Agents of Discord

Deprogramming, Pseudo-Science, and the American Anticult Movement

Susan E. Darnell, Susan E. Darnell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351533225
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religious Fundamentalism & Cults

"It is widely acknowledged that the United States has always provided fertile ground for the growth of new religious movements and cults, but modern organized efforts to oppose and restrict them have been less well understood. In Agents of Discord, Anson Shupe and Susan E. Darnell offer a groundbreaking analysis of the operations and motives of these oppositional groups, which they generally group under the umbrella term of the anticult movement.Historically there have always been parallel groups opposed to certain religious movements, whether these be anti-Quaker, anti-Roman Catholic, or anti-Mormon. The authors establish the cultural context of such movements in the nineteenth century. They point out the link between modern anticult movements and nativist movements in American history. Turning to the postwar era, the authors discuss the rise of anticult movements and focus specifically on one of the most prominent, the Cult Awareness Network (CAN). CAN was a two-tiered organization. Partly composed of volunteers, donors, and families affected by cult movements, it also included what the authors call an ""inner sanctum"" of behavioral science professionals, attorneys, and deprogrammers. Using never-before-reported data on CAN's activities, the authors cite an extensive history of financial impropriety that finally led to the organization's bankruptcy. They offer a pointed critique, informed by current scholarship, of the ""brainwashing"" model of mental enslavement presented by the anticult movement that has been a central assumption undergirding its activities. At the same time, they show how increasing professionalization has gradually begun a shift of such movements to a therapeutic model of exit counseling that rejects the crude methods of earlier intervention strategies.In their analysis of the anticult movement nationally and internationally, Shupe and Darnell merge sociological concepts and social history to make unique sense of a hereto"

1
Introduction

A modestly educated man with a criminal past proclaims himself the Prophet of the God of the Jews. He possesses a charismatic personality and begins to attract followers. He first sexually seduces women in his movement and then claims rights of privileged sexual access to all the wives of men in the movement (while preaching the inferiority of women to men). He collects the financial assets of his followers, enjoying a comfortable lifestyle while they exist in communal poverty. At one point, he is held by civil authorities on possible murder charges. He is given to long-winded, thundering sermons to his followers, speaking of the coming Kingdom of God, the last days of this existence and his unique ability to interpret hidden prophecy in biblical scriptures.

Does this description read something like David Koresh, late leader of the (mostly) deceased Branch Davidians at the Mt. Carmel compound in Waco, Texas circa Spring 1993?

It might, but the above details are actually of a carpenter named Robert Matthews who served jail time for assault in the 1830s. He began calling himself Mattias and, during an age of tremendous religious innovation in this country, formed a cult that did some very unconventional things. Mattias even reportedly tried to win influence with Joseph Smith, his contemporary prophet from New York state, who founded the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.¹

As Philip Jenkins documents in his book Mystics and Messiahs: Cults and New Religions in American History, charismatic, world-transforming-portending leaders like Mattias (and their attending flocks) have been legion in North American history. So have been their opponents. Jenkins emphasizes the continuities of both “cult” and “anticult” phenomena in American history, including our own era. He observes that “there is no period, including colonial times, in which we cannot find numerous groups more or less indistinguishable from the most controversial movements”² and, on the “normality” of new religious movements (hereafter NRMs) Jenkins adds, “far from being a novelty, cults and cultlike movements have a very long history on American soil. Extreme and bizarre religious ideas are so commonplace in American history that it is difficult to speak of them as fringe at all.”³

In this volume we do not intend to retread the familiar ground of religious fear, prejudice, discrimination, competition and conflict involving NRMs in North America. All these dimensions have been researched extensively by social historians on such groups as Roman Catholics, Shakers, Quakers, Mormons, Baptists and Seventh Day Adventists, to name a few. Our focus instead will be on modern organized efforts to oppose and restrict NRMs, now known in the sociology of religion as the post-World War Two countercult or anticult movement (hereafter the ACM).

In particular this book describes and analyzes one incorporated organization within the ACM; the Cult Awareness Network (hereafter the CAN). In that sense we offer a social movement’s biography. For a time the CAN was one of the two largest national ACM groups, having surmounted the problems of economic exigency and public apathy that drove most local and regional ACM attempts at mobilization into extinction. It was not typical of all modern ACM groups, most of which have been law-abiding, in that at times (despite protestations otherwise) the CAN actively promoted the abduction and coercive deprogramming of so-called cult members.

