa telenovela, one of my favorite characters)

The 04/19/07 issue of Rolling Stone carried an article by Jeff Sharlet about Ron Luce's fundamentalist Christian group BattleCry, "Teenage Holy War". Rolling Stone placed an excerpt from the first part of the article online.

Sharlet's article is disturbing enough. But I was struck by one passage in the print version that shows that the group has some definite cult-like tendencies. But Sharlet didn't flag them that way. I can only guess what decisions he or his editors may have made. But it's also possible that Sharlet, like most journalists, wouldn't recognize these as warnings of cult tendencies.

He reports on the Honor Academy, which is prominently featured on the group's Web site at the present writing. The Academy is said to be a one-year experience for teenagers. Sharlet reports, "Students, called interns, come for a year or more between high school and college."

And he describes one of the striking features of the Honor Academy "campus":

There's also what they call the "Back 40," several hundred acres on which stand more primitive structures, retreats for toughening up the kids, and a Quonset-hut officer's club for those who stay to become employees or permanent volunteers, forgoing college or earning mail-order degrees from Jerry Falwell's Liberty University.

That mention of some of the kids deciding to stay living in apparently Spartan conditions permanently really caught my eye. Especially giving the socially restrictive conditions Sharlet describes. Here's his portrait of a typical day there:

Intern days begin as early as 4:45 A.M. •with an hour of group exercise on the court near the Academy's swimming pool. Mornings are for classes: There's "Character Development," which focuses on "obedi-ence" and "purity," and the "World View Mocule," in which one learns to see current events around the world through the lens of obedience and purity.

"Purity" for BattleCry means, especially, no sex. And presumably no lustful thoughts, either.

Then there's this:

Further reinforcement comes from the Academy's required "Life Transforming Events," the most grueling of which is ESOAL (Emotionally Stretching Opportunity of a Lifetime). Luce was reluctant to share details about the "Opportunity," a fifty-to-ninety-hour sleep-deprived endurance test, but a short video of the 2005 ESOAL provides revealing glimpses: students weeping and dragging giant wooden crosses on their shoulders; a boy rolling and puking across a field while a senior intern "sergeant" in camouflage and a helmet urges him on; a platoon of weeping girls; a shell-shocked boy mumbling into the camera, "Don't know what time it is.... Don't know what matters. ... Don't even necessarily know who I can trust." (my emphasis)

The Web site presents a 2006 ESOAL video as of this writing.

As hair-raising as that sounds, Sharlet's article doesn't provide enough information about the right factors, such as what kind of personal authority Luce and his senior assistants exercise over their most devoted members, to say definitively that he's describing a cult.

But there are some screaming warning signs there that this group could be a cult, or a group evolving into a cult.

In any case, it's hard to imagine a camp like that is really constructive or healthy for 17-, 18- and 19-year-olds.

Tags: battlecry, cults, ron luce