Welcome to the Cult Culture Blog!

What makes a cult, a cult? How do cults form? How do people become involved in cults? Are people aware they're in a cult?

These are questions that I've wondered for years. Cults have been in the news for decades, and have garnered widespread public attention. Nearly everyone has heard of infamous cults like the Manson Family and NXIVM, but there are several cults that lurk in the shadows, drawing people in unwittingly, and going unnoticed by society at large.

Cults don't just impact those who join; they have a deep, unrelenting effect on the friends and family members of their participants. This blog is going to explore how cults form, how they recruit members, how they shape the lives of their participants, and much more. If you've ever wondered the same things I have about the development and continuation of cults, then this is the blog for you.

Each week, I'll be unpacking more and more information about the culture of cults in the form of weekly blog posts, with the goal of understanding how they form and how so many people become deeply involved in them. All of this research and investigation will culminate in a podcast that brings all of these threads together, and shed some light on this enigmatic corner of society.

Join me in taking a deep dive into Cult Culture!

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Cults in the Media

In the previous post, we discussed the anti-cult movement and several variations of it that target specific types of cults. We briefly touched on the topic of the media and how they both portray and attempt to peel away the veneer of cults, so that people have a better understanding of how they work. This week, we’re taking a deeper dive into media coverage of cults, and how big of a role the media can play in a cult’s downfall. Media is arguably the most powerful tool of the twenty-first century (aside from technology). It shapes the way we view the world, and our perceptions of particular topics, people and events are heavily influenced by what we read and watch, and where we are getting that information from. Just think about how the media has been reporting about the COVID-19 Pandemic over the last year, and how differing opinions about the virus and the measures being taken to mitigate its spread are influenced by where people are receiving their news from. There is always bias i

The Anti-Cult Movement

In last week’s post, we discussed New Religious Movements, highlighting Heaven’s Gate and the Branch Davidians, and whether they could be classified as cults. At the end of the post, I gave a tease that this post would discuss the process and stress associated with escaping cults. However, that topic would be better served as the final blog post, so this week’s topic will instead focus on anti-cult movements. You might be asking yourself, what’s that? It’s a fair question, because this aspect of cult culture is simultaneously rarely discussed but arguably the most obvious. Any new societal movement is going to have detractors. Think about the world of music. In the 1950s and 60s, just as rock and roll was taking off and super famous bands like The Beatles were immensely popular, there was a significant cultural push against it. In the 70s, hippie culture (a key element of the Manson Family) took off, and saw huge pushback as well. So, there is established precedent for societal backl

New Religious Movements: Are they Cults?

In the previous post, we discussed how cults operated and recruited members prior to the Internet age. We discussed two prominent cults that existed during the second half of the 1900s: the Manson Family and the Peoples Temple. The latter of these organizations was technically considered to be a New Religious Movement (NRM). But what does that mean? Defining new religious movements has been difficult because of the terminology used to describe them. The term “new” indicates that the organization has not been around for a long time, but that can be said about any religion at one time or another; every religion was once “new.” Additionally, NRM’s have become synonymous with the word “cult” for main three reasons: they operate on the fringes of society; they have a marginal group membership in comparison to traditional religions; and they often represent beliefs that deviate from the norm (Saliba & Melton, 2003, p. 10). For our purposes, New Religious Movements can be defined as m

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