Thought Control, Totalism, and the Extension
of the Anti-Cult Critique Beyond the "Cults"
Joseph E. Davis, PhD*
University of Virginia
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- The Campaign against the "Cults"
- Assumptions About the Individual and Society
I. Introduction
Over the past two decades, a controversy has been swirling around the
theologies and activities of certain religious and therapeutic groups, including the
Unification Church, the Children of God (later, Family of Love), the International Society
of Krishna Consciousness (popularly, Hare Krishna), Scientology, the Divine Light Mission,
the Rajneesh Foundation and others. Popularly called "cults," these groups are
collectively known as new religious movements (NRMs)1
by sociologists, and the movement that grew up in the 1970s to oppose them, the
"anti-cult movement."2
The campaign against the "cults" in the United States (and
other countries of the Western world) has followed a trajectory of ever more lurid
accusations of mind control, manipulation, abduction, scandal, tax evasion, authoritarian
and totalistic organizational structures, blackmail of defectors, political conspiracies
and hazards to the health of members. The man on the street was led to believe that the
"cults" were pretty much all controversial, all weird and all the same. Whatever
information he possessed was generally in the form of stories of brainwashing, harsh
living conditions, ruined careers, deceptive fund raising practices and the anguish of
relatives that had "lost" a son or daughter to some strange guru. The
destruction of Jim Jones' People's Temple community in Jonestown, Guyana, or the
Tate-LeBianca murders by the Charles Manson cult, were the paradigmatic outcomes in the
popular imagination (fed by the media and the anti-cultists) for these bizarre and
threatening gurus and their robotized followers.
In recent years the anti-cult movement has been gradually expanding its
focus, in part as a result of the decline of the very groups it was organized to resist.
This shift in focus has brought it into conflict with a growing number of groups that are
accused of sharing in this or that aspect of the excesses of authority, totalist practices
and abuses of personal autonomy that were alleged to occur in NRMs. In order to understand
the nature of the charges now being leveled against non-NRMs, this paper will address some
of the sociological features of the anti-cult movement as well as aspects of that
movement's ideology, including its legitimations and a number of the central assumptions
about the individual and society at its core. What is of interest is not the NRMs per se,
but the nature of the public campaign waged against them.3
Some readers will be put off by the relentlessness of the argument.
Granted that the anti-cult movement has interests and that their analysis is far from
perfect, still, it will be argued, real people have been hurt, some groups -- even if not
all -- have left tremendous emotional wreckage in their wake, some NRM leaders are
undeniably charlatans and some NRM members have clearly been manipulated. Nothing that
follows in this paper is intended to deny that many NRMs have such problems. The issue is
the anti-cult reading of communal groups and the implicit "solution" that is
embedded within their ideology. The sweeping generalizations and anti-communal
presuppositions of anti-cultism have become a tool with which to attack expressions of
religious faith out of sync with conventional assumptions.
II. The Campaign against the "Cults"
In order to put into perspective the campaign against NRMs, it is
helpful to begin by seeing the current "cult" controversy in an historical
pattern of reactions to new religious groups in the United States. These reactions exhibit
remarkably consistent features and build on similar public fears of foreign conspiracy led
by evil geniuses equipped with new and sinister methods for human manipulation. Virtually
all of the major elements of the anti-cult movement can be found in earlier movements
against novel religious groups. The hysterical reaction to the growing presence of the
Roman Catholic Church during the nineteenth century is characteristic.4
An Historical
Parallel: Nativist Anti-Catholicism
The rapid influx of Catholic immigrants, long-standing
Protestant-Catholic tension transferred from Europe and the fear of Catholic church-state
approaches were among the kindling fueling a public fire that generated intense
apprehension, was highly visible and lasted throughout much of the nineteenth century. In
the "nativist" imagination, the average Catholic was an innocent dupe,
manipulated by unscrupulous priests in the interests of a conspiracy masterminded by the
Pope and the Jesuits. The Catholics, voting on papal instruction, were preparing to wield
immense political influence.5
The anti-Catholic movement of the nineteenth century (hostility toward
Catholics goes back to the earliest colonial times), included formal anti-Catholic
associations, such as United Order of Deputies; Minute Men of 1886; Red, White and Blue;
United Order of Native Americans; and American Patriotic League. The most powerful of such
groups was the American Protective Association (APA). Members of the APA took an oath
never to vote for, employ or go out on strike with Catholics. Boycotts were organized
against Catholic merchants, lectures were given on the evils of Catholicism and the
election campaigns of sympathetic candidates were supported. The APA's legislative agenda
involved initiatives at both the national and state levels. The national campaign included
reduction of immigration, denial of public funds for sectarian purposes, taxation of all
non-public property and public inspection of private schools, convents and monasteries.6
In addition to oppositional associations, the anti-Catholic movement of
the nineteenth century included brainwashing and conspiracy theories, atrocity stories by
former members and calls for governmental action. In a series of accounts published
between the 1830s and 1850s by ex-nuns and ex-priests (there is good historical evidence
that a few of these accounts, such as those by Maria Monk, were largely fabricated and
ghost written by the leaders of anti-Catholic organizations), all manner of horrors were
purported to be occurring behind convent and monastery walls. Nuns, for example, were
alleged to be grossly deceived about the true nature of convent life, became virtual
slaves, were physically abused for failure to obey orders and were treated as sexual
objects by frustrated priests. Titles in this genre included Scipio de Ricci's Female
Converts: Secrets of Nunneries Disclosed, Rebecca Reed's Six Months in a Convent,
Samuel Smith's The Wonderful Adventures of a Lady of the French Nobility, and the
Intrigues of a Romish Priest, Her Confessor, to Seduce and Murder Her, Monk's Awful
Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery of Montreal and Sister Agnes; or the Captive
Nun; a Picture of Convent Life, and Bunkley's The Testimony of an Escaped Novice
from the Sisterhood of St. Joseph, Emmetsburg, Md7.
