CULT COUNTRY: IS THIS A NEW AGE OF CULTISM--OR A NEW CULT PANIC?

• Author: Walker, Jesse

CULTS ARE IN style again. Or at least it's trendy to call things cults--every thing 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 Riverdale or The Empty Man. 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 Wild Wild Country, 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 had several other documentaries from the last fewyears to choose from, covering vintage cult stories ranging from the Peoples Temple massacre of 1978 to the Heaven's Gate suicides of 1997. A&E ran three seasons of a series about Scientology.

The subject keeps cropping up in the news too, with alleged cult crimes committed everywhere from Idaho to Siberia. (One of the first COVID-19 superspreader events in Korea took place at the Shincheonji Church of Jesus, an apocalyptic sect that is often accused of being a cult. That sparked conspiracy theories in which the church was supposedly spreading the virus to deliberately bring on doomsday.) Using the GDELT Project's Television Explorer tool to search the Internet Archive's TV News Archive, one can detect a systematic increase in the use of the word cult since November 2019. Sometimes that's because of those local stories, but the term turns up in broader contexts too.

Take QAnon, a sprawling subculture devoted to a strange, elaborate, and ever-evolving collection of conspiracy theories. Conspiracism in general has attracted a lot of anti-cult rhetoric lately--when one poet was disturbed by her elderly mother's interest in conspiracies, she wrote in The New York Times last year that it was "as if" her mom was "under the spell of a cult"--and QAnon has gotten the brunt of this. Many of its critics call it a cult, sometimes even a "terrorist cult." In March, NPR ran a story suggesting that QAnon and similar beliefs are "cultic ideologies" whose followers could use the help of "deprogrammers" to "reconnect with reality." The Q believers, for their part, are convinced that a cult of cannibal pedophiles controls most of Washington and Hollywood.

The fringy Q crowd weren't the only ones who suspected a cult had taken over the country. As Donald Trump's presidency progressed, it became increasingly common to hear his following described as a cult. (During the pandemic, this sometimes progressed to "death cult.") This wasn't always meant as mere metaphor: In late 2019, a major American publishing house-Simon & Schuster--put out a book called The Cult of Trump: A Leading Cult Expert Explains How the President Uses Mind Control, written by the anti-cult activist Steven Hassan.

When some of those Trump fans rioted at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, it wasn't just the outgoing president's opponents who embraced that rhetoric. One defense attorney--Clint Broden, retained by the accused rioter Garret Miller--went on TV to announce that he's working to "deprogram" his client. "Donald Trump was a cult leader," Broden told CNN's Chris Cuomo. "You have somebody like Garrett Miller, who is not very politically involved, hadn't even voted much earlier in life, loses his job, and gets focused on the internet. And you have, as I said, a cult leader telling him to do X, Y, and Z to protect the country." Ordinarily, people think it an affront to their dignity to be depicted as a mindless sheep. But under certain circumstances, it can be a useful way to deflect responsibility.

Inevitably, the specter of the cult entered other fronts of the culture war. "Wokeness," Fox News, both major political parties: They've all been called cults in the last few years. And then there's the battle over trans rights, where the rhetoric has been getting especially ugly.

Parents have long been prone to moral panic when adolescents embrace ideas or subcultures that seem alien. One perennial way to express those anxieties is to say their children have "joined a cult," even when no actual organization is in sight. This reached a new height of hysteria when certain conservatives and feminists started describing transgender teens in terms that evoke Jonestown. Google the phrase trans cult and you'll find countless complaints that a complex social world with no leader, no clerical hierarchy, and no shortage of substantial internal disagreements is in fact a cult bent on "stealing our children." Mutual support is seen as "love bombing," interest in new ideas as "brainwashing." The same anti-cult writer who produced The Cult of Trump tweeted last year that trans advocates are using "weaponized mind control" to recruit young people.

One anti-trans group, the Kelsey Coalition, chose these words to represent a parent's experience: "Your beloved child has been kidnapped by a sadistic cult. The cult brainwashes her to believe you are the enemy. The brainwashing erases her entire childhood. Every good memory is replaced with memories of abuse that never happened. The cult convinces her to inject poison in her body and to get her healthy body parts amputated. You...