Am I in a Religion or a Cult?

Cultic Captivity

A cult is an organization whose advocacy of an ideology coupled to behavioral prescription coercively infringes upon personal, familial, political, and/or epistemic liberty.  We usually think of cults as religious organizations, but there are non-religious cults, too, such as the so called “executive success programs” business cult, NXIVM, of Keith Ranieri fame (yes, the now-imprisoned leader who advocated branding his initials above the genitals of his female devotees), or the political apocalyptic doomsday cult of Shoko Asahara that deployed Sarin gas in Tokyo in 1995.  When I define a cult as corrosive to liberty, I mean to define liberty according to the English philosophical tradition of John Locke, where liberty should not be understood as the license to do whatever one wants, because that isn’t liberty at all, but is really just anarchy.  Our liberty requires a firm adherence to natural moral law in order to recognize what would constitute its violation.  Hence, you have the liberty of your person and body such that it is morally wrong for me to kidnap and restrain you.  You have the right, the liberty, not to be restrained, and we form a correlative moral “ought” claim that kidnapping is wrong and we ought not to do it.  If liberty were nothing more than my license to fulfill my every desire, then if I desired to kidnap you, I would be morally permitted to do so.  But I am not so morally permitted, and therefore, liberty is definitely not equivalent to moral license. The American term “freedom” is unfortunately ambiguous between genuine liberty and anarchic license.

The liberties that belong to you in virtue of being an individual human being, a member of a family, and a citizen of a specific country or state were granted to you by God, Nature’s God, and/or Nature in the first place.  I add these two additional formulations, because atheists can recognize natural moral law’s legitimacy, even if they dispute its links to God’s nature.  (You can find advocacy for such atheistic natural law in some of the followers of Ayn Rand, for example.)  Because liberty and its correlative formulation into natural moral laws find their origin in God’s creative act of human nature, the Church doesn’t see herself as superseding the liberty protectors of properly functioning family and state, but instead as adding to what was already given.  As the philosophers of our Faith repeatedly assert, grace never contradicts nature but only adds to and fulfills it.  By contrast, cults deny this crucial rule and falsely award to themselves some sort of supervening authority that permits them to overwrite these originating natural liberties.  In the historic teaching of both Judaism and Catholicism, on the other hand, you find rich commitments to marriage, family, and their boundaries of privacy.  As we will shortly see, many cults are desperate to break into these familial protections because when a husband and wife can speak their minds to one another privately, right there you find the first seeds of a resistance to tyranny.  Cults will accordingly try to separate husband from wife and parents from children in any number of ways.

All religions prescribe some ideology and some behavioral expectations.  When does this cross the line into coercion and violation?  To get at this general rule, it is helpful to look at cults across the board and identify patterns that tend to link them together and distinguish them from non-cultic religion.  Keep in mind that cults vary so widely that a particular feature of one may not be found in another.  So, think of the categories and examples in what follows as a “cluster-definition” of a cult’s methods of infringement on liberty.

Cult Leadership & Authority

Let’s begin, then, with how cults tend to be led and how they accordingly conceive of their authority.  First, religions tend to have institutional checks on power—rules or bodies that can discipline and even remove bad leaders.  In the Church we have canon law and the ability to appeal to our Bishop when we find serious failings in priests or deacons.  By contrast, if you recall the horrible situation in Jonestown in 1978 where 918 people died, Jim Jones of the People’s Temple cult answered to no one but himself.  When one person or very small group of people claim for themselves an unappealable authority, there you have the makings of a dangerous tyranny.

Second, the leadership of cults often form “cults of personality” around a single, charismatic leader.  When that leader dies, these cults tend to collapse.  In the infamous 1993 Waco, Texas standoff led by David Koresh, the destruction of their compound and the death of Koresh effectively ended the Branch Davidian movement as an ongoing cultic enterprise.  Without Koresh’s alleged ability to channel divine will, how could the cult continue?  When Keith Raniere of NXIVM was sentenced to over 100 years in prison, his inability to daily maintain his hold on his followers led one after another to realize the level of his deception and criminally abusive behavior toward them.  By contrast, religions survive their founders through transmissive institutions and offices.  Moses died, but Judaism continued in her traditions and priesthood.

Third, the leadership of cults tend to exempt themselves from the moral standards they impose on everybody else.  Keith Raniere of NXIVM, for example, required strict celibacy requirements on certain members of his elite group of DOS devotees, while all the while forming them into a harem to service his sexual appetites.  David Koresh cancelled all of the marriages of his Branch Davidian followers and took the former wives to himself, explaining that God told him to take the “burden of sex” on himself.

