VARIETIES OF CULTS

A Variety of Cults and Leaders

There are many, many cults around the world at present, reaching into any country where there’s freedom of assembly. Curiously, in totalitarian environments cults cannot flourish; the state itself has a monopoly on extreme and total power—though the entire entity—the entire nation—can itself be taken over by the cult of the leader, as we see, for example, in North Korea.

Kim Jong-un, Supreme Leader of North Korea, also known as “the Dear Leader.”

There are religious cults and political cults, New Age cults, psychotherapeutic cults, human potential cults and commercial cults (organizations centered on marketing some product but exhibiting in their organization and leadership structures cult-like characteristics). But the typing of cults into such categories cannot be too strictly followed since the types not infrequently tend to blend into hybrids. Also, in a sense, almost all cults have a religious component, though this is much more evident in some than in others. Perhaps this is due to the religious nature or inclination in human beings generally, by which I mean the tendency to want to worship and serve something, the desire to give oneself to something in a deeply committed manner.

Perhaps it would not be mistaken to say that all cults can in some sense be seen as religious, then, because they foster a kind of worship. Though the means of worship varies, the object of worship always seems ultimately to include focus on the person orchestrating the operation—be it some extreme representative of a commercial enterprise, or a person’s director in the seeming self-improvement program associated with human potential, or the leader claiming a special connection to the power that rules the universe, or the person who announces he is the Messiah.

Some cults are politically oriented, and these can appear on both the political Left and on the Right. Some such groups appear cult-like without ever quite “making the grade.” Lyndon LaRouche, whose political career moved from the far Left to the far Right, attracted very devoted followers to his political organization. These devotees could be found distributing his tracts in Harvard Square or outside New York City subway stations or in airports all over the country. LaRouche was a charismatic figure who presided over those only too ready to listen to his ideas, follow them and spread them fanatically.

Lyndon LaRouche attracted dedicated followers who manned displays in many American cities.

He founded the National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC) in 1969, by means of which followers came to him and began to spread his ideas. In his New York Times obituary he was labeled a “cult figure,” but he did not really seem to consolidate his appeal or authority over his followers to such a degree that might have made him a true cult leader. Perhaps one could say he approached the rank without fully attaining it.^[1]

Another political group, this one on the Left, The Democratic Workers Party, a Marxist-Leninist group based in California, which was founded by a former University of Chicago professor, Marlene Dixon, fully attained the cult rank. The group lasted from 1974–1987.

Marlene Dixon, pictured in 1969. She was the leader of the Democratic Workers Party, 1974-87.

Dixon was very much a charismatic leader who exhibited all the traits one associates with a cult leader, as attested to by Janja Lalich, who, after her decade-long experience with Dixon left the group and later became a successful academic, serving for many years as a professor in the sociology department of California State University, Chico. Her book, Bounded Choice: True Believers and Charismatic Cults, is an important study of the ways cults attract and keep followers.^[2]

Some groups appeal to would-be members by selling the notion that a person has not fully reached his or her human potential. Along these lines are organizations like Scientology, the invention of author L. Ron Hubbard. Scientology is a hybrid: it is both a business and program of advancing human potential and it calls itself a religion and a church.

It is known for attracting actors and actresses and other well-known people and for intensely attacking its critics. Hubbard died in 1986 but Scientology continues under the leadership of a younger man who was Hubbard’s close associate, one David Miscavige.^[3]  Film director and screenwriter Paul Haggis was very much involved with the group for many years and finally, becoming very critical of the group, left them. At the end of a long article featuring interviews with him, Haggis said of Scientology, “I was in a cult for 34 years. Everyone else could see it. I don’t know why I couldn’t.”^[4] When asked about the future of his relationship with the group after his departure Haggis replied, “These people have long memories…My bet is that, within two years, you’re going to read something about me in a scandal that looks like it has nothing to do with the church.”^[5] In other words, this former member suspected he would be attacked using trumped up reasons but the real reason would be because he dared to criticize Scientology; cults do not like being exposed and often hint—or suggest explicitly—that for those who leave them there will be a price to pay.

This “price to pay” for criticism was seen graphically with the group known as Synanon, founded by one Charles Dederich in Santa Monica, California in 1958. It was originally a drug rehabilitation program but it evolved in the 1960s and became The Church of Synanon in the 1970s.

In October, 1978, an attorney involved in legal procedures against the group was bitten by a rattlesnake that had been placed in his mailbox by two Synanon members. Synanon dissolved in 1991; Dederich died at age 83 in 1997.^[6]

It is when cults are specifically religious, or when such groups begin to take on an explicitly religious cast, that they seem to attract the greatest attention. There are a wide varieties of these—from Scientology to Synanon, which are in no way biblically oriented—to others that associate themselves with Christianity or are generated in some biblically-tinctured way. In New England, where I lived for many years, I met several people who had escaped an organization known as The Boston Church of Christ. Each of these persons spoke of the extreme control the group’s leadership sought to extend over every aspect of their lives. The Boston Church of Christ started in the 1970s with only a few dozen followers, but by the late 1980s the group was capable of drawing over 2,000 people at a time to services the Boston Garden and attracted large numbers to regular services at the Boston Opera House.

