Cult members who had drunk the Kool-Aid were taken away by guards and instructed to lie down in rows. Families and groups of friends grasped hands. Some embraced. Soon, they all began to gasp for air and retch. Blood poured out of their noses and mouths. Jones continually gave his benediction, repeating over and over, “I tried. I tried. I tried.” Finally, he called out “mother,” six times. A shot was fired, and Jones careened backward with a fatal bullet wound to his right temple. When the silence descended completely over the jungle commune, and the “service” was over, some 914 members of the cult were dead.
Definition of a Cult
What is a cult? It depends on who you ask and at what point in a group’s lifespan the question is asked. Today the term cult is largely pejorative. To call a group a cult is a subjective judgment and not one that people inside the group might choose to make. Some Muslims consider the politically radical al-Qaeda group, which encourages suicide missions, a deviant cult. The early Christians were considered deviant cultists and persecuted accordingly. No one today would consider Christianity to be a cult. However, when the Protestants separated from the Catholic Church, they were treated as a heretical cult. Also considered cults at one time were the Church of Jesus Christ of LatterDay Saints, the Christian Scientists, and the Jehovah’s Witnesses. All these are now established, respected, denominational religious groups. Today, there are many nonreligious, charismatic treatment groups that emphasize the use of contemporary psychology. For example, Transcendental Meditation, the rage of the 70s and 80s, continues to gain adherents. Is it a cult? That, again, depends on who you ask.
Perhaps the most dispassionate understanding comes from social scientists, who divide religious groups into three categories: churches, sects, and cults. Churches tend to be large denominations with an open, welcoming approach to life and an identification with the prevailing culture. Sects follow their denominations in most aspects but are more strict on doctrinal matters and in the demands they make on an individual’s behavior. Quaker and Mennonite sects, who have disavowed war, come to mind: many conscientious objectors have come from these sects. Cults follow an altogether different religious structure in that they are foreign and alien to the main stream of religious communities. Among the more widely known entities in this category are The Church Universal and Triumphant (Summit Lighthouse), Elan Vital (Divine Light Mission), The International Society for Krishna Consciousness (“Hare Krishnas”), the Unification Church (its members are called “Moonies,” after their founder Sun Myung Moon), and the Church of Scientology. But it is important to remember that what may appear to be a cult for one person, may for another be a religion.
Psychiatrist Marc Galanter refers to cults as “charismatic groups.” Such groups usually contain at least a dozen members and often many more. The members adhere to a strongly felt, mutually accepted belief system. They are highly enmeshed. Cult members are strongly influenced by the group’s behavioral standards. They seek or undergo altered consciousness experiences, and they attribute charismatic (divinely inspired) power to the group or its leaders.
According to J. Gordon Melton, the author of the Encyclopedic Handbook of Cults in America, there are approximately 500 to 600 cults in the United States. Of these, about 100 are principally ethnic groups composed of first- and second-generation immigrants who only recruit within their own ethnic base. Other estimates put the total number of cults in the United States as much higher, in the range of 2,500. Cult Hotline and Clinic estimates the number of cults at 3,000 to 5,000 and says that 5 to 7 million Americans have been associated with cults or cult-like groups at some point in their lives. Contrary to popular opinion, cults are just as prevalent today in the United States as they were in decades past. Today’s cults are more sophisticated, taking on new names or mimicking established groups; they also splinter into other groups, shut down, and morph into another configuration. The Hotline estimates that there are 180,000 new cult recruits every year.
Close observers have noted that cults perform both terrible and positive deeds. Some cults have perpetrated horrible acts on their neighbors, whereas some have provided people with productive and uplifting experiences. Most cults fall in between the two extremes of negative and positive, and their practices and aspirations are quite common and ordinary. Killer cults are at the deviant extreme of the cult spectrum. But many of the things that killer cults do—for example, how they attract members and how they are led—are represented all along the spectrum. In many instances, what is common to the most benign is also present in the most lethal of cults.
Most cults have reasonably stable structures and functions. They generally have a written body of ideas and beliefs that govern relationships with others, the leader, the world, the cosmos, and God. The Divine Principle, the so-called Moonie bible, was written by the Unification Church’s Reverend Sun Myung Moon. As with similar tracts by other cult leaders, this is considered to be divinely inspired. In the cult, “all for one and none for the self” is the motto. The individual’s self-worth and survival are seen as intimately interwoven with the group’s survival. Although most cults have leaders who are charismatic, it is not required that a leader have charisma. Some groups themselves are charismatic, evangelical, and very demanding of their members. Leaders can be old or young, male or female. The Divine Light Mission’s Maharaj Ji was 15 years old at the height of his popularity. The Reverend Moon is in his late 80s. Although male leaders are more common, female leaders are also found, principal among them Elizabeth Clare, Prophet of the Church Universal and Triumphant.