Fourth, authority within religions tends to be communally distributed through scriptures, traditions, and interpretive structures like councils that limit what individual leaders might try to do.  Intriguingly, when St. Peter issued his advice on the question of whether non-Jewish converts to Christianity had to also convert to obedience to Mosaic Law (i.e., had to become Jews as well as Christians), Paul, Barnabas, and James also provided their advice, and the whole council debated the matter.  By contrast, cult leaders tend not only to issue allegedly divine proclamations but also to grant themselves the sole right to interpret them.  Thus, Sun Myung Moon of the Unification Church offered self-validating “revelations” that he personally interpreted and applied.  There was no appeal.

Fifth, most religious leaders see themselves as part of a transmitted tradition that authenticates and limits their authority.  They do not see themselves nor represent themselves as divine beings or prophets.  The founders of religions that provide new divine revelation are accordingly understandably expected to furnish some sort of bonafides to establish themselves as divine transmitters.  Moses was so concerned about this (and said so to God at the burning bush) that God provided three divine signs to enable him to authenticate himself.  By contrast, cult leaders claim divine or prophetic status without objective verification of their authenticity.  David Koresh claimed to be a second Messiah, and Shoko Asahara called himself Christ and the next enlightened one after Buddha.  Of the many latter days cults I described in the Question from the Unsettled Mind “When are the Last Days?” you will discover repeated claims to divine prophetic status by the leaders of these cultic movements but a corelative avoidance of scrutiny of their claims by the Church’s leadership!

Cult Concealment & Intellectual Suppression

Let’s move to some more features of cults that contrast with religions with respect to inquiry, information, and doctrine.  Our sixth feature of cults involves transparency.  When Jesus was questioned during his all-night “trial,” he pointed out that all of his teachings were public.  Similarly, St. Paul contrasted Christian teachings’ public character with the gnostic cults trying to seduce Christian converts.  People have the right to understand what they are getting into before they are required to make commitments to the group.  Cults tend toward the opposite, with layered secret teachings made available only to those who pass through various spiritual commitment levels.  In her televised series, “Scientology and the Aftermath,” Leah Remini detailed the ways in which the Church of Scientology extracted significant sums of money from church members in order to rise in the spiritual levels of L. Ron Hubbard’s “Bridge to Total Freedom” and then discover the secret teachings of the advanced “operating Thetans.”  In Covenant Communities, multiple years of layered practices and commitment demands are exacted before prospective community members are read in on the full requirements and commitments of membership, while those outside the inner group are provided with a false narrative about what is actually believed and practiced.

Seventh, religions usually permit their adherents to review criticisms of the religion, digest outside media, and consider opposing viewpoints.  In Catholicism specifically, her rich philosophical tradition lays claim directly to the Socratic dictum that “the unexamined life is not worth living.”  Inquiry lies at the heart of the Catholic desire for the truth.  By contrast, cults tend to restrict their members’ access to outside criticism and even to outside media, warning them not even to look at it.  In the now infamous Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), it’s self-acclaimed prophet-leader Warren Jeffs prohibited the use of the internet and television as well as consumption of print media.  In Jonestown, Jim Jones erected a surveillance system to monitor cult members’ mail and use of shortwave radio.  Similarly, according to Leah Remini and many former Sea Org members of Scientology’s clergy-like class, their lives were subject to constant surveillance and they were ordered not to digest critical media.

Eighth, so robust are the intellectual traditions of critical inquiry to mature religions that you will often find collegiate level theological and philosophical faculty within Catholicism, whole orders devoted to teaching and education such as the Jesuits, or entire traditions of inter-teacher dialogue such as the rich Jewish rabbinical dialogical system or entirely distinct schools of thought within Islam.  By contrast, cults tend to suppress doubt, classifying it as moral weakness, intellectual sin, or even demonic or enemy influence.  In the Unification Church, for example, doubts were characterized as Satanic attack.  Cult expert Steven Hassan offers his BITE formula of cultic Behavioral, Informational, Thought, and Emotional control to show how cults reshape their adherents’ doubts as their own personal failing or even demonic attack.  The Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Church of Scientology, and NXIVM are all reported by former members to employ these tactics to suppress doubt.  It’s intriguing to note by contrast that in his letter to the Romans, St. Paul identifies truth suppression as the central epistemological vice that leads to the many moral vices.

