Candace T.

Cults: A Dangerous Devotion
“The most dangerous lie is that which most closely resembles the truth”
- Jan Groenveld

This quote above is by Jan Groenveld an Australian who has her own experiences as a former member of the LDS Church which deals with Mormonism and the Jehovah’s Witnesses and was featured in Richard Guilliatt’s book Talk of the Devil. Her definition of a cult is any group that has a pyramid type authoritative figure with all teachings and guidance coming from the person at the top. The group will claim to be the only way to God and will use thought reform and mind control to keep their members. Unfortunately, after 15 years in a cult she finally realized that she was being controlled rather than controlling her own life. She wanted to let people know about her experiences in order to help others. She is so hated by the church of scientology for exposing them that her name is not even allowed to pop up under scientology on Google.

In the United States, it is estimated that there are 5,000 cults that are actively recruiting people, no matter the age and walks of life. Jan Groenveld made it her mission to help people recognize cults, spiritually abusive behaviors and how to defend them from persuasion. Because the beliefs in cults are so believable people become locked into a “thinking box” which makes them unable to see the world around them.

The topic that I chose to analyze is religious cults. I chose this because I thought it was interesting to explore the unknown and secret world of persuasion. A cult is any group that uses mind control techniques to get someone to join. A religious cult is very demanding and the leader wants full loyalty from their followers. They are motivated by having more members which gives them a sense of reassurance and makes them feel like they are doing a good job. Money, power, control, respect from others, approval, lack of attention as a child, self expression and a wish to be admired also play a big role in motivating cult leaders. So who exactly joins a cult, and what if anything is wrong with them? For the most part normal everyday people like you and me join and only 5-6 percent has major psychological issues before joining (Singer, 1995). Situations like loneliness, depression and uncertainty are all factors that make a person more vulnerable to joining a cult; it makes them feel like they belong. Others might join for religious reasons or those who are looking to get in touch with their spiritual side and have not found it in the traditional setting. These cults usually have structure, something that a person who feels like they do not belong needs. According to observers, adults and teenagers, regardless of gender are most at risk for joining a cult because they go through many obstacles in life such as losing a job, moving to a new school or city or going through a divorce. Self esteem also plays a big role, compared to those with high self esteem people with low self esteem are usually more anxious, depressed and lonely, they are basically unhappy which drives them to go somewhere where they feel they belong.

Parents feel like today’s music is no help; instead it is sending messages of hate that may cause teens to find interest in joining a cult. I would not necessarily say that all of today’s music influences us to join a cult but I think that rock and heavy metal music are big examples of this, "We come bursting through your bodies rape your helpless soul transform you into a creature merciless and cold we force you to kill your brother eat his blood and brain shredding flesh and sucking bone Till everyone's insane we are pestilent and contaminate the world demonic legions prevail" This song, “Demons” by Rigor Mortis is just one example. Donald Phau, says that modern rock music, came about in the early 1960s and has been, an “enterprise of British military intelligence and satanic cults." There is much more to the music business than we know.

There are about four types of cults: religious, commercial, self-help, and political. I will start with the most popular; religious. A religious cult could involve any religion including Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity or a self made belief system like Heavens Gates or the Church of Euthanasia which is focused on over population and promotes cannibalism, abortion and even suicide. . A commercial cult is what you see on the infomercials, they promise you that if you join and follow their program for success then you will become rich, of course that’s not the case. The next are cults that use self improvement to target businesses. For example a commercial cult they promises that if you join, you and your business will be successful, the only difference between a commercial and a self improvement cult is that you share any personal thoughts you may have. The last cult is political. Examples of a political cult include white and black supremacists and terrorist, they use mind control to recruit their members. Even though they are not all violent, they have a common structure that creates the same situation.

A religious cult is different from any other cult because all religious cults have a “God”. Non religious cults do not focus on God. A cult differs from a regular religion because in a cult you are not allowed to disagree and form your own opinions and thoughts. A cult deceives and pressures you to join when they are recruiting you, isolates, keeps non believers out, it wont allow you to express your own thoughts and beliefs, threatens if you disagree or question them, do not allow information to go to anyone outside of the “family”, and the leader is always superior. In a religion, you are exposed to everything right away. Nothing is hidden and members are allowed to have a freedom of thought, you are allowed to and in fact encouraged to spread the word to people who are not in the same religion, you have a freedom to join, you are not pressured or rushed and you are allowed to disagree.

Even though religions and cults might seem the same, they have a difference and that is openness. Cults have secret beliefs and information that cannot be known, even to members until they have reached a certain level that the cult leader is pleased with. For example, Scientology only provides its believers with the full information regarding the religion after believers pay for the classes and pass certain tests.