Cults emerge whenever the structure of society is seriously threatened. During the upheavals of the Industrial Revolution in England, the French Revolution, and the westward migration of large populations in the United States, for example, many such cults formed. Closer to the present, when American society was disrupted by the Vietnam War in the mid-1960s, many young people were attracted to charismatic politicians and religious leaders. This was also a time when there was fragmentation of the fundamental structures of society—the family, schools, and established churches. Many people were left susceptible to the seductive appeals of cults that provided total answers for life here and in the hereafter. The need to belong somewhere is irresistible to most humans. For many people in that era, the need was met by joining a “new” group.
Who Joins a Cult, and Why?
From this psychiatrist’s perspective, the dangers in joining a cult are the stunting of one’s personal growth and the surrendering of responsibility in exchange for what at best is spiritual security and what at worst is passive dependency. As Erich Fromm suggested in his book Escape From Freedom, to leave one’s thinking to another is unlikely to be an enriching life experience.
Most cults look for specific kinds of recruits. Charles Dederich, the Synanon guru, specialized in rehabilitating drug addicts who were willing to make a life commitment to the cult. Jim Jones recruited the oppressed, particularly poor blacks, prostitutes, and other disaffected individuals interested in communal living and the pursuit of a socialist utopia. The Hare Krishnas, the Moonies, and the Children of God prefer idealistic, intelligent, college-educated recruits who will bring honor to the cult.
Most people who joined cults in the 60s and 70s reported that they came predominantly from upper middle-class socioeconomic backgrounds. They were young (median age 22), white, reasonably welleducated, and from intact families. The majority of members of such diverse cults as Elan Vital and the Unification Church attended college. They reported that at least one of their parents had also done so.
Psychiatrists have done studies to determine the mental health or illness of persons who join cults. Some outsiders may argue that anyone who joins a cult is deranged, but the studies do not confirm this proposition. A liberal estimate of significantly mentally troubled or disordered individuals among those who join cults is no more than one-third of the members. Some psychiatrists and psychologists argue that there is no evidence at all to su
ggest that members of cults are any more disturbed than are comparable peers who are not members.
Nonetheless, a significant number of sect members have reported themselves as being psychologically troubled. In fact, psychological distress has been found to be an important precursor to joining a cult. Psychological distress does not necessarily indicate the presence of mental disorder. Interviews conducted by clinicians among cult members, former members, and relatives of members paint a picture of young adults who are experiencing depression and serious personality disorders. New members have described experiencing feelings of inadequacy, sadness, loneliness, and rejection just before joining; many had limited social connections at the time. For people in the midst of a personal crisis, joining a cult has led some to experience a significant diminishing of their personal psychological suffering—at least, for a time. Yet many people seek and join mainstream religions for these very same reasons.
Cults can be powerfully seductive to individuals who have strong conscious and unconscious yearnings to be loved and nurtured. For such psychologically needy persons, cults may provide the guidance, purpose, love, nurturance, sense of belonging, relief from conflict, and self-control that they desperately seek. Much of this is done as the recruit establishes a personal relationship with the cult’s charismatic leader. Religious cults offer direct contact with God through their own charismatic leaders. This appeals to recruits who seek a transcendent or enlightened spiritual experience.
The cult as a whole is an extension of the leader’s personality and teachings. The leader’s grandeur, as well as his or her association with divinity, provides an essential feeling of specialness and importance to cult members. For people who do not fit in anywhere or see themselves as misfits or outcasts, this connection to the leader is very compelling. Their relationship with the leader can “cure,” or at least alleviate, some of the personal losses and deprivations that they may have experienced with their own families. Symbolic of this connection, the cult leader is often addressed as father or some version of the word, such as “baba.” The leader’s teachings offer all-encompassing prescriptions for having a world and cosmic view, as well as strict codes for day-to-day living. In these ways, the powerful parent figure provides a supplementary conscience for members who need support against their own aggressive, sexual, and drug-seeking behaviors that in the past have threatened to go out of control. Thus, the structure and direction provided by the cult restrains the dark side of some of its members.
It then becomes understandable why many members find it very difficult to extricate themselves from a cult or reject a leader who has been defrocked and exposed as a sham. To do so is to risk losing an idealized and idolized figure who has provided self-cohesion, lifemeaning, and psychological support to the cult member. The highly troubled, vulnerable persons in Charles Manson’s “family” found him to be a vitalizing force in their aimless, desolate lives. After their imprisonment, “family” members continued to espouse Manson’s beliefs. Without the connection to Manson, they likely believed that their lives would shatter.