Ninth, all religious groups employ some form of technical vocabulary, but those terms are transparently and publicly defined.  Cult expert Robert Lifton noted how cults employ insider jargon—what he termed “thought-terminating clichés”—to shut down critical analysis.  Leah Remini and other Scientology survivors have showcased the dense moral and theoretical lexicon created by L. Ron Hubbard that reshaped how members understood moral and personal reality.  They reported how technical terminology such as “suppressive person” and “enturbulated theta” were employed to reclassify critical concerns as pathological spiritual states of the doubter or outside critic.

Tenth, religions encourage non-member public inquirers such as scholars, historians, and journalists to study them, providing access to their histories, texts, practices, ideology, and members.  Cults tend to conceal the inner mechanisms of the group, their finances, their disciplinary measures, their ideologies, and their member identities.  They write and rewrite their own histories to suit the group’s objectives rather than to provide an objective record for historical and scholarly review.  For example, NXIVM members were required to sign non-disclosure agreements and even to provide embarrassing collateral to hold them hostage to remaining silent about the group.  Leah Remini and other ex-Scientologists have discussed how the Scientological practice of auditing led to a collection of information from members’ every session, including embarrassing details to threaten potential defectors.  Some covenant communities employ small group confession tactics without initially informing their members that their small group leaders are making reports on what is disclosed to higher-level leaders.  They justify this as a part of what they term the “pastoral authority” umbrella, even though none of them are ordained clergy.  By contrast, the state sees a vital interest in protecting disclosure and employs legal protections for people speaking to psychologists or lawyers.  Similarly, the Roman Catholic Church teaches that if a priest reveals what he hears in the Rite of Reconciliation (Confession), he auto-excommunicates himself.  Thus, while religions tend to applaud outside scrutiny and protect personal disclosure, cults tend to suppress outside scrutiny and record personal disclosure.

Cult Conversion Methodologies

Let’s shift again to another category of the differences between religions and cults, namely their tactics for recruitment and membership.  So, our eleventh distinction comes in the form of how honest the recruitment efforts are.  When we advertise for the Catholic foundational entry class, now called OCIA (formerly, RCIA), we openly identify who we are, that all inquirers are welcome with no obligation to join, and that the program is entirely free of charge.  We provide a full disclosure of what Catholics believe and do, before offering the inquirers the opportunity to join the Church, thereby respecting the personal liberty and dignity of each person.  By contrast, cults tend to conceal their recruitment efforts through various front organizations that disguise their allegiances.  For example, the Unification Church employed CARP on college campuses without linking it to the cult leader, Moon, and justified it to the recruiters as “heavenly deception.”  The Sword of the Spirit affiliated Covenant Communities make use of a number of intake groups that do not necessarily advertise and often actively conceal their links to Sword of the Spirit and the particular covenant community recruiting in that locale.  For example, Kairos (not the prison ministry by the same name) is a teen program employed in many Catholic churches and Catholic teen camps that was started by Sword of the Spirit and employs their ideology and practices.  Though Kairos still publicly identifies its origin affiliation, the Sword of the Spirit collegiate intake program, St. Paul’s Outreach, has scrubbed its media, history, and literature of any reference to Sword of the Spirit or Covenant Communities even though it continues to employ the same methodologies and seeks the same eventual outcomes of covenant community membership for its members.  Similarly, some Sword of the Spirit affiliated Covenant Communities actively conceal their links to the Sword of the Spirit movement, just as their adult intake groups often hide their links to the Covenant Community itself.  Someone might join a men’s group at a parish without having any idea that its aim is ultimately to direct him into Covenant Community membership.

Twelfth, while religions tend to welcome newcomers according to the localized social pacing customs, cults attempt to accelerate bonding to the group, often affecting extraordinary displays of emotion conditionally tied to further group insertion.  Most of us are familiar with this notion of “love bombing,” of drawing an analogy to the intense bonding feelings of falling in love with the cult group’s attempt to portray itself as the answer to your personal and social ills.  The Moonies employed intensive weekend workshops linked to constant praise and attention.  Some groups offer teen summer camps that take advantage of the campers’ separation from their parents to mix love-bombing with identification of personal vulnerabilities that the group claims it can resolve.  Kairos, for example, encourages substantial disclosures to other teens within the small group structure without the therapeutic benefits of a trained psychologist to move that teen through an appropriate healing process.  NXIVM made great hay about access to Keith Raniere and his alleged “smartest man on the planet” status, so that by the time that prospective members met him, they were already primed to believe whatever he told them about their deficiencies and his unique ability to help them.