Cults and gangs are very much alike. Cult’s boast about a certain belief and get people to join by influencing them to believe what they are saying is true, and gangs do the same thing. They put on an image that appeals to young people and that is welcoming and gives them a guaranteed friendship or “family”. The young people then believe it and that turns to their main focus in life, it is secretive and destructive. The structure is very similar, they promise things like money, women and sex, power, and materialistic things to their members. Signs and symbols are used in both a gang and a cult to identify themselves. Gangs use graffiti, tattoos and a certain color to let it be known what they are part of and to intimidate other gang members. Cults use symbols like the inverted pentagram in witchcraft. Although they both have symbols they are used in very different ways. Gangs openly and proudly show who they belong to and have no problem talking it about it in public, while cults are secretive about it. Slang is the unique language used by the street gangs and prison gangs in America. Unlike a cult, gangs “created” their own language which is known as slang.

The term cult originated in 1932 by an American sociologist Howard P. Becker for the German theologian Ernst Troeltsch. Troeltsch’s goal was to be able to tell the difference between the three main types of religious behavior: churchly, sectarian and mystical. Howard Becker then created four categories out of churchly and sectarian. He split church into ecclesia and denomination, sectarian into sect and cult. The small groups that he created were not like the ones that we know now; they were not as organized and private, people later put emphasis on cults as a “deviant religious group”.

As of right now you are probably saying “if cults use these certain influence tactics and my church also uses influence tactics then I must be in a cult as well.” This common thinking is called “affirming the consequent”. For example, “Fact 1: When it rains, the sidewalk gets wet. Fact 2: The sidewalk is wet. Conclusion: It must have rained”. Just because the sidewalk was wet does not necessarily mean it rained. This is the same concept with the confusion about cults although they have influence tactics that is not the only thing they use. According to Lewin, a psychologist, behavior is made up of both a person’s personality and their situation or environment. He is saying that the environment can easily change a person’s true personality, when in a situation a person will most likely respond to it by going with the majority. This can be seen in school with peer pressure, the Jim Jones incident, or as far back as the Nazi’s which dealt with racism.

There is no certain type of person who is most likely to join a cult. Cults do not discriminate against race, gender, age, religion and sexual preference; as long as you agree with them and follow the guidelines you are welcomed. Cults only exclude those who do not obey their rules. People are most vulnerable on a vacation, their first year away from home at school, a job loss, losing a loved one, going through a break-up or divorce, reaching a new point in life, moving to another city or country, searching for one’s self and loneliness. A cult recruiter is an everyday person like you and me, they seem to be very interested in you; they can be either middle or high class, a teenager or an older person, man or woman, average intelligence, well educated, they are usually friendly, outgoing, welcoming, and persuasive. Tactics used are deception and manipulation. The leader might tell you to come to one of their meetings one day just to get a feel for it and see if you like it, or tell you that they are raising money for a good cause, they identify your needs and then play with your mind and use that to make it seem as if they really know what your going through, they also pick up on a person’s fears and tragedies. For example, if someone just lost a loved one, they might tell them that joining will release all the stress and take their mind off of it. The recruiter might be someone that the member knows, they like to isolate members so that they cannot get a reality check and realize anything, for example they might have a meeting when there is a special event going on with friends or family, they can have retreats whose goal is to drown your brain with their message. This can have a big effect on how a person thinks and communicates, their doubts go unheard and it turns into self doubt instead. When a new member to be goes to one meeting they are constantly invited to another and are constantly asked to commit.
According to Marshall Applewhite the leader of Heaven’s Gate, cults group themselves into two groups, the first type is used to recruit and the second type is used to keep members. A very common tactic that they use is known as the “hot seat technique”. The cult members sit around you in a circle while the cult leader sits directly in front of you and asks you questions from which you have to confess to. I had a similar experience once, one of the members from the Church of Scientology sat me down and started asking me random questions. Then he tried to convince me to buy one of the videos. He was obviously a member of a cult and his job was to recruit. The purpose of cult members sitting right in front of you staring you straight in the eye asking you questions is to lower your self esteem. According to Applewhite, this is an excellent example of the principle that states “A person with low self-esteem will be more persuadable than a person with high self-esteem when the advocated message is weak”.
A big part of a cult is mind control. Mind control does not necessarily mean that someone can robotically take over your mind and control it, it just means that they influence you so much that they force you to believe what is being said and in doing so change your way of thinking. Deception, restriction, intimidation, relationship control, information control and time control are all techniques used by cults. Deceiving a person is the first step in getting someone to join a group. If the person you were trying to recruit knew the real purpose before joining then they would not join. Cult leaders only tell you when they think you’re ready to accept it. “For example, imagine if the leader of the Heavens Gate cult was open and honest about the group and said to new recruits, "Join us, wear strange clothes, get castrated and then drink poison!" he would not have had many takers”. The cult will restrict you from moving to another group, for example if you are a Christian, you are allowed to move from one church to the next and have your own opinions but in a cult that is not the case. They will tell you that you can only be saved by staying with them and that they are the only ones who know the truth. If you believe that, you are only giving them more power. The leader of the cult makes it seem that if you disagree with them, it is like disagreeing with God. Some cult recruiting techniques include; meetings, pressure, and denial.
A religious cult can be related to terrorism. Suicide bombers or people who sacrifice their life to intentionally kill others do so to honor their leader. So this can be seen as a religious cult. Cults brainwash people to become as extreme as the cult leaders want them to be. They brainwash them into thinking when you die, god will be waiting for you and you will be rewarded into heaven. Cults and terrorism have more in common than you think. The people that are involved usually do not look harmful and have everyday jobs, they all think that they are doing well for themselves and the world, and they are all in denial of doing any wrong. In both cases, leaders control the information, communication with anyone outside of the cult is cut off, and in some cases to hide the group’s identity they might change their look and there is no guilt in killing or punishing people who don’t disagree. They both have a specific theme; all the members will reap a reward in the after life.

