In our everyday lives, charisma is often thought of as a trait that is found in special individuals, a “personal gift made manifest in miracle and revelation.”5 But charismatic authority is a powerful social relationship that requires followers to respond to the vision and demands of their excitingly charismatic leader. Weber noted, “What is alone important is how the individual is actually regarded by those subject to charismatic authority, by his ‘followers’ or ‘disciples.’ ”6 By this he meant that it is the recognition by others that determines the validity of a person’s charisma. In other words: no followers, no charisma. Since charismatic authority is a social relationship and not merely an inherent trait of an individual, it exists primarily in the eye of the beholder. This is why some people can see through a seemingly charismatic leader and ask, “How can anyone follow that charlatan?” while others may be completely smitten. Not everyone responds in the same way to charismatic authority figures.7
Once followers have identified a person as a charismatic authority, it then becomes their duty to “act accordingly … with complete personal devotion … arising out of enthusiasm, or of despair and hope.”8 This dutiful obedience is established intentionally by the authority figure through internal systems of control and influence (enforced discipline, rules, rituals, intense study, peer monitoring, etc.) that train followers in how to submit. This submission must occur so that the leader can expand his “sphere of domination.”9 To expand his domination, a clever charismatic leader offers something uniquely special that followers can only get from him or her—the hope of new beginnings, peace on earth, an enchanted afterlife, perfect health, a cancer cure, political revolution, social justice, or something as mundane as weight loss or financial gain.10
Through initial encounters with the leader or recruiters, a new recruit comes to believe that this leader is the only one who can offer salvation (be it religious, political, philosophical, health, or otherwise). The recruit is then further convinced by the savvy cleverness of the leader that to be part of the group and reach salvation or perfection, he or she must follow the leader’s special transformational process, which always includes self-denial and obedience.
Transcendent beliefs and dogmas seem to be the focus of cults; yet in reality, the purpose of many cults is simply to serve the emotional, financial, psychological, and sexual needs of the leader with unquestioning obedience and disregard for self. The authoritarian personality of the cult leader helps ensure that his or her needs and desires are always the top priority.11 However, this need backfires reliably. Why? Because even if the leader started out with good intentions, it’s rare that a person can handle the kind of adulation and blind obedience that is demanded from and granted by cult followers—even if the worship and obedience are granted under duress. It is commonplace for charismatic authority figures to become unbalanced and egocentric.
In Grandmaster Kim’s College of Learning, followers were promised spiritual attainment through martial-arts discipline. Lily remembers that part of that discipline involved praising Kim:
“Praise the Lord.” “Praise Jesus.” And “I love the Lord” and “Jesus is my answer.” If you had that mentality in the group, that wasn’t good enough. You had to praise Grandmaster Kim and she had to take credit for you getting to know God. And in her eyes, her introducing you to God was more important than your relationship with God itself, and you had to be thankful to her for that.
A young man whose family was among the first followers of the Word of Life Fellowship remembers the point when his leader’s charismatic authority began to spin out of control:
I think the church originally started out with good intentions, but then pastor started realizing, “Hey, I have power. I love this sense of power.” I think that’s the point where people were writing songs about her. They would write songs about God and stuff, but they would be writing these praise songs about the pastor and it’s like, this is ridiculous. Are we going to church to worship her?
It’s important to clarify that charisma or charismatic authority on its own is not evil and does not necessarily produce a cult leader. We can think of such charismatic leaders as President John F. Kennedy, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., Aung San Suu Kyi, or Nelson Mandela, to name just a few. These and other charismatic authority figures have been a positive force in society. However, the influence over others that comes with authority—and the inherent power imbalance that is created—must always be kept in check.12 Charismatic leaders have a responsibility to learn how to maintain their humanity in the face of constant adulation, and to apply rigorous checks and balances to their behavior so that they can protect their followers from harm. In cults, those protections don’t exist.
How Charisma Becomes Toxic
Cult leaders do not have checks or balances on their behaviors or their claims. They are the final authority. Beyond utilizing their charisma to attract followers, cult leaders must also be authoritative, domineering, and be able to read people well enough to convince and charm them. Often, a leader will claim that he or she is aligned with or is the spokesperson for some greater authority, such as God, Jesus, Buddha, Ascended Masters, Spiritual Oneness, or even Marx, Lenin, or Mao (in the case of some political cults13). Some cult leaders, like Grandmaster Kim, may openly claim to be the reincarnation of a religious figure such as Jesus. This is not unusual; one woman Janja interviewed for this study was raised in a New Age cult called the Brotherhood of the Spirit/Renaissance Community, and she said, “The leader believed he was the reincarnation, of course, of several different things: historical figures, some being Christian, some being Civil War heroes, like Robert E. Lee, various things like that.” One cult leader, Gabriel of Sedona, claims to be the reincarnation of, among others, King Arthur, a mythical being.