Such opposition movements are as much a predictable fixture of religious pluralism as are the NRMs themselves.⁴ This fact has not always been obvious to those caught up in the fray. Each age, Jenkins reminds us, thinks it is uniquely being overrun with menacing, antisocial, questionable religious groups and, for similar reasons, “reinvents the wheel” of religious alarm:

Just as no era lacks its controversial fringe groups, so no era fails to produce opponents to denounce them; anti-cult movements are also a long-established historical phenomenon. Anti-cult rhetoric is strikingly constant, or is at least built upon a common core of allegations and complaints. When an emerging group today is denounced as a cult, its critics are employing, consciously or not, a prefabricated script some centuries in the making, incorporating charges that might originally have been developed long ago against a wide variety of movements.⁵

Thus, issues of the legitimacy and toleration of NRMs persist into the twenty first century and cannot be expected to disappear soon, not just in the United States and Canada but in Europe as well. As we shall show, Italy, Germany, France and Russia, among other countries, are experiencing the same tensions that have characterized NRMs’ appearances in North American religious pluralism. These “cults” or “sects” have been accused of harboring subversive motives, employing under-handed techniques of “mental manipulation” to gain and retain members and seeking financial enrichment for leaders at the expense of followers.

There is an irony in this NRM/ACM conflict that neither side would have appreciated several decades ago. Anson Shupe and David G. Bromley, two veteran chroniclers of the controversy, looking back over a quarter century, have reported that

…neither side expected this protracted protest against new religious movements to last: either because a damaging image of the anti-cult movement as an intolerant, anti-constitutional, vigilante movement would have been successfully promoted by its opponents; or because, thanks to the ACM’s mobilization of public officials and law enforcement agencies, health professionals, academics and public opinion, the “innovative” NRMs would have been broken up, prosecuted and deported.⁶

After over three decades neither side has prevailed.

The Current Wave of NRMs

So many pundits and social observers have navel-gazed during the second half of the twentieth century and ruminated about the causes of social movements involving everything from war discontent, the environment and civil rights to fashion statements and spirituality that here we need only distill cultural analyses of the origins of modern NRMs down to a few brief paragraphs.

The Age of Aquarius

NRMs, as Jenkins and others have emphasized, are a constant in North American culture. We’ve always had them and almost certainly always will. But for a variety of reasons discussed elsewhere in detail, the secular sociopolitical movements of the 1960s had dissipated in strength by the 1970s when the NRMs managed to come into their own.⁷ Robert Bellah, for instance, wrote of a “crisis of meaning” in which “the inability of utilitarian individualism to provide a meaningful pattern of personal and social existence” became increasingly apparent to many adults.⁸ Sociologists Bromley and Shupe followed up on this logic: “As the cultural crisis continued, established institutions were discredited, and political solutions were not forthcoming, many youths sought solutions in religious movements which offered thoroughgoing critiques of traditional value systems.”⁹

Some of the discontent made its way to ultra-conservative Christian sects, such as the Children of God, the Alamo Foundation, various Jesus communes (rural and urban), the International Churches of Christ or The Way International. Some questing persons gravitated to Eastern groups and the latter’s gurus, swamis and adepts. (These leaders found American society easier to penetrate after the 1965 repeal of the Oriental Exclusion Act and the end of the universal military draft in the early 1970s.) The largest of the Asian groups included Transcendental Meditation, the Divine Light Mission, Nichiren Shoshu and the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, among many others.

Still other seekers tried more sophisticated, cerebral examples of spiritual technologies, aligning themselves with modernity, such as est and Synanon. And others approached the “generative mileau” of the diffuse “human potential movement” of therapeutic technologies, like est, for affluent persons reluctant to think of themselves as “sick.”¹⁰

In sociologist Thomas Robbins’ words, “by the middle 1970s new religions had become a highly conspicuous feature of the (American) religious system.”¹¹ However, as Robert Wuthnow has cautioned, a poll of 1000 sixteen-year-old-and-above youths in the San Francisco Bay Area (the epicenter for NRMs) during the 1970s found that only a relatively tiny percentage of individuals actually had dabbled in, or became members of, any NRM.¹² Neverthless, such groups did achieve high and exotic visibility, which undoubtedly contributed to the later concerns held by families whose offspring and relatives joined them.