"Such apostate tales," according to the sociologist James Lewis, "were
designed to evoke public reaction, and they often succeeded in this purpose."8
Moreover, the Catholics, despite having nothing in common with various
other new groups on the nineteenth century American scene, were lumped together with them.
These groups included the Mormons and the Masons. Lumping disparate groups together in
this fashion served the purpose of creating the specter of conspiracy and of a
stereotypical enemy. All of these elements -- organized opposition, brainwashing theories,
atrocity stories, calls for governmental action, combining of unrelated groups with an
overarching xenophobia and religious bigotry -- are a part of the anti-cult movement that
appeared in the 1970s in response to a new flock of novel religious groups, the
"cults."
An Anti-Cult
Industry
The anti-cult campaign was initiated in the 1970s primarily by parents,9 who formed organizations to combat the groups their
children had joined (the American Family Foundation, which publishes the Cultic Studies
Journal: Psychological Manipulation and Society, the Cult Awareness Network
[formerly the Citizen's Freedom Foundation], Love Our Children, etc.), but was later
joined by "deprogrammers," apostate former members of NRMs (generally those who
had been subject to "deprogramming") and some religious and mental health
professionals.10 These miscellaneous groups and
individuals collect and disseminate information on the beliefs and operations of NRMs,
lobby against them in various settings, particularly the media but also in the courts, and
act as referral services for parents, professionals and other interested parties.11
Over time this disparate movement has developed a life of its own, quite
independent of the groups it was initially created to oppose. According to sociologists
David Bromley and Anson Shupe:
The elevation of the new religions controversy into a scare has had
several implications which derive from the nature and dynamics of scares as social
phenomena. One has been a tendency toward continual expansion of the dimensions and
boundaries of the "cult problem." A wide variety of groups have become
equivalent by virtue of being labeled "cults" even though there is no
systematic, research-based knowledge about any but a handful of the largest, most visible
groups. A diverse array of recruitment and socialization practices have been designated
"brainwashing" as a result of being utilized by groups that are labeled
"cults." The number of groups labeled as "cults" or as manifesting
"cultic tendencies" has continued to mount as suspicions about particular
practices are voiced.12
Furthermore, with the establishment of formal anti-cult organizations,
publishing enterprises, educational programs, psychiatric practices dedicated to servicing
former NRM members, and other forms of institutionalization, the anti-cult movement now
has a considerable stake in keeping the cult scare alive. This has become especially clear
as the major new religious movements have declined and in some cases even disappeared
(from the U.S.). Again from Bromley and Shupe:
The response of the anticult movement to the receding visibility and
size of the NRMs that sparked the initial controversy has been to expand the number of
groups considered to be cults (or to manifest cultic tendencies) and to tie new themes to
the cult controversy, such as child abuse, in order to rekindle public and media interest.13
The animus of the anti-cultists includes a long list of allegations, too
long in fact to consider in detail here. The bulk of them cluster around financial/fund
raising practices and recruitment/ socialization issues. Three allegations form the core
of the recruitment/socialization issues and are also relevant to the subsequent extension
of the cult conflict to other groups considered cult-like or manifesting cult-like
tendencies. These are the inter-related charges of practicing "thought reform,"
normally through the creation of "totalist" environments, which in turn
psychologically impair members. The inter-connected nature of these three ideas must be
stressed because the anti-cultists frequently do not draw out all the implications of
their statements about "high intensity" environments and psychological stress in
"closed groups." In less polemical environments14,
they avoid terms like "brainwashing" and "cult" but apply an analysis
that is of a piece with the standard anti-cult ideology. That ideology stands or falls on
the basis of its central tenets.
Major
Themes of the Anti-Cult Ideology
The idea of mind control is a major doctrine of the anti-cult ideology.