Thirteenth, one of the things you’ll notice if you enter a Catholic or Jewish or Hindu congregation is the great cross-section of society, representing full families of all ages, an inherent divine protection against manipulation.  But cults tend to target the most intellectually and morally vulnerable: young adults in familial and/or collegiate transition.  With a new cultural, employment, or collegiate surround, young adults are often desperate to acquire new friends, making them highly vulnerable to cultic recruitment.  Both Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles of the Heaven’s Gate cult (the group that in 1997 committed suicide en masse to spiritually fly to a UFO they believed was waiting for them behind the Hale-Bopp comet) as well as David Berg of the Children of God cult focused almost exclusively on recruiting young seekers adrift in the world.  The Sword of the Spirit affiliated Christ the Cornerstone Covenant Community in Ohio also focuses its recruitment effort almost entirely on young adults.  Remember, God created families for our protection.  This is one of the reasons in our adult formation activities within the Catholic Church, my wife and I emphasized programming with a constant cross-fertilization of younger with older, men with women, and married with the unmarried.  Groups that consistently isolate these factors are doing so for a reason.

Fourteenth, the speed of conversion and support for the personal choice not to convert can vary noticeably between religions and cults.  In the Catholic Church the typical period of conversion education is about ten months.  We do not pressure people to join, but encourage them to follow their doubts, ask questions, and if they do not think they are ready for baptism, then wait, take another year of OCIA, or come back in the future.  Our friendship connection with them does not change based on their willingness to convert, because they are persons made in the image of God and valuable to us intrinsically.  Cults, by contrast, often channel new recruits into some initial level of conversion experience within weeks, and begin requiring certain forms of commitment almost immediately.  Jim Jones of the People’s Temple compelled new recruits to quickly hand over their properties and join their communal living.  Groups that employ spiritual leveling such as Scientology and the Covenant Communities begin with simple teachings on time and money management that then move to increasing commitment requirements to achieve advanced levels and access.  NXIVM employed a leveling system with the wearing of colored sashes that indicated the mastery of the particular adherent to the group’s ideology and personal commitment to Keith Ranieri.  When potential recruits waver in their willingness to commit, various tactics such as love bombing, guilt or fear inducement, and shaming are employed to try to get the prospective person to commit.  If the person leaves, the group often shuns them entirely, leaving people who had partially committed suddenly absent what they have been habituated to feel as a personally validating psychological necessity.  Those psychological feelings can then be interpreted as divine drawing to illicitly employ religious authority to induce commitment to the cult.

Cult Totalitarian Controls

Let’s turn now to how religions and cults differ in their handling of adherents’ daily lives.  Our fifteenth factor distinguishing religions from cults involves micromanagement of daily life.  Religions tend to offer general moral principles that adherents interpret and apply to their own lives.  Catholics teach that we should pray.  How often?  When?  What forms of prayer?  That’s all up to each person.  Catholics teach that husbands and wives should love one another in a self-giving marital partnership.  So, how should they handle their family budget?  How much time should they do separate activities?  How should they order their education of their children?  Again, that’s up to each marital partnership.  Guidelines that respect personal liberty is the way religions tend to operate.  By contrast, you tend to discover that cults seek granular control over nearly all daily activities.  The FLDS movement prescribed the exact hair style, prairie dress style, and pastel colors that all women were to wear.  FLDS also assigned women their marriage partners by prophetic edict from Warren Jeffs, who curiously directed a substantial number of them straight into his eighty-member harem.  The 1980’s Rajneeshpuram cult led by Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh required all converts to don a maroon dyed garment.  Cults tend to dictate terms for what is eaten, when it is eaten, when to sleep and how much sleep should be had, as well as social interactions such as to whom one can talk and about what, whom one can date and how, what sort of employment one should have or not have, where one should live and with whom, and especially, what one should do with one’s money and property.  Every form of personal choice is subjected to the cult leadership’s choice, depriving the cult adherent the exercise of his independent personal, familial, financial, and citizenship liberties.

