Defining the Cult
The Oxford English Dictionary offers this definition of the cult: “a small group of people who have extreme religious beliefs and who are not part of any established religion.” They illustrate the term with this example: “Their son ran away from home and joined a cult.”[1]As far as it goes this definition is not wrong, it’s just too narrow and tepid and tame. But I mustn’t be too hard on the hard-working scholars laboring in the offices of the Oxford English Dictionary. I don’t suppose any of them had even the slightest acquaintance with the world of the cults as it appeared in America in the 1960s and 1970s and was carried forward to the present; having that might have strengthened their defining efforts.
Since my first aim here is to provide a thorough—and personal—definition of the term “cult,” I will start with a very terse revised definition: a cult is a trap, it is a net, and it is a snare, disguised as a worthy cause—be it religious or otherwise—so that the unsuspecting are taken, netted and caught; it is willfully and knowingly set, and escape from it is not easy.
“A cult is a trap, it is a net, and it is a snare, disguised as a worthy cause—be it religious or otherwise—so that the unsuspecting are taken, netted and caught; it is willfully and knowingly set, and escape from it is not easy.”
How is that for a fresh start? But let’s look more carefully beyond this terse beginning. What constitutes this thing, the cult? What is it built out of, or what is it built from? It’s quite simple, in one sense: it requires only two main ingredients. First there’s the dumb, sheep-like human being, ripe and ready to be shorn, that is, to be deceived—and devoured, too. And secondly, there’s the wolf-like person in sheep’s clothing, who, disguised in his deceptive garb, can so easily do his work among these “sheep” without their much realizing what’s going on.
The Cult Leader
Jesus, speaking to his disciples in the Sermon on the Mount, warned of cult leaders when he said “Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.”[2] He spoke of the wolf in sheep’s clothing but what he said applies particularly to the wolf in shepherd’s clothing, the wolf as a false, deceiving, lying, supposed teacher, shepherd and prophet. Jesus was saying this “wolf” is another name for the false teacher who is a mockery of the very idea defined by the term, “shepherd.”
Now the mainspring of the cult is this “wolf,” this person who understands how to deceive others and seeks to do this so as to rule, dominate, misuse and then devour. He is in “sheep’s clothing,” which is to say he is a master of disguises so that it’s not so easy to see, much less notice, something’s amiss when you meet him. How naïve we can be!—so that we might even say, as Little Red Riding Hood once naively said to a certain wolf, “Oh, but Grandma, what big teeth you have!” Little Red Riding Hood saw something was odd, but she didn’t try to analyze the testimony of her own eyes. If one is to be ready to avoid cults, and cult leaders, one must not be naïve. One must learn to do what Little Red Riding Hood failed at first to do and quickly recognize when something is “fishy” and act upon that recognition.
The cult leader and his underlings come across as caring sorts—and they try to hide their big teeth. He—or occasionally, she—promises to be someone in it for the benefit of others, someone laying down his life for the sheep, that is, for his or her followers. The cult leader says he wants to be your good shepherd, and he may even claim to be your savior, a role for which he is wholly unqualified, though he makes great efforts at appearances and can be very charming. But what we actually have here is a deceiver and no savior at all. If we are to answer the question, “What is a cult?” we must then start with the mainspring of the thing: it’s this wolf in sheep’s and shepherd’s clothing.
Let’s look a little more closely at this person. Is he always consciously being a deceiver? Is he even aware of himself as being that way—cynically and consciously fraudulent? Does he think of himself as a wolf in sheep’s clothing? Perhaps on rare occasions he even might, but far, far more often he’s just about fully persuaded of his own virtue. I say “just about,” because one must wonder to what extent some remnant of conscience is troubling or bothering him. But has he not become skilled at ignoring such would-be restraints? I think so. This is because he has become the product of his own self-delusion. It’s possible to deceive oneself and actually believe things that once upon a time one knew better than to believe. But because he’s deceived himself it’s possible for the cult leader to come across as very sincere.
The cult leader, self-deluded as he has become, sincerely believes the things he teaches and writes and tells his followers. They—these followers—convinced by his apparent sincerity, are thus all the more ready to believe him. Actually, sincerity proves nothing in these circumstances about the uprightness of the cult leader, though the appearance of sincerity is nearly always very persuasive. Meanwhile, the cult leader, teaching what is not the truth with a great deal of sincerity, nevertheless remains a wolf in sheep’s clothing and his followers remain sheep ready to be shorn and even devoured.
Despite what we’ve said above, we still recognize that the cult leader, at least on one level, still consciously deceives his followers—only he doesn’t do so with entire cynicism. He persuades himself that some deception can be a good thing because it’s the means to a supposed good end. The cult leader does what he does because he has an end in view which he is convinced justifies a degree of deception. If he wishes to build a new social order around himself, he must first tear down those ideas and institutions that stand in his way. If sexual liberation is part of his goal, for example, then the followers need to be given arguments which prove traditional views of the family and of marriage stand in the way of the fully flourishing human life they are destined for. Deceptiveness is useful if he doesn’t want to tell everyone right away just how radical his aims are; he must hold his fire on that until everyone is ready, and in order to do so he must use deception to bring people along until they reach the full, supposed revelation of truth he is aiming for.
