New Religious Movements: The Basics

Joseph Laycock

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000601893
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religious Fundamentalism & Cults

New Religious Movements: The Basics is a concise and engaging introduction to the field of New Religious Movements (NRMs). Western culture is currently going through a wave of fascination with "cults", with numerous documentaries and television series dedicated to describing these groups. Meanwhile, scholars have been wrestling with the intricacies of this loaded category for decades.

Introducing the reader to some of the key issues and debates in the field of NRM studies, this book includes discussions on:

• how to define the term "new religious movement"
  
  

• critically unpacking the term "cult"
  
  

• how to study NRMs
  
  

• brainwashing and deprogramming
  
  

• prophecy and failed prophecy
  
  

• charisma and authority
  
  

• NRMs and violence
  
  

• gender and sexuality
  
  

This book is essential reading for students and scholars of religion who are approaching the study of NRMs for the first time as well as those interested in deepening their understanding of NRMs.

1

What Are New Religious Movements?

DOI: 10.4324/9781003214212-1

This is not a book about particular religious groups; it is a book about a category of religious groups called new religious movements, or NRMs. Categories, of course, are not things unto themselves: They are created by people in order to group and organize things for their own purposes. Perhaps in your home you have a filing system for important papers. Should your car insurance go in a folder with other types of insurance or with other documents related to your car? There is no “right” way to set up the categories in your filing system, but the categories you create serve a purpose—helping you find documents quickly.

Some of the groups that often get categorized as NRMs include Scientology, Neo-Paganism, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS). These are all very different religions. Not only are their beliefs and practices quite different, but they do not have a shared history or social structure. Unsurprisingly, religious groups often object to being categorized as NRMs. So we might well ask: Who put these groups in this category together and for what purpose? As we will see, the answer is complicated. For better or worse, the category of NRMs was created by scholars—mostly in the fields of history, sociology, and religious studies—as a replacement for another category of religions: cults. So before we can discuss what NRMs are, we need to look at how the category of “cults” has been used.

The word “cult” comes from the Latin cultus or “worship,” the verb form meaning to cultivate, attend to, or respect. In its original sense, “cult” referred to any form of organized worship. Cicero used the expression cultus deorum meaning “the honoring of the gods.”¹ But in modern times, the word “cult” has come to mean something very different. In her 2018 book, Cults That Kill, journalist Wendy Joan Biddlecombe Agsar provides the following definition of a cult:

Cults are defined as groups of people who have joined together for an ideological cause, such as religion, politics, science fiction, or self-improvement, and are under the total control of a charismatic leader to whom they are completely devoted. Cult beliefs are all-consuming, and cults usually isolate themselves, shunning the outside world to prevent conflicting viewpoints, including from the news and media, to permeate the tight-knit group. The cult leader, who can be alive or dead, is always right, has important information that only they know (such as the day the world will end or biblical secrets), and cannot be questioned by his or her followers.

You don’t look for cults; cults look for you. And people don’t knowingly join cults, but instead join religious, political, or self-improvement organizations with a mission that resonates with them. Cults have specific tactics for recruiting new members, and people who are lonely, vulnerable, or going through life changes are often targeted.²

This description is typical of rhetoric about the dangers of cults. One thing you may notice is that cults do not have to be “religions” in any traditional sense. According to this definition, nearly anything can be a cult. In fact, you could already be in a cult and not even be aware of it. The defining characteristics of a cult according to this definition are social isolation, an all-powerful leader, and deceptive recruitment tactics. So we might infer that movements that do not have these features cannot be cults and will not be labeled as such. But this is not the way the term “cult” is used in practice.

In 2012, Republican Senator Mitt Romney, a member of LDS Church (also known The Mormon Church), ran for president of the United States. At the conservative Value Voters Summit, Pastor Robert Jeffress, a Southern Baptist, urged Republicans to nominate someone else, stating, “Mitt Romney’s a good, moral person. But he’s not a Christian. Mormonism is not Christianity. It has always been considered a cult by the mainstream of Christianity.” When Jeffress appeared on the cable news show Hardball, host Chris Matthews asked him what he meant when he stated Mormonism is a cult. Jeffress back-pedaled: “I was talking not about a sociological cult like David Koresh or Jim Jones. I’m talking about a theological cult. I mean it’s a fact: Mormonism came 1800 years after Jesus Christ and the founding of the Church.” Matthews responded, “People hear the world cult, they hear Charles Manson. They hear Jonestown.” Jeffress conceded that he did not mean “that kind of cult,” but that he preferred a president who is a Christian. Matthews answered that, in that case, Jeffress’s comments about Romney’s religion were in essence “a prejudice”, adding, “You saying what you’re saying is no different than some Rastafarian saying I’m only going to vote for Rastafarians for president.”³

This exchange is revealing as to how and why the category “cult” is deployed. When pressed, Jeffress said he did not think the modern LDS Church was destructive or used deceptive recruitment tactics; he wanted a different candidate because Romney’s religious beliefs were theologically different from his own. Why then, did he not just state this, instead of using the word “cult?” The Hardball interview demonstrates a point made by political scientist Michael Barkun that,

The term “cult” is virtually meaningless. It tells us far more about those who use it than about those to whom it is applied. It has become little more than a label slapped on religious groups regarded as too exotic, marginal or dangerous. As soon as a group achieves respectability by numbers or longevity, the label drops away.⁴

And indeed, once Mitt Romney won the Republican nomination and ran against democrat Barack Obama, pastors like Jeffress ceased calling his religion a cult.