Sixteenth, on matters of marriage and sexuality, religions again tend to offer general moral norms for behavior, but they don’t usually make a point of peering into the private lives of their members.  Religious adherents are expected to self-police their moral behavior.  With respect to marital choice, religions usually offer guidance and advice but permit members to choose their own spouses.  Cults, by contrast, understand how dangerous independently formed and self-managed marital partnerships are to the totalizing control the cult seeks.  So, Sun Myung Moon would marry thousands of complete strangers together in mass ceremonies.  David Berg required his Children of God women to “flirt fish,” meaning that they were expected to use their sexual charms to seduce men into the cult.  He also required adults and children within the group to sexually interact.  Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh of the Rajneeshpuram cult required women to prostitute themselves to raise funds for the cult leadership, as well as subject themselves to sexual assault during religious rituals.  David Koresh cancelled all sexual activity amongst his followers except for what he allowed for himself, namely the wives and daughters of his followers.  Keith Raniere managed multiple sexual outrages for his followers to showcase their commitment to truly change and challenge themselves, including his having sex with both mothers and their daughters within the group.  Of course, cults aren’t the only ones who find themselves in serious and perverted sexual problems, for the Roman Catholic Church’s legacy of thousands of priests raping children the world over is the darkest moment in the Church’s history.  But while the Church initially attempted to hide the extent of the sexual carnage as well as the degree to which Church leaders tried to relocate priests into unsuspecting parishes, the public nature of the Faith and the role that married men and women played in policing the activity of clergy eventually led to a substantial reckoning, arrests and convictions, and massive settlement payments to victims, as well as new police-only reporting requirements within United States parishes.  Unlike cults, Catholic doctrine does not condone sexual assault or formalize it as something else in order to groom the unsuspecting and vulnerable into sexually exploitive situations.

Seventeenth, many religions employ voluntary or semi-voluntary ascetic practices, such as the fasts of Ramadan in Islam or Lent in Catholicism.  The extent of these fasts is bounded by limiting rules and to some degree self-chosen.  Lent lasts only for forty days, followed immediately by the forty-day feast of Easter.  Pregnant women, young children, and older adults, as well as adults with serious physical or mental maladies are all exempted from the Lenten fasting direction.  The purpose of the Lenten fast is tied directly to the spiritual practice and growth of each individual participant.  So, a fast that led to physical incapacitation by the participant would be prohibited.  By contrast, cults employ sleep and diet as tools of control.  For example, Gwen Shamblin of the Remnant Fellowship Church “Weigh Down” cult shamed women into extreme thinness as a sign of spiritual their progress.  She would employ clever lines such as, “Who do you love more, God or your refrigerator?”  Other groups tend to limit the sleep and protein diet necessary for higher brain function, thereby reducing critical inquiry.  Jim Jones directed his adherents to work eleven-hour days in the fields followed by multiple hours of religious services.  Chuck Dederich of the Synanon cult employed days long sessions (without allowing his followers to sleep) of “The Game,” where members engaged in highly confrontational forms of group therapy, a practice also alleged to occur in Scientology by former member Mike Rinder who described the “hole” and the “Rehabilitation Project Force” (RPF) where disfavored Scientology leaders were compelled to confess their disloyalties to the Scientology’s leader, David Miscavage.  Both religions and cults understand the significant links between health of the body and health of the soul/mind, but while religions usually aim at nurturing those bonds for the overall good of each person, the cult seeks to exploit that relationship for the cult itself.

Eighteenth, another place where we see cults differ substantially from religions in matters of daily life pertains to time management.  Religions usually expect some kind of religious observance—weekly services, religious holidays, and the like—but those expectations are bounded by the recognition that the adherent does not live or exist for the sake of the religion.  Rather, the religion exists or ought to exist for the sake of each adherent’s overall betterment.  Of course, religions differ in their understanding of that betterment and accordingly with respect to how they expect their members to use their time.  But religions recognize limits on demands of time, because participants have families, jobs, social, recreational, artistic, and political demands too.  Religions refuse to make themselves the most important or solely important factor in their adherents’ lives.  Cults, by contrast, are totalitarian, meaning that they wish to control as much if not all of their adherents’ time.  Cults will require service that amounts to unpaid or barely paid labor for cult projects.  In Scientology, for example, Leah Remini described how Sea Org members signed billion-year contracts and worked for nearly nothing.  If they left the organization, she explained, they were billed for many of their expenses during their service.  In Rajneeshpuram, the guru classified as “worship” his compelling his sannyasins to build his Oregon commune.