In the cult in which I was so willingly living, the leader, David Berg, had been involving himself in unbiblical sexual behavior for a long time before he began to introduce teachings meant to undo the puritanical sexual values we were strictly following among the rank and file in the early years of the group. Before this initiative, deceptions of the members on this matter were kept in place until he felt ready to “undeceive” us.
“If private property or the exclusive privacy of the marriage bond stands in the way of the aims of the cult leader, he will find ways to persuade the followers that the ideas of “mine” and “thine” are selfish and unloving and so promote a communal way of living—such that even holding on to your spouse sexually could be termed selfish.”
If private property or the exclusive privacy of the marriage bond stands in the way of the aims of the cult leader, he will find ways to persuade the followers that the ideas of “mine” and “thine” are selfish and unloving and so promote a communal way of living—such that even holding on to your spouse sexually could be termed selfish. David Berg finally taught that you are selfish and unchristian if you don’t want to share your wife or your husband sexually with others. But this can’t be revealed until the leader feels the followers are ready—or until he feels ready to go ahead and push it whether they are yet ready, or not. In the meantime they can be deceived that traditional attitudes toward marriage or property are always to be the norm in the group. But in these ways deception is thus justified; it’s a means to help bring people along toward the leader’s desired goal—a goal he’s deceived himself into believing is a justifiable one.
If such a teaching as his seems counter to biblical strictures, then a new means of interpreting the Bible must be called for. The Bible is now thus placed in service to the cult leader. He may claim to revere it, but it is quite possible to claim all kinds of things without really meaning it. And so, until the leader’s new and greater truths are ready to be revealed to his loyal followers, the leader as much as says, “Let them go on being deceived in their holding to the older view of the Bible and of interpreting relevant passages.” This is how a cult leader finds ways to justify being deceptive.
He might even think to himself, “It’s for their own good until they are ready for me to lead them into the full truth, a truth that has been revealed to me!” I don’t know that David Berg precisely thought this way, but he certainly seems to have. The point is that the cult leader reasons in one way or another that the act of deceiving is not necessarily wrong and may even be called for in order to reach a supposed greater good.
If the cult leader wants to promote a new understanding of Christianity, then demonstrating the shortcomings of institutional Christian religion must be a major topic of his teaching. If the cult leader’s aim from time to time is to manipulate the information required to make a case for condemning all religious institutions, which is what David Berg did with the churches repeatedly, he may find it necessary to knowingly omit arguments in favor of trusting any of them. Such actions involve being knowingly deceptive, for surely not every congregation of believers is a den of compromise or hypocrisy, but the cult leader can reason that making this case for the total contemptuousness of the churches is necessary in order to bring about the superior revolution he has in mind. This is what David Berg wanted to do—and did do.
In promoting these things—his ideas about sexual liberty, about the selfishness of traditional marriage, about the emptiness of the churches—Berg was at the same time moving into a position of total power over his followers, for now that he had revealed these things to us, who else could lead us into the complete unknown defined by his ideas, but him?
Having justified himself regarding any charge of deceptiveness, the cult leader is not finally a “huckster”—not in his own mind. He is totally “into it,” and only a total surrender on both their parts—leader and followers—can really satisfy him. This surrender must be total (though strangely, I recall little asides in the Mo Letters—those communications from David Berg to the Children of God—which sometimes revealed little tell-tale sentences that showed a hint of guilt about a moral failing; these were strange and never explained and were just introduced and then forgotten, like the briefest whiffs of smoke).
David Berg, his wife and four children in the early 1960s, perhaps seven years before he founded the Children of God
It remains a marvel and something of a mystery, how tortured, in a way, it is for iniquity to work its way through a human being’s life. Maybe David Berg was capable of being a cynical deceiver in a number of respects. There may have been times he knew he was selling “a bill of goods” when he was about to do so, and was doing so. But with time he became more and more convinced, and more and more wedded to a delusion about himself—and this made him all the more able to be sincere and convincing to would-be followers, though in all this he was deceiving both himself and them—or, I should say, us.
“I think the cult leader can oscillate between truly believing in his delusion and cynically deceiving others, or that he may be capable of being both cynical and sincere almost simultaneously. But since cult followers want the cult leader to be a special person, and so greatly encourage him in his beliefs about himself, helping him overcome whatever self-doubts he may have, he comes to believe these things more and more.”
Thus I think the cult leader can oscillate between truly believing in his delusion and cynically deceiving others, or that he may be capable of being both cynical and sincere almost simultaneously. But since cult followers want the cult leader to be a special person, and so greatly encourage him in his beliefs about himself, helping him overcome whatever self-doubts he may have, he comes to believe these things more and more. So he then more and more fully embraces the lie and his followers are complicit in his, and their own, self-deception.
