CULT COUNTRY
CULTS ARE IN style again. Or at least it’s trendy to call things cults—everything from QAnon to SoulCycle has gotten the tag. It’s pretty easy to throw the word around loosely, since we’ve never come to a consensus about what exactly a cult is.
The line between “cult” and “religion” is famously hazy, and the biggest practical distinction between the two is whether a faith has been here long enough that you feel comfortable having it around. If you’re especially apprehensive about rival sects, even longevity might not be enough to get a group off the hook. “The difference between a religion and a cult,” The Globe and Mail cracked in 1979, “is that you belong to a religion and everyone else belongs to a cult.”
Some scholars dismiss the c-word as a slur, preferring the less pejorative term “new religious movement.” Others say a cult is distinguished not by whether a group is new but by whether it has a particular sort of authoritarian internal culture, a scope that excludes many of those new religious movements but includes several organizations that aren’t ordinarily thought of as religious at all: pyramid schemes, psychotherapy groups, would-be vanguard parties. Some sociologists have tried to advance a more neutral approach, suggesting that cults are held together by a living charismatic leader while other religions rely on an established set of rituals and doctrines. (Under that definition, you might note, a circle of harmless high school occultists might qualify as a cult but Scientology arguably ceased to be one years ago.)
And in ordinary conversations, those all get mixed together. At some moments, the word cult can encompass any exotic way of looking at the world; at others, it’s a set of social dynamics involving unhealthy hierarchies and rigid attachments to a party line. Often it entails looking at the former and imagining that you’re seeing the latter. At its most feverish moments, it involves seeing the alleged cultists not merely as people who happen to have a different view of the world, nor even merely as the victims of an abusive leader, but as zombies who have lost the capacity to think or act for themselves.
Fortunately, we don’t need to settle on a definition here. Our subject isn’t cults themselves so much as the monsters people imagine when they hear the word.
America has always been haunted by cults, but the hauntings are more acute at some times than others. “From the 1970s through the 1990s, from Jonestown to Heaven’s Gate, frightening fringe groups and their charismatic leaders seemed like an essential element of the American religious landscape,” Ross Douthat wrote in The New York Times in 2014. “Yet we don’t hear nearly as much about them anymore, and it isn’t just that the media have moved on. Some strange experiments have aged into respectability, some sinister ones still flourish, but over all the cult phenomenon feels increasingly antique, like lava lamps and bell bottoms.”
Seven years later, it is Douthat’s diagnosis that feels antique. Cults themselves may or may not be more common now than in 2014, but we’re awash in a flood of cult stories, cult rumors, and cult rhetoric. It’s still “nothing like where things were in the early ’90s,” says J. Gordon Melton, a professor of American religious history at Baylor. But “dislike of cults has never really gone away…and we’ve seen a heightening of that over the last couple of years.”
Let’s start with the small screen, which has offered plenty of cult-themed materials for binge watchers in lockdown—and not just in purely fictional tales like or . Last year Starz and HBO each ran their own documentaries about NXIVM, a purported self-help group charged with being a front for a secret society devoted to sex slavery. Curious viewers could turn from there to Netflix’s , a six-part 2018 docuseries about Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh’s ashram in Antelope, Oregon, and the conflict that erupted in the ’80s between his followers and the townsfolk nearby. If you developed a taste for the subject, you