In the words of sociologist James Beckford: "terms like 'brainwashing,' 'deception,'
'coercive persuasion,' and 'mind control' abound in the rhetoric, and some psychiatrists
and psychologists have attempted to lend them scientific status."15 Louis West, a psychiatrist and a leading proponent of the
idea that NRMs use special influence techniques, asserts:
Cults are able to operate successfully because at any given time most of
their members are either not yet aware that they are being exploited, or cannot express
such an awareness because of uncertainty, shame, or fear.16
Several bodies of literature are heralded by West as demonstrating that
techniques of influence exist that are capable of drawing people into NRMs, of holding
them there, "even to their detriment," and "influencing their mood, thought
and behavior." This literature includes studies of coercive persuasion or thought
reform outside the NRM field, accounts by former NRM members, studies of
"cultlike" organizations and reports by those who have treated former NRM
members.17
A closer look at this literature, however, does not yield the
unequivocal conclusion drawn from it by West. According to Bromley and Shupe, there are
"strong grounds for skepticism about rhetorical brainwashing allegations."18 This skepticism is shared by a large number of
social scientists and mental health professionals. At one end of the spectrum is the
psychiatrist Thomas Szasz who asserts:
Actually, it's all quite simple. Like many dramatic terms,
"brainwashing" is a metaphor. A person can no more wash another's brain with
coercion or conversation than he can make him bleed with a cutting remark. If there is no
such thing as brainwashing, what does this metaphor stand for? It stands for one of the
most universal human experiences and events, namely for one person influencing another.19
At the other end of the spectrum are the mental coercion scholars, like
Robert Jay Lifton and Edgar Schein. These scholars believe "thought reform" can
take place in certain highly-controlled settings that include incarceration and physical
coercion, but flatly reject the term "brainwashing" (a misleading translation of
the Chinese colloquialism hsi nao, "to cleanse thoughts") and what it
implies. Lifton, whose book Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism is widely
used as a standard text of the anti-cult movement,20
warned about the danger of simplistic notions of "brainwashing"
as an all-powerful, irresistible, unfathomable, and magical method of
achieving total control over the human mind. It is of course none of these things, and
this loose usage makes the word a rallying point for fear, resentment, urges toward
submission, justification for failure, irresponsible accusation, and for a wide gamut of
emotional extremism.21
When the post-Korean War thought reform literature was revitalized in
the 1970s and applied to NRMs, this warning fell on deaf ears.
1950s Brainwashing Literature
Considerable research was conducted in the 1950s on the effects of
Communist attempts to bring about ideological conversion of Western POWs during the Korean
War and of Western prisoners and native intellectuals in China in the late 1940s and early
1950s. The most frequently quoted of this mental coercion scholarship is the book on
thought reform by Robert Jay Lifton and Coercive Persuasion by Edgar Schein and his
colleagues.22 These scholars detailed a process
of "thought reform" (Lifton's term, based on a neo-Freudian psychoanalytic
theory) or "coercive persuasion" (Schein's term, based on a socio-psychological
theory).23
The research by Lifton and Schein debunks the idea of some mysterious
Oriental process by which an unwilling person has their faculties captured, rendering him
or her a helpless robot. According to Lifton, "we have no evidence that the Chinese,
in evolving their programs, have made deliberate use of any known psychiatric techniques
or of Pavlovian [conditioning] theory -- as is so often asserted."24 Rather the re-socialization process of thought reform
utilized widely understood dynamics of peer support and pressure. Again from Lifton:
The psychological forces we encounter in thought reform are not unique
to the process; they represent an exaggerated expression of elements present in varying
degrees in all social orders.25
Both Schein and Lifton see social and psychological processes similar to
those used in Communist thought reform in such environments as college fraternities,
Catholic religious orders, recovery groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous, the military,
mass media advertising and even customary child-rearing practices. Such well understood
principles of group dynamics and inter-personal behavior can be very effective under
certain conditions but no magic is involved and they are far from fool-proof.
The essential and only unequivocal characteristic that differentiates
coercive persuasion from conventional situations of persuasion is incarceration and
physical maltreatment. For Schein, physical coercion and imprisonment are fundamental to
his very definition of coercive persuasion. So with Lifton, who argues that physical force
and captivity, combined with social influence techniques, is intrinsic to the
thought-reform process:
[I]t was the combination of external force or coercion with an appeal
to inner enthusiasm through evangelistic exhortation which gave thought reform its
emotional scope and power.26
In essence what the work of Lifton and Schein demonstrates is that under
conditions of captivity and extreme physical threat there is considerable inducement to
change one's behavior to comply with captors' wishes so that treatment might improve. They
are coerced before they are persuaded; or, in Schein's words, "coerced into allowing
themselves to be persuaded."27
Furthermore, both Lifton and Schein found that preexisting motives were
important in the influence process. Their findings in this area were important because the
cold war mentality then regnant held that Communism was such an alien ideology that only
evil mind- control devices could account for anyone adopting it or being influenced by it.
In fact, the value system and psychological makeup of individuals disposed them toward or
away from Communist ideas before the thought reform process ever began.
Finally, rather then some fool-proof method of capturing unwilling
minds, Lifton and Schein found that the Communist thought reform process was both
inefficient and, overall, quite ineffective. According to Schein,
The extent to which the Chinese succeeded in converting prisoners of war
to the Communist ideology is difficult to evaluate because of the previously mentioned
hazards of measuring ideological change and because of the impossibility of determining
the latent effects of the indoctrination. In terms of overt criteria of
conversion or ideological change, one can only conclude that, considering the effort
devoted to it, the Chinese program was a failure.