In Karla’s New Age cult, her leader claimed to be a medium for an ancient Chinese sage, and said that he had also lived previous lives as the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten, the philosopher king Marcus Aurelius, the mythical wizard Merlin, and the musician Henry Purcell, among others. This seems objectively bizarre now, but at the time it was magical. Everyone in the group was encouraged to imagine who they might have been during those historical periods, with the leader assigning identities, such as Henry Purcell’s wife for Karla’s mother, one of Akhenaten’s daughters for Karla, and the mythical King Arthur for the leader’s own young son. This exciting, enthralling, and imaginary history helped everyone in the cult feel that they had been together for centuries, and that being together in this life was an exquisite and necessary aspect of destiny. Their leader had created a deep and meaningful ideology that united everyone, such that anything strange or harmful that happened in the cult was easily downplayed in deference to their extraordinary fate. Though these ideas about reincarnation were one part of the group’s transcendent belief system, note that the leader was always a powerful charismatic figure in every reincarnation, and that—in this life—he was the ultimate authority who assigned his followers’ identities in their own (alleged) past lives.
Toxic charismatic authority can be difficult to escape (as many of us may have experienced in our own dramatic and unhealthy love relationships) because it engages a powerful need for belonging that keeps followers entrapped by the intense and urgent demands of the leader or leadership group. In cults, the leader combines the exciting and seductive quality of charisma with an unhealthy lust for power and influence. This toxic situation binds followers to the cult so strongly that meeting the needs of the cult or the often bizarre, corrupt, and sometimes illegal needs of the leader begins to feel correct and normal, as if it is second nature. At this point, members have become enveloped in what Janja has identified as a “bounded reality.”14
In The Family cult, leader David “Moses” Berg was widely known for acting out his sexual fantasies and perversions, especially with children. Jessica remembers a specific demand that Berg made when she was seven years old:
We’d get together and have these big meetings
and read all the new mailings.15 Around that time, the big thing was making videos for Berg, the leader. He had decided that he wanted to come around to the homes and have sex with everybody, but because he couldn’t, he wanted all the women to dance and make a video for him. Every woman in The Family. He said he’d like everyone to do it, but that you didn’t have to. It was like an honor/requirement, you know what I mean? These videos he asked for, they were called “Glorified God in the Dance.” He told us what he wanted, what type of music, and that there should be three songs. The first one should be nice and fast, and the second one should be medium, and the third should be a really slow song. And you should start out with some scarf or whatever, or some small amount of clothes on, and he wanted you to wave the scarf around your body as you got undressed. It was really, really detailed. Everything he wanted, like basically, “Here’s my fantasy.” I was seven. Oh, yeah. Seven was pretty much the age when we were starting to be integrated [into the cult’s sexual sharing practices].
Though meeting bizarre requirements like Berg’s might come to feel like second nature, meeting the needs of a cult leader has detrimental effects on individuals and an even more detrimental effect on children. In most of the cults Janja has studied, the children’s daily lives were entirely focused on what the leader felt was important. Normal and healthy aspects of childhood, family life, bonding, and development were pushed aside if they didn’t agree with the leader’s needs and beliefs. For instance, if the leader or group distrusted conventional medical care, as Matthew’s Twelve Tribes and Iris’s TM cult did, then children weren’t allowed to see doctors, dentists, or even optometrists. If the leader or group actively distrusted the everyday world, as most of these cults did, then children received extremely limited cult-based education, or had their public school classes scrutinized and stripped of anything the cult didn’t agree with, as Joseph experienced in the Exclusive Brethren. If the leader actively distrusted family ties, as Grandmaster Kim and David Berg did, then the children weren’t allowed to grow up with their own parents.
In her book on cults and attachment,16 social psychologist and cult researcher Alexandra Stein, Ph.D., focuses on the damage to normal bonding and attachment that occurs in cults because leaders tend to want all attention, all love, and all adulation focused on them:
John Bowlby’s attachment theory17 has helped researchers and parents to understand that the need for protection is a fundamental, evolved element of the relationship between children and parents. When all works well, children seek the protection of a safe other—usually a parent—when stressed, or under threat. There is a set of behaviors (visual searching, calling and crying, for example) that children engage in with the goal of ensuring proximity to their caregiver. In general, these behaviors cease on uniting with the caregiver and gaining comfort. This is known as the “attachment behavior system.” Parents have a reciprocal “caregiving system” that seeks to protect their children so that in a healthy relationship parents will feel distressed if they are unable to comfort and protect their child. When these systems are functional, the result is protection of the child, which increases chances of survival to adulthood.