David Berg, aka “Moses David” or “Mo” or “Father David” was totally “into” being “Moses David” “Mo” and “Father David,” despite perhaps having to deal with remote corners of his heart where persisted for a time the stubborn knowledge that he was rejecting the love of the truth and embracing something else. I think he kept that knowledge confined to the smallest corners and tried his best to live elsewhere, far from any self-doubt. Perhaps his love of wine, which was reportedly exceptionally marked—with its power to make him forget any tiny corner that witnessed against everything he was doing—is thus explained; he needed it to dull the power of that voice and to stop his ears to it.
Still, it seems when a person resists knowledge of the truth too long, wine isn’t even necessary to dull the senses. Instead, it’s quite possible for callouses to develop over a person’s moral sense so that he no longer notices his transgressions of the law of what is right and good and true. The cult leader then may certainly become totally deluded and no longer open to any self-questioning. Then he has above all, and first of all, completely deceived himself. This means that other kinds of thought that are contrary to this delusion must be kept out, a labor necessary both for the leader and the followers.
Perhaps, then, David Berg—the model cult leader, in some sense—was once, or maybe more than once, at a crossroads, and while he may have momentarily hesitated, he at last was not hesitant. Then I suspect he rationalized his choices and way led on to way and he turned aside more and more to believe something other than what he knew to be right. Thus he became hardened in his belief of a lie. The more he committed himself to that course and found reasons to justify and excuse it, the more convinced he was that it was good, and the more firm became his self-delusion. The biblical passage that captures what I think happened to David Berg is as follows:
…because they received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved. And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie: That they all might be damned who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness (II Thessalonians 2:1-12).
Because he rejected the truth of the biblical gospel, God allowed him—even sent to him—the delusions he embraced and loved. This is hard to fathom; it seems if we reject the truth, the sorts of delusions we’d prefer are allowed us by the overarching, mysterious, sovereignty of God. I think something similar took place in the hearts of such men as “the Reverend Moon” and Jim Jones and David Koresh and any number of other cult leaders.
In the case of David Berg, perhaps there first was one illicit sexual adventure, and then another and another—all before the Children of God ever began. This continued once the group he founded was underway and then there were always ways he found he could allow for it, and he was always ready to try to use the Bible to justify it by means of misinterpreting it. Even before the founding of The Children of God, according to the memoir of David Berg’s eldest daughter, since he was ready to believe a lie, he began an incestuous relationship with his younger daughter. David Berg used the story of Lot and his daughters in Genesis chapter nineteen, appropriated completely unbiblically, as a workable justification for this behavior.[3] He took a second wife, and a third, and began to advocate to an inner circle that his brand of sexual behavior was not a sin. Didn’t King David and other kings and characters in the Bible have many wives? Doesn’t the Bible say “all things are lawful to us” as Christians? Well, no, but Moses David misinterpreted the Bible’s words here, for doing so was useful to him. And so it went, these and other behaviors passing as justifiable. They were wrong biblically but were explained in new ways by twisted biblical interpretations so that they became perfectly fine and acceptable. Thus Berg repeatedly excused himself. When he was satisfied enough with his excuses he then made them into a doctrine which was brought out to all his followers as a righteous teaching we were expected to endorse and follow. And because we were so ready to be deceived, we went along, which in turn seemed to confirm the rightness of it all.
“Cult leaders of every description are self-deluded. If you want to believe it enough, and you tell a story enough, couldn’t you then begin to believe it?”
Cult leaders of every description are self-deluded. If you want to believe it enough, and you tell a story enough, couldn’t you then begin to believe it?
So how does self-delusion work? Here’s a relatively innocent example: around 2001 a very well-known historian—he was a history professor at a highly respected college in Massachusetts and writer of well-received books, was discovered to have been making up stories about his exploits as a soldier in Vietnam.[4] He had been doing so for quite a while, telling these tales to the undergraduates taking his classes before it was discovered they were all untrue. He’d kept telling them over the years until he seemed to believe them, though they were all false. When he was found out he apologized and repented and was forgiven. Perhaps something like this happens with cult leaders—they make up stories and keep telling them, deceiving others and ultimately deluding themselves, only their stories—unlike the tales of this professor—are capable of bringing great harm. But when they are accused of lies and caught in them—and in still greater types of wrongdoing—these cult leaders baldly deny it, defying their accusers and never repenting, unlike this college faculty member, who really did repent. Instead, those who fill the role of cult leader insist on their own virtue while declaring their accusers are unjustly persecuting them. They choose to believe the tale they’ve woven; such is the strong power of self-delusion—and anyone who contradicts them is deemed a persecutor and unjust.
[1] https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/definition/english/cult_1?q=cult, accessed November 11, 2020.
[2] Matthew 7:15
[3] Deborah (Linda Berg) Davis, The Children of God: The Inside Story (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1984) pp. 9-10, 100-101,
[4] Jodi Wilgoren, “College Suspends Professor For Vietnam Fabrications,” New York Times, Aug. 18, 2001. https://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/18/us/college-suspends-professor-for-vietnam-fabrications.html, accessed March 25, 2021, 5 pm CST. Pamela Ferdin, “Professor Suspended for Lying,” The Washington Post, August 18, 2001, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2001/08/18/professor-suspended-for-lying/33bddcb3-5a6f-4ffc-a1fd-97a693818188/, accessed May 2, 2021, 9:25 pm CST.