Cults are damaging to both the individual and society. For example, say a college student joins a cult; she soon becomes absorbed into it the cult and that becomes her life. She no longer has a passion for her schoolwork but instead for pleasing the leader of the cult. Her grades start to slip and she gets depressed. She is damaging herself as a person because she will most likely be isolated from her family and friends and have limited contact with them which will change the relationship she once had with them. Domestic abuse and cults have much more in common than you might think. In a commitment like marriage or a new job, you have to believe in what you are getting yourself into, people in abusive relationships do not purposely marry an abusive partner, the same goes for a cult. A person’s personality will change; they will have a different belief than what they had before and will not be able to make decisions without a new way of explaining everything. There is no positive in joining a cult, only negative, it leaves a person dependant and fills them with false information. After leaving a cult a person might experience a sense of loss, depression, fear that not following through will result in God punishing them, isolation from the outside world, fear of evil spirits taking over, confusion about right and wrong, anger, and will even want to join the group again.

Another factor of being in a cult is Peer pressure. Peer pressure is when someone is pressured to do something out of character that they would not normally do. For example a teen in school who is less popular and in a totally different social group would probably want to follow the popular kids to fit in so that they are not made fun of. Mind control is when someone shapes a person's attitudes, beliefs, and personality without the person consciously knowing. Mind control uses manipulation and works by eventually getting into a person’s mind by techniques. While peer pressure and mind control go hand in hand when trying to persuade someone, they are different. Peer pressure does not take over your mind you are still allowed to think for yourself and have your own opinions, the act of peer pressure itself doesn’t alter your mind but gets you thinking to form your own thoughts, opinions and decisions. Since the economy is not in a good place and work is not promising, people look for easy answers which make them vulnerable to join a cult; they will see it as a quick fix. A personal consequence would be loss of interest, change of mood, thinking and personality.
Scientology teaches that we are immortal (called a Thetan) and are not originally from earth, and that man is trapped by matter, energy, space, and time. Salvation for a Scientologist comes through a process called”auditing,” where memories of past pain and unconsciousness that create energy blockage are removed. Auditing is a long process and can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. When everything is finally removed, the Thetan can once again control memories of past pain instead of being controlled by it. Until salvation, each Thetan is constantly reincarnated. Scientology categorically denies the existence of the God of the Bible, heaven, and hell. To a scientologist, Jesus was just a good teacher who was wrongfully put to death.