According to Melton’s Encyclopedic Handbook of Cults in America, approximately 90% of those who join a cult leave within 1 year. More than 1 million people took the Transcendental Meditation course, yet the number of members in the United States remained steady in the 1980s at 10,000 to 20,000. Several hundred thousand people took the Unification Church’s basic weekend introduction course; 30,000 to 40,000 joined up, but by 1990, fewer than 6,000 remained as members. Many members leave cults voluntarily, without having been deprogrammed—and also, it seems, without significant psychological consequences. For the fortunate who come out unharmed, it becomes just a phase they were passing through. When considering the spiritual and psychological experiences of cult members, one is reminded of William James’s classic The Varieties of Religious Experience. James wrote that the religious experience can be normal or pathological, and that the spiritual experience can be sublime or painfully distorted by mental dysfunction. Similarly, according to the psychological needs of the cult member, a cult can be used for the purposes of illness or of health.
Cult Practices Recruitment
One of the chief duties of cult members is recruitment. It is absolutely essential to the cult’s survival and is practiced by most cults as both an art and a science. When seeking converts, timing is a key factor. Recruiters for cults come to college campuses, for example, when the students are most vulnerable, usually around exam time, or in the first months that students start to attend a college. Recruiters sit in libraries, waiting to make eye contact with students who exhibit some difficulty, hoping to find in such students the detritus of a broken romance, poor grades, or uncertainty about future goals. In cities and resorts, recruiters scope the scene, looking for backpacking students who have declared a moratorium on schoolwork or who are struggling with identity problems. Experts on cults recognize that everyone is susceptible to some form of organizational recruitment during their lives. UCLA law professor Richard Delgado, an expert on cults, says that “everyone is vulnerable. You and I could be Hare Krishnas if they approached us at the right time.”
Cults speak to the universal dreams of mankind for nurturance, security, and certainty. The Grand Inquisitor of Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, when Christ returned to earth and spoke of giving mankind unlimited freedom, told the “stranger” to go away and never come back again. The Grand Inquisitor argued that people cannot bear the burden of freedom and responsibility for their own actions throughout life. They would prefer to cede direction for their lives over to some other authority. In the story, Christ appears to agree that that “burden” was best borne by the church of which the Grand Inquisitor was a high-ranking representative.
The Unification Church has perhaps the most sophisticated methods for acquiring potential cult members. The first phase is called “love bombing.” A lonely student is spotted, drawn into friendly conversation, and invited to dinner. The student is soon surrounded by smiling faces and warm hands, and inundated with compliments. An invitation to a weekend retreat is extended. At the retreat, guests are urged to take part in endless exercise, singing, games, and oblique religious discussion. Little time is left for the potential recruit to sleep. Any probing questions by the potential recruit are discouraged. Monitors accompany them everywhere, including the bathroom. When Sunday arrives, potential converts are urged to stay for one last party. If the potential recruit calls family members or an employer to say that they will not be present on Monday, the Moonie recruiters know that the individual will stay for the full 7-day program.
That recruits stay for the entire program is essential, from the recruiters’ point of view, because a basic tenet of most cults’ conversion process is to isolate the recruit from the outside world, especially from family and friends. During the intense phase of conversion, recruits are made to feel guilty about their lives and past deeds. They are exhorted to become reborn and join their already cleansed and omniscient “brothers and sisters” in the cult family.
Many cults give converts new names. The Heaven’s Gate cult added “ody” to its members’ names to distinguish them from ordinary people. Some cults emphasize the new reality for recruits by defining time differently. For example, the day is divided by prescribed tasks and duties but is otherwise timeless. Other cults try to produce a new personality in the recruit through sensory deprivation, special diets, sleep deprivation, and by forcing the recruit to take part in endless, exhausting chants, prayers, and indoctrination sessions that focus on the cult leader’s vision.
Although many cults recruit vulnerable people, the popular sense has been that they are the downtrodden of society—as indeed, they were in Jim Jones’ Peoples Temple, in the cult led by ex-convict Charles Manson, and in many others. But the Branch Davidians came from a higher stratum of society. The Heaven’s Gate cultists were so well educated that they had a business designing websites. One might hope that a cult made up of reasonably
well-educated, well-off recruits from the middle and upper classes, from intact families, would not fall under the suicidal thrall of a deranged cult leader. Unfortunately, this has happened as a result of the power of cult psychology and of the deviant leader’s dominance.
Location Is Everything
All cults try to maintain established meeting places for their activities. Even when a cult has a number of groups that are distributed far and wide, their meeting places display a remarkably uniform appearance. This phenomenon can also be observed in the uniform appearances of the churches of any more-established denominational religion, even though they are in different cities, and, sometimes, in different countries. Similarly, the Hare Krishna temples and the Divine Light Mission ashrams maintain a comforting uniformity that bespeaks continuity and certainty, and that exists regardless of location. When a cult maintains many branches in a country or throughout the world, it is less likely to deteriorate into a killer cult. What keeps it alive and functioning is contact with other cultures and dispersion of authority, both of which serve to counter the regressive forces within a cult.
Bad Men Do What Good Men Dream: A Forensic Psychiatrist Illuminates the Darker Side of Human Behavior Page 28