There is something even more nefarious going on here. The power of the word “cult” comes from its slipperiness: it has a very concrete, negative meaning in some contexts—such as the definition provided in Cults That Kill—and a vague meaning in other contexts, such as Jeffress’s statement that “Mormonism is a cult.” Sociologist James T. Richardson notes,

If those opposing certain groups can successfully attach the label “cult” to a group, then they virtually automatically get to heap the negative baggage of the popular definition on that group. In short, the term has become a “social weapon” to use against groups which are not viewed with favor.⁵

Another thing revealed in the Hardball interview is that the word cult is connotative. In other words, it suggests secondary meanings in addition to its primary meaning. In discussing whether it is fair to call Romney’s religion a cult, Jeffress and Matthews named David Koresh, Jim Jones, and Charles Manson. These are three figures who have come to epitomize the stereotype of the destructive cult leader in popular media. If Jeffress had openly compared Mitt Romney to these figures, this would have seemed ridiculous. But these comparisons were connoted to his audience merely by using the word “cult.” They were only stated explicitly when the word “cult” was scrutinized.

Finally, these allusions to the violent episodes such as the deaths at Jonestown point to another aspect of how the word “cult” operates. NRM scholar David Feltmate writes of Jonestown:

People know Jonestown. They know not to “drink the Kool-Aid.” This phrase is evoked as a warning against suspect religious authority. It is used to encourage people to turn away from religious leaders and embrace the American ideal of self-directed autonomous thought. Ask people where Jonestown was and they cannot tell you. Ask them the name of at least one person who died there besides Jones and, unless they are a relative or scholar of the movement, they will present a blank stare. Ask them the name of the group that founded, built, lived in, sang at, struggled at, and eventually died at Jonestown and see if they can give the answer: Peoples Temple.⁶

Nearly everyone has heard the expression “don’t drink the Kool-Aid.” Much like the word “cult,” this phrase has become part of modern political rhetoric and is used to suggest that other people’s views are not rational but the product of group indoctrination. (In fact, no one at Jonestown drank Kool-Aid: the fatal concoction used Flavor Aid.) Feltmate’s point is that people do not really “know Jonestown” at all. The events that led to the murder-suicide of over 900 people in Guyana on November 18, 1978, were incredibly complicated. NRM scholars are still gathering data about these deaths and still struggle to understand the factors that contributed to them. But for many people there is nothing to know about Jonestown other than that, “Cults are bad.” More broadly, this phenomenon is known as ignorant familiarity. Feltmate defines ignorant familiarity as “widespread superficial—and often erroneous—knowledge about groups of people that other groups use to facilitate social interaction.” He adds, “Ignorant familiarity exists when people think they know enough about others to make decisions about how to treat them, but that familiarity is based in ignorance.”⁷

Ignorant familiarity about groups like Peoples Temple or the LDS Church is compounded when these groups are bundled tougher into the broader category of “cults.” NRM scholars Douglas Cowan and David Bromley note that ignorant familiarity is fostered in public consciousness by the repetition of media images and popular rhetoric about dangerous cults:

Through social psychological processes such as source dissociation (our tendency to misremember where we learned something), the validity effect (our bias toward things we hear repeatedly), and the availability heuristic (our propensity to regard as true that which can most easily draw to mind), once the notion of “cult” is invoked, it is a very short conceptual step to the “dangerous cult.” As cultural shorthand, “cult” serves to stereotype and marginalize religious groups whose only offense is being different from the mainstream.⁸

Not only is the term “cult,” imprecise, misleading, and “a social weapon,” it is also dangerous. Perhaps the greatest example of the danger of this rhetoric was the siege of the Branch Davidian headquarters in Waco, Texas, in 1993. The Branch Davidians were a religious group who lived communally. They regarded their leader David Koresh as a messiah (someone anointed by God for a special purpose) and believed they would play an important role in the coming battle of Armageddon. Koresh certainly had questionable practices: He took many wives and had sex with underaged girls with the permission of their parents. Rumors from former members reached authorities that Koresh was molesting children or otherwise preparing to do something illegal. In 1992, Texas social workers began an investigation of the Branch Davidians but stopped, finding no evidence of child abuse. However, the Branch Davidians had a large stockpile of weapons, partly because they sold guns to raise revenue. So the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (BATF) obtained a warrant to arrest Koresh and search the premises for illegally-modified firearms. Self-described “anti-cult experts” warned that the Branch Davidians would commit mass suicide rather than allow a search. So the BATF decided to serve the warrant “in force” in the form of a raid that included dozens of officers in tactical gear. A shoot-out ensued after which the BATF retreated and the FBI began a 51-day siege of the Branch Davidian headquarters. Federal agencies surrounded the headquarters with a dozen tanks and almost 900 agents. On April 14, Koresh agreed to surrender once he had written a new interpretation of the Book of Revelation. However, on April 19, federal agencies attacked the headquarters using tear gas and tanks. Hours later, the building where the Branch Davidians had been sheltering caught fire, resulting in the deaths of 76 people including 23 children. In the aftermath, many asked why government agencies handled the situation with such force. The Branch Davidians were American civilians. They had not threatened anyone but they had been treated as if they were enemy combatants or terrorists. Prior to the raid, Koresh could have been quietly arrested wh...