It's still "nothing like where things were in the early '90s," says J. 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. Seven years later, it is Douthat's diagnosis that feels antique. 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." "Yet we don't hear nearly as much about them anymore, and it isn't just that the media have moved on. "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. Our subject isn't cults themselves so much as the monsters people imagine when they hear the word.Īmerica has always been haunted by cults, but the hauntings are more acute at some times than others. 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.įortunately, we don't need to settle on a definition here. Often it entails looking at the former and imagining that you're seeing the latter. 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. (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.)Īnd in ordinary conversations, those all get mixed together. 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. 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. "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." If you're especially apprehensive about rival sects, even longevity might not be enough to get a group off the hook.
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.
It's pretty easy to throw the word around loosely, since we've never come to a consensus about what exactly a cult is. Or at least it's trendy to call things cults-everything from QAnon to SoulCycle has gotten the tag.