Cult Culture

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

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