While this may seem obvious to those in more or less healthy family relationships, what is less obvious is how and why cult leaders consistently and predictably interfere in these evolved systems of care and protection of the young. But interfere they do, in a multitude of ways, as shown in my book.18
Stein highlights the impact of the cult experience on the mother-child bond. According to her research, this bond is controlled in multiple ways in a cult. The ones most relevant here are: (a) mothers are often discouraged from having a special bond with their children; (b) mothers may spend little or no time with their children due to the demands of the cult; (c) the child is physically taken from the parents; and (d) each mother’s behavior toward her children is carefully monitored.19
Doing “the right thing” (for God, the Revolution, one’s personal growth, whatever) becomes synonymous with obeying the leader. To go against the leader’s directive is to go against God himself. The mother becomes psychologically trapped: she wants to be a good person, but the definition of goodness resides entirely in the cult’s domain. And any attempt to define goodness for herself ensures swift condemnation and an attack on her “faith.”20
Children who are born into or brought into cults are usually taught that the leader’s needs are more important than their own needs, family ties, friendships, health, schooling, comfort, stability, or even sleep. It’s important to state here that we’re not blaming the children’s parents for the abuse and neglect their children endured. After all, the parents became enthralled by the cult and believed deeply in the rightness and omnipotence of the leader. We must acknowledge that parents in cults, like all other members, are indoctrinated to believe that their sole loyalty must be to the leader.21
As part of this loyalty, parents are expected to teach their children reverence for the leader and the belief system. Their children’s devotion and conformity reflect on the parents’ own worth as cult members; therefore, indoctrination of the children becomes a regular daily task. Some of this indoctrination occurs through simply being in the environment; at other times, it’s transmitted through direct teachings. For example, one young man who grew up in Scientology said:
Maybe when I was three or four, I started to pick up some of the things from the belief system. I know that there was a lot of talk about L. Ron Hubbard—how he was going to bring peace on earth, and he was going to prevent a third world war from happening. Those are the kinds of things I remember. Like he was someone—you know, it was written in the Buddhist scriptures thousands of years ago that a person would return and that person would bring peace on earth. Those sorts of things I remember just picking up on. I guess I would say I was around three or four at the time.
Iris remembers indoctrination during events on the TM compound:
Twice a day all the adults would go and meditate at the dome, separately. The men would go to one, and the women would go to another. But regularly they would have events at the men’s dome where everyone would attend. The kids would go, too, and usually it would be because Maharishi was going to speak. Every now and then he’d be there in person, but usually it was on a telecast. Either he would speak or other people from the higher-up level of the organization would speak. Or they would also have singing and school-kid events, where the kids would sing or do something. They had these funny movement songs that they taught us. The songs taught the principles that we were supposed to remember.
These cults were very social places in most cases, but without their parents’ care and protection, the children were basically on their own, with only their leader to rely upon. However, because the charisma of the leader (or the leadership group) was both deeply compelling and deeply toxic, the children were continually drawn toward or forced to attach to someone who could never and would never meet their true needs. Sadly, this damaging situation was true even for the children of cult leaders.
Divine Neglect: Children of Cult Leaders
Some children of cult leaders receive special privileges and acclaim, but many are treated as burdens or obstacles who stand in the way of their parents’ grandiose plans. Janja interviewed the daughter of the leader of Morningland, a New Age cult, who remembers that she and her siblings had to grow up very fast because her mother intentionally avoided parenting them:
I was always being pushed onto other members of the church and being disassociated from my mother. It got to the point where she said, “I have no children.” Well, people knew that we were her children, but to us in private, she would let it be known: “You don’t call me mother. You call me Sri. You have to look to other people for mother figures.” That’s when I finally shut myself off, because then I knew—oh, God. At that point I was about 14, so I got myself a part-time job because no one was supporting me or giving me money anymore. I wasn’t being given money for school. I
f I needed clothes or something, I had to go to one of the Gopis22 [her mother’s special disciples] and they would go to my mother. At one point, she had her attorney assign one of the Gopis as my legal guardian. And when I was 15, she had me emancipated. And that was the last time I saw her. I was not allowed to go see her even when I was getting married.
The most negative part of it, I think, are the abandonment issues—feeling abandoned, not really having a nurturing mother—and, I think, the jealousy. I would feel jealousy with girlfriends and stuff because I would see how close their mothers were to them and I didn’t have that. I really didn’t.
In the 1960s, a visionary cult leader attracted many young people to her home, where she set up a live-in commune. Her daughter shared one of her more harrowing experiences:
And so it was all these hippies that were flocking to her, mostly—all these dope smoking, smelly people, which is how I perceived them. They were weird and they were scary. They all lived in my home. And during that period of time, I don’t remember really having any connection with my mother. My grandmother took care of me. She would make sure I got to school; she’d make sure I had a snack when I got home. And that’s pretty much it. Then we moved into a big old store building, and from there to this huge house, where I lived with a bunch of young hippie women. I didn’t really get to see my mother very much, unless she was preaching. She pretty much stayed in her study most of the time, getting words from God. And having meetings all the time. Round the clock. Any time of the day. Sometimes they’d last for days.
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