Perhaps it all can be attributed to post-World War II baby-boomer angst and disillusionment with capitalist materialism. Perhaps it was also a product of expanded opportunities for liberal hedonism and personal rebellion, or conversely, a search for order, cloture and discipline. But in any event there literally developed a “market” for new religious currents catering to some unknown but significant number of eager, exploratory “consumers” in American society turning their backs on traditional religious “brands” and looking for the novel.¹³

Are They All Cults?

To postulate an anticult movement presupposes there are tangible groups some persons can identify in agreed-upon fashion and label “cults.” To be sure there are, and have been such, groups but how many depends on how one defines them. Let us deal with this issue at the outset since the labeling process has never been all that precise. Many opponents of NRMs have tried laboriously and inclusively to define what constitutes a cult and a cult leader. They have cited individual characteristics such as leaders’ concentration of influence and loyalty, their wealth, their followers’ communal and proscribed lifestyles and so forth. But as Bromley and Shupe stated several decades ago, “The range of groups termed cults is quite arbitrary, depending on how one defines “normal” religion. Many definitions of cults tell you more about the critics than about the groups in question.”¹⁴ In fact, any religious or quasi-religious leader— from the Pope to popular Protestant evangelists to pop-music icons— could be tagged as a “cult leader” by various ACM definitions. As Philip Jenkins pessimistically concludes on this definitional matter, “It is all but impossible to define cults in a way that does not describe a large share of American religious bodies, including some of the most respectable.”¹⁵ The following chapters will show how the ACM, both in the United States and abroad, has created an increasingly expanding definitional net into which almost anyone can be portrayed as either a “cult victim” or “cult leader.”

Social science researchers of NRMs conservatively define a “cult” as a relatively small group, with culturally unique beliefs deviating from majority society, led by a charismatic leader. Many are exclusivist and “high-demand” in terms of the amounts of time members are expected to surrender to group activities. Originally the term had a neutral meaning. Jesus and the Twelve Disciples, the Buddha and his first disciples or Charles Manson and his small destructive band, would equally qualify as cults. Many contemporary scholars of religion no longer use the term, fearing its misuse as a cover for prejudice or hostility. Instead they prefer the less inflammatory phrase “new religious movements” (although many of the groups opposed by the ACM are not really so new, such as Japanese Nichiren Shoshu Buddhism or followers of the Hindu god Krishna).

Outside social science, the term “cult” has been one of the most overused words in the English language. It has become a code-word for any unconventional religion or philosophy of which one disapproves. Thus, Jewish groups, such as the American Jewish Committee, abhor attempts by Christians to convert them and brand Jews for Jesus (an evangelical mission made up of Christianized Jewish converts) as a “cult” alongside Unificationists, Krishnas and Scientologists. Southern Baptists and other evangelical Christians (who do not consider Jews for Jesus a cult) instead see it as a legitimate, appropriate mission for Christianized Jewish converts to provide them with the opportunity for salvation as opposed to eternal damnation. Many mainstream evangelical groups would include within their “cult” category not just violent, self-destructive groups like the Order of the Solar Temple, the Heaven’s Gate group and Jim Jones’ Peoples Temple but also nonviolent, older religions like the Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Christian Scientists. Some fundamentalist Protestants feel comfortable adding to the list all forms of yoga, martial arts like Tae Kwon Do (Korean-style karate), aikido and kung-fu (because of their non-Christian philosophical origins), and any form of visual imagery or meditation. The late Walter R. Martin, a well-known evangelical writer and radio personality, counted Zen Buddhism (one of Japan’s older and most respected forms of Buddhism) among cultic groups,¹⁶ while Bob Larson, another popular fundamentalist author and media personality, has thrown in not only martial arts, yoga and UFOs, but also all of Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism and Islam.¹⁷ Dave Hunt, another prolific Christian writer, has even taken on the Star Wars movie series, declaring that Obi-wan Kenobi is essentially a warlock (albeit one practicing “white” or good magic as opposed to Darth Vadar’s “black” or evil magic) and that The Force is actually a Satanic concept.¹⁸

Sociologically, most cults are short-lived. They usually either take seed, thrive and go on to become what we know as larger religious traditions, such as Islam, Christianity or Buddhism, or they disintegrate and fade away (though that process may take generations). Successful cults are relatively few in number. The majority fail for any number of reasons. Perhaps the cult is persecuted into extinction, or the leader dies before provision for a successor can be worked out (thus shattering the fragile bonds among the followers), or the leader becomes somehow discredited in the followers’ eyes. To be sure, horror happens. Not all cults are benign. In recent years our most spectacular cases of cult-like groups coming to...