Nineteenth, most of the adherents of religions live in the wider world and participate in the full range of human social, business, and political activity.  A narrow range of religious adherents sometimes form communal societies with less access to the wider world, but these succeed in the long run only when they are carefully policed against abuse.  In the cases of Opus Dei and the Legionaries of Christ, for example, substantial evidence exists of human trafficking, coerced domestic labor, sexual assault, and personal violations of many kinds.  Any time people move outside the divinely ordained structures of families within a society of properly ordered police powers, these kinds of abuses are possible and must be guarded against.  Of course, terrible abuses can also occur within the privacy of families, too.  The Church doctrine of Subsidiarity recognizes the independent status of the Church, the State, and the Family, while at the same time recognizing that sometimes they must intervene with one another to combat abuse.  But no one should be naïve about joining a group that rearranges fundamental human structures such as family and private property.  Whether choosing a marriage partner or membership in a Holy Order, starry-eyed idealism is a recipe for disaster.  So, if abuse is already a worry for religion and regular society generally, imagine how much worse it must be in the case of cults who seek totalizing power over their members!  This is why so many cults seek to draw their members into narrow forms of society that isolate them from the people around them.  Jim Jones moved his entire congregation from the United States to the jungle of Guyana and surrounded them with armed guards, prohibiting escape.  David Koresh’s followers joined together at the Mount Carmel site near Waco.  Covenant Communities seek to move members into closer neighborhood proximity to one another and increasingly occupy members’ time preventing their normal public and private associations.  Any time someone tries to isolate you “for God,” be wary!  God is himself a community of three persons, and God is also a Family.

Cult Management of Outsiders & Escapees

Let’s turn now to how religions and cults tend to differ in their treatment of relationships outside the group and their treatment of people who wish to leave the group.  Religions tend to encourage family bonding, including with family members who are not part of the religion.  The Catholic Church even allows marriages between Catholics and non-Catholics, provided the non-Catholic agrees to raise any children as Catholics.  Religions recognize natural law moral rules pertaining to families, such as the fifth commandment in the Hebrew Bible to honor thy father and mother, as well as the duty to love one’s spouse even if he chooses not to join your religion.  Religion is not allowed to trump family relationships, say these religions themselves!  By contrast, cults tend to isolate and sever relationships outside cultic control, whether those relationships be familial, social, or even political.  The Children of God cult named outsiders as “systemites” because they were part of the Satanic system of worldly evil—including members of one’s own biological family who weren’t members of the cult.  Similarly, as Leah Remini has described in “Scientology and the Aftermath,” Scientology requires the total separation from family members who question members’ allegiance to the group, classifying them as “SP’s,” suppressive persons.  Again, NXIVM’s secret female society DOS required its members to cut off anyone who questioned the group’s activities.

Twenty-first, if you attempt to leave a religion, what usually happens?  Quite often, they barely notice that you are gone, because people come and go all the time without any loss of their family members, economies, or political status.  By contrast, leaving a cult can exact a momentous cost.  FLDS members who escaped the polygamous marital arrangements found themselves wholly isolated without professional capability, identity documents, housing, savings, vehicles, clothes, or even food.  Without substantial assistance from cult-escape support groups, FLDS escapees find survival challenging.  Cult-escapees also discover that in the outer world they are ill-equipped to navigate the complex decision-making process that their cult society handled for them.  Cults essentially reduce their adherents to children rather than motivate them toward full and independent adult maturity.  Escapees also experience profound loneliness, loss of identity and value, anxiety, depression, shame (about leaving the cult, about having been sucked into a cult in the first place, and even about the people they recruited for the cult!), difficulties in trusting other people, and fear that the cult will find them and take them back for extreme punishments.  And many cults do attempt to reacquire members.  Leah Remini and Mike Rinder documented a number of reports of Sea Org members attempting to escape Scientology and the stream of vehicles that would launch in pursuit with Scientology agents lurking at airports, bus stations, and train stations to intercept them.  What a contrast with normal religion!

Twenty-second, religions do not usually practice any form of shunning or forced ostracism of former members, while cultic groups can formalize the practice.  Leah Remini in her series describes the Scientological policy and practice of “disconnection”—permanently separating nuclear family members—if a person leaves the church.  Jehovah’s Witnesses practice disfellowshipping.  And, of course, shunning itself comes from the Amish tradition deployed against people who leave that form of life.  Cults feel justified in employing these abusive tactics because they do not value people intrinsically, but only insofar as they serve the interest of the cult.  In cases of cult defectors, former leaders who leave and then openly criticize the group, while normal religions often just ignore them, some cults target them with surveillance, harassment, lawsuits, and even various forms of defamation or harm.  The creator of Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard, established the “Fair Game” doctrine in which enemies of the religion could be deceived, sued, or destroyed.  Though Scientology currently claims to no longer employ that doctrine, ex-church leaders such as Mike Rinder indicated that it is very much in force and was applied against him.  Similarly, when Sarah Edmondson escaped the NXIVM cult, she found herself pursued by investigators and litigation for speaking out against NXIVM’s abuses.  She and her husband now host their own podcast, A Little Bit Culty, so have a listen to this brave married couple who helped bring down Keith Rainiere and his reign of sexual and personal terror.

Cults on Finance & Justice

Finally, let’s talk about money and the law!  Twenty-third, religious groups usually maintain not-for-profit status and are bound by substantial public disclosure laws, publish their budgets, and are subjected to audits to ensure that the flow of donations is properly directed to their group’s religious ends.  By contrast money within cults usually finds itself entirely at the disposal of the cult leader.  Jim Jones maintained millions of dollars in foreign accounts at the time of his suicide.  Bhagwan Rajneesh owned over ninety Rolls-Royces purchased from member donations.  Gwen Shamblin of the Weigh Down cult maintained a substantial residence in Brentwood, TN, as well as a multi-million-dollar home on the Floridian coast.  Other cult leaders purchase very large mansion or compound-style properties and require their inner core group members to join them in a communal lifestyle.  Prior to his costly and ultimately failed legal defense, Keith Raniere claimed around fifty million dollars in worth.  Are cult leaders in it for the money?  To be sure, yes, but also for the power they exert over people’s lives once they separate them from their property.

It's worth adding on this issue of finances, that twenty-fourth, while religions tend to encourage sustained and proportional giving, cults tend to require escalating payments as one gets deeper and higher into the system, as well as property transfers, and even taking loans and debt to provide additional donations to the system.  For example, as Leah Remini illustrated in her own experience in Scientology, completing the Scientology “Bridge to Total Freedom” cost her hundreds of thousands of dollars.  Jim Jones’ Peoples Temple members handed over their deeds, their social security checks, and their paychecks.  As we saw when we examined the history of last days cults, any time a religious group broadcasts its commitment to some form of shared property or communal living arrangement, take care.  As Locke demonstrated clearly in his Treatise of Civil Government, our natural rights to life and liberty require a correlative right to property as the sole means to secure said life and liberty.  Thus, political or religious movements that assault private property seek tyrannical control over your liberties.  The cult leader does not give his property to you, no; you are expected to hand over your property to him.

Twenty-fifth, how do religions view the law in well-governed political constitutions?  Laws in such governments provide a non-violent means to adjudicate disputes and apply to all citizens equally, regardless of their particular religious expression.  Thus, my bishop cannot kill me in the name of God and think that the state of Ohio isn’t going to arrest him for murder.  But cults tend to believe that they exist above the state.  As such, they tend to see attempts by the state to investigate and limit their activities as enemy actions worthy of a serious response.  In the case of Scientology’s founder, L. Ron Hubbard, he spent years at sea on a ship trying to evade various investigative authorities.  In 1977 the FBI discovered that he had also initiated what he called Operation Snow White, considered the largest domestic espionage case in US history, where he sent some 5,000 Scientologists into government agencies—some with forged identity documents—to steal documents and purge records about Scientology.  In Japan in 1995 the Aum Shinrikyo cult created the chemical weapon called sarin gas and released it into the Tokyo subway, murdering 13 people.  Again, in 1984 the Rajneeshees launched a large biological weapons attack using salmonella against ten salad bars in restaurants to sicken enough people to sway elections.  This same group also plotted the assassination of Charles Turner, the United States Attorney in Oregon.  The Branch Davidians accumulated and then modified a substantial number of weapons into automatic machine guns that they used to prevent an ATF raid on their compound in 1983, leading to the deaths of four agents and six Branch Davidians, until the demise of nearly the entire membership in the final conflagration that burned down the whole compound.  Jim Jones ordered the murder of a US Congressman who travelled to Guyana to investigate reported cult abuses, followed by the coerced suicide of his entire commune.