Heaven's Gate is a doomsday cult based on UFO beliefs in California. 21 women and 18 men voluntarily committed suicide. Most were in their 40'S the rest ranged from 26 to 72. They committed suicide in order to reach an alien space craft. In this cult, the members gave up their normal life for a tight knit community.
Interestingly enough, a survey revealed that between 5 to 7 million people have been involved in a cult group totaling to about 3,000 to 5,000 groups in all. The solution to this is awareness. If people are informed before hand they will know better. Some of the most notorious cults are the Branch Davidians, the Manson Cult, Jonestown Cult and Heavens Gate. Cults like these have a certain belief that drives them to either kill themselves or do illegal acts and think it is alright. The Branch Davidians were a sect that separated itself from the seventh Day Adventist church and was lead by Vernon Wayne Howell who changed his name to David Koresh it is most known for the Waco siege of 1993 in Waco, Texas where agents raided their property which resulted in the deaths of Koresh and 82 of his followers. There were allegations of sexual abuse, misconduct and stockpiling illegal weapons. Authorities were able to investigate these charges and obtained a warrant to search Koresh's compound because of the information they had.
"You made your children what they are.... These children that come at you with knives, they are your children. You taught them. I didn't teach them. I just tried to help them stand up.... You can project it back at me, but I am only what lives inside each and every one of you. My father is your system.... I am only what you made me. I am a reflection of you.”- Charles Manson
Charles Manson created a cult which is referred to as “the family. He was referred to as “God” and “Satan” by his followers and claimed to be a reincarnation of Jesus. Although he didn’t directly kill anyone himself, he ordered his followers to commit what is known as the famous Tate murders. Charles Manson's family had over 50 people. Charles Manson felt that there was going to be an apocalyptic war between black and white people. He and his “family” had planned to hide out in Death Valley in a hole and grow their family and when it was all over they were going to come out of the whole. He thought that the black man would come out victorious, but not know how to lead, so him and his family would become leaders. He called this "Helter Skelter named after the Beatles song about a little kid's ride. Accounts from his family say that that wasn’t true. Since he sees no Helter Skelter coming he decides to start it himself. He chooses Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, Tex Watson, and Linda Kasabian, who were part of his family to do the dirty work for him. He tells them to go to Cielo drive and instructs them to kill everybody in the Tate-Polanksi home who had been previously talking about a record deal with Manson. The next night Charles Manson went with Leslie Van Houten and Clem and according to him attempted to shoot someone in a car but the light had turned green and they sped away. He went into The LaBianca home and made some members from his family kill them. They were eventually caught because one of the family members were in jail and told about her killing of Sharon Tate.

The Jonestown massacre was led by James Warren Jones who was a preacher and had no training but based his teachings on a combination of religious and socialist philosophies. In 1978, he gave poisoned kool-aid which was mixed with cyanide, sedatives and tranquilizers to 912 of his followers and shot himself in the head. He was the founder and leader of the Peoples Temple, which is best known for the November 18, 1978 mass suicide of 909 Temple members in Jonestown, Guyana along with the killings of five other people at a nearby airstrip. Over 200 children were murdered at Jonestown, almost all of whom were forced to ingest cyanide by the elite Temple members. They were brainwashed into thinking that was what god wanted and that they would go to heaven because of their obedience. They were targeted because families had complained that they were taking their family members away.

Mormons believe that there are four sources of holy words, not just one: 1) The Bible “as far as it is translated correctly.” 2) The Book of Mormon, which was “translated” by the founder and published in 1830. He says that it is the “most correct book” on earth and that a person can get closer to God by following it. 3) The Doctrine and Covenants, which contain a collection of revelations about the Church of Jesus Christ as it has been restored. 4) The Pearl of the Great Price, which is considered by Mormons to “clarify” doctrines and teachings that were lost from the Bible and adds its own information about the earth's creation. Mormons believe that God has not always been the Supreme Being of the universe, but got that status through righteous living and persistent effort. They believe God the Father has a “body of flesh and bones as tangible as man’s.”

Cults are so damaging because the leader is usually very controlling and does not allow you to form your own opinions and thoughts, and if you do not live up to their standards the consequences can be very severe. The problem is not so much what is taught but the methods used to get people to join and stay. It is harmful to society because it interferes with a person’s way of thinking.
Cults are dangerous because they use lies, deception and clever recruiting techniques in order to gain new members. Cults target and approach people who have a wide range of unmet needs or are weak and vulnerable and try to persuade them to join their cause. They prey upon the weak and deficient in society. The mind control, manipulation, emotional abuse, extortion, loss of choice, loss of free will and other deceitful practices are reasons why cults are bad. Cults are like multi-layered onions that as you peel away the surface one can see the evil at the core of the organization. In order to provide a balanced view on cults, some cults or “cult-like behavior” can be seen in a positive light. Organizations that try to establish a common community and share positive beliefs are healthy. Establishing a culture that fosters a common bond are healthy examples. Sports teams, school groups and the like all employ productive recruiting techniques that do not have at their core any negative intentions.

My thesis statement is that Religious cults are a global problem because they can negatively affect people around the world who are not exposed to a mainstream way of living. My solution to this problem would be a program to educate and allow people to think on their own. It would have the same concept as a rehab facility in the fact that people who are trying to recover from being in a cult would have group discussions and share their experiences and educate and help each other with the healing process. I would also use social media to inform people since that is what our society flourishes in. For example KONY 2012 advocates used youtube and facebook to spread awareness.