The group started just outside Boston, in Lexington, Massachusetts. Its leader, one Kip McKean, learned tactics of authoritarian rule as a young man from someone named Chuck Lucas, founder of the “Crossroads Movement” in Florida in the late 1960s. In the ministries of both Lucas and later McKean, the same kinds of coercion, twisting of biblical teachings and misuse of power characteristic of cults flourished.^[7]

It seems difficult to see contemporary “mainstream” Mormonism as a cult, that is, a group centered around a highly charismatic leader using coercive or “mind-controlling” manipulation to exercise enormous authority over the lives of followers, all centered upon the leader’s thought. I addressed the matter of the Mormon church’s cultishness earlier under the heading, “What is a Cult,” and I refer the reader back to those pages. While modern-day “mainstream” Mormonism is not authentically Christian and holds to what many would term eccentric beliefs, these do not in themselves mean that the Mormons constitute a cult.^[8]

However, one can indeed find extremist, present-day Mormon off-shoots where leaders exercise extraordinary power over the daily lives of everyone and these groups plainly employ great manipulative and coercive influence completely consistent with what has been said here about cults. ^[9]

The kind of coercive and manipulative power found in Boston Church of Christ or in some Mormon off-shoots was also present in the Tony and Sue Alamo Foundation, founded in  Hollywood, California in 1969. Its leader, the late Tony Alamo, was convicted of ten child rape offenses in 2009 and spent the rest of his life in prison, where he died in May, 2017. He exhibited every characteristic we have associated with cult leaders and his wife was his willing partner in his leadership.^[10]

Combining religious, political and non-Western aspects in one group, consider the radical and terroristic movement, ISIS (or ISIL), “the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria,” led by the late Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. His leadership employed the features of cults described above.^[13] It was characterized by great violence–and his life ultimately ended violently. On October 27, 2019, Baghdadi killed himself and two children by detonating a suicide vest during a raid conducted by the United States military in a northwestern province of Syria.

Like their Western counterparts, these  leaders from a wide variety of cultures and geographic locations, each in their in his own way, exemplifies the leadership posture that characterizes the cult. Like ISIS, others of these kinds of groups can be very violent. In Japan the murderous cult that used to be called Aum Shinrikyo, carried out a Tokyo subway attack in 1995 using a deadly chemical weapon—a poison similar to sarin, a nerve gas estimated to be 26 times more deadly than cyanide—attacking five trains in the Tokyo subway system.

As many as 6,000 people were injured, some fifty very seriously, and thirteen were killed. Founded in 1984 by someone named Shoko Asahara, this cult leader was executed by the Japanese government for his crimes in 2018. Well before the execution of their leader, the group split in two, with Aum Shinrikyo’s name changing to “Aleph” while a splinter group led by a former Aum spokesman became known as “Hikari no Wa” or “The Circle of Light,” though no clearly no light emanated from either of the branches.^[14]

In 2014, The Japan Times wrote that “good looks and commitment to a cause, demonstrated by Aleph, inspire a new generation of admirers.” To explain this admiring appeal among those who follow such groups, the paper wrote, “Dissatisfaction with society and low degrees of success in life make them identify with the cult and adore the cultists as if they were pop idols.” As terrible as such groups are, it is remarkable that they are still able to attract admirers. Here, indeed, is testimony of their deceptive and extremely dangerous appeal.

It is interesting to note how many cults—even those hardly associated with Christianity—borrow something from the Bible. Aum Shinrikyo borrowed ideas from the Book of Revelation, including belief in a coming great battle—the Battle of Armageddon of Revelation 16—and in the reality of “the Beast” of Revelation 13, whom they thought represented the United States. It is interesting that a number of cult leaders have been attracted to the Bible as a resource to furnish their imaginations with notions of who they are and what they must struggle against.

To this list of violent groups we might add still others: Heaven’s Gate, founded in 1974 and led by a couple: Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles. They led thirty-nine members of their group to commit mass suicide believing that this would bring them aboard an alien craft that was passing by Earth after the passage of comet in 1997.^[15] The violence used by the group known as The Manson Family is infamous. This cult at one time consisted of approximately 100 of Charles Manson’s followers, some of whom committed a series of nine murders at four locations in July and August 1969. Manson died in a California prison serving a life term in 2017.

David Koresh, leader of a group called The Branch Davidians, thought himself to be a messianic figure commissioned by God while at the same time being involved in sexual manipulation and abuse of some of his followers. His group, already known for inclinations to violence, was destroyed in the Waco siege of 1993, though some of his followers are still around.^[16]

Another group—though not one defined finally by great physical violence, had the consonant-heavy name, Nxivm. It was founded by one Keith Raniere and his associate, actress Allison Mack. His group appeared to be involved in marketing, but, as is often the case with cults, was involved in the sexual manipulation of its members. Raniere was convicted in federal court of sex trafficking and racketeering on June 19, 2019 and in 2020 was sentenced to 120 years in prison.^[17]