Conclusions

What does our look at twenty-five differences between religions and cults tell us?  Well, let’s summarize what we have learned:

1.     Cults tend to form around charismatic leaders whose lack of accountability enables their tyranny over members.

2.     Cults tend to collapse when their leaders with their unique divine insight die or are imprisoned.

3.     Cult leaders tend to exempt themselves from the moral rules they impose on everybody else.

4.     Cults tend to concentrate both divine insight and the authoritative interpretation/application of that insight into the hands of their leader.

5.     Cult leaders tend to claim for themselves divine or prophetic status without subjecting themselves to inspection by the Church or providing divine attestation of their supposed prophetic power.

6.     Cults usually conceal substantial portions of their teaching and practices for their inner circles and away from critical outside inquiry.

7.     Cults often severely curtail member access to outside media critical of the cult.

8.     Cults nearly always classify intellectual challenges to their leadership and teaching as sinful or psychologically disturbed.

9.     Cults usually employ volumes of technical jargon that reclassify and redefine fundamental categories of morality, human dignity, and human nature.

10. Cults tend to conceal their teaching, practices, and history from objective scholarly and journalistic review, while at the same time they collect and transmit member disclosures of personal failings to the leadership of the group.

11. Cults often conceal their recruitment efforts behind front organizations that fail to honestly identify cult links, cult doctrines, or cult conversion efforts.

12. Cults usually employ emotional bonding tactics to sidestep critical inquiry by prospective members and hurry them into the initial commitments to further cult indoctrination.

13. Cults ignore mature and experienced adults in their conversion efforts, focusing almost exclusively on vulnerable young adults in stages of significant life transition.

14. Cults employ many forms of pressure tactics to coerce prospective members to join, valuing people not for who they are intrinsically but only for who they might be as cult members.

15. Cults tend to extend their teaching to the nitty gritty of daily life, replacing adult decision-making and liberty with child-like dependence on cult authority.

16. Cults often invade sexual and marital privacy, requiring demeaning activity and sexual submission of female followers and acquiescence by their husbands and fathers.

17. Cults employ ascetic practices over diet and sleep to reduce higher brain function and render members susceptible to behavioral and ideological manipulation.

18. Cults tend to gobble up members’ time until their entire lives are enslaved to the cult interests.

19. Cults usually seek to concentrate their members together in their living quarters and activities, cutting them off from outside scrutiny or escape.

20. Cults tend to isolate and force severance from non-compliant family members and friends, seeing the cult alone as the primary and even sole value in members’ lives.

21. Cults often make exiting the cult extremely difficult, as the exiting member is tied to the cultic power structure emotionally, intellectually, aspirationally, socially, economically, politically, familially, and physically.

22. Cults tend to demean, harass, and sometimes legally pursue defectors.

23. Cult leaders usually direct all cult-acquired funds into their own unaccountable control, often leading to standards of living substantially higher than their members.

24. Cults often tie progress through the cultic indoctrination and practices directly to escalating donations or payments to the cult leaders.

25. Because cults see themselves as the preeminent human institution, they discount and evade legal jurisdiction, often concealing their activities from judicial scrutiny, and sometimes actively seeking to undermine government oversight by force of espionage, terrorism, or military action.

One way to capture the essential difference between religion and cults is to look at the problem from the standpoint of ends, or purpose.  What is a cult for?  What is a religion for?  Religions tend to serve their adherents, while cults employ their adherents to serve them.  One of the originating founders of the Covenant Community system, Stephen B. Clark, jotted down some hand-written notes when he was first conceiving of covenant communities.  He titled the leaders “dictators” and the people “null sets.”  In systems such as these, the people are worthless cogs in an economic and financial machine that ultimately serves the dictator.  Because of their status merely as items of use, cult members may find themselves deprived of every form of liberty—their personal liberties, their property liberties, their marital and familial liberties, their economic liberties, their religious liberties, their political liberties, and ultimately even their lives.  Religions see inherent limits to their power over their adherents, because those powers exist for the sake of those very adherents.  Thus, as with all organizations that stave off tyranny, the limited and defined powers of family, state, and church/religion tend toward the betterment of the liberty management of and by each human person.  But cults believe themselves justified in exerting unlimited power, because they see themselves as superseding and replacing the family, the state, and normal religion.

So, am I in a cult?  Are you in a cult?  Socrates said that the unexamined life is not worth living, so it is probably a good idea to ask this question even if you are a member of a “mainstream” religion.  Because as we will soon see in another Question from the Unsettled Mind, cults can exist within religions too!