Cults, Conspiracies, & Secret Societies

Excerpt

CULTS
 
What Makes a Cult Cultish?
 
The dictionary defines "cult" as a system of worship, but the word is
usually used to denote a religious movement that is out of the mainstream.
Christianity, for example, began as a cultic offshoot of Judaism, enjoying a
similar status to the Essenes, the desert-dwelling ascetics who preserved
the Dead Sea Scrolls, or the Samaritans, who not only belonged to a
different ethnicity than the ancient Hebrews, but also didn't worship in the
Temple in Jerusalem or acknowledge any but the first five books of the
Bible. If a cult gains enough adherents, cultural currency, money, and other
appurtenances of respectability, it generally becomes either a recognized
denomination of the orthodoxy that spawned it or a full-fledged religion in
its own right.
 
When members of one of those orthodoxies use the word "cult," more often
than not they are using it pejoratively, to undercut a disreputably
heterodox challenge to their own authority. Many evangelical Christians, for
example, dismiss even such large, established movements as the Jehovah's
Witnesses, the Church of Christ Scientist, and the Latter-Day Saints as
cults, refusing to grant them the status of legitimate Christian
denominations. On May 11, 2007, televangelist Bill Keller sent the following
message about then-presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, the former governor of
Massachusetts and a practicing Mormon, to the millions of subscribers to his
daily Internet devotional, "LivePrayer":
 
Romney winning the White House will lead millions of people into the Mormon
cult. Those who follow the false teachings of this cult, believe in the
false Jesus of the Mormon cult and reject faith in the one true Jesus of the
Bible, will die and spend eternity in hell.
 
Although my tone may be snarky at times, I strive to be agnostic when it
comes to the tenets and doctrines of the movements I describe in these
pages. Though I have occasionally given in to the temptation to write about
a group merely because its ideas are entertainingly strange (a la
Koreshanity), I am much more interested in the power relations between the
leadership of a group and its members than I am in its doctrines. For the
most part, when I characterize a group as a cult I am using the word as a
social scientist or a psychologist would, to denote a coercive or totalizing
relationship between a dominating leader and his or her unhealthily
dependent followers. What makes a cult cultish is not so much what it
espouses, but how much authority its leaders grant themselves--and how
slavishly devoted to them its followers are.
 
Excerpted from Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies by Arthur Goldwag
Copyright (c) 2009 by Arthur Goldwag. Excerpted by permission of Vintage, a
division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt
may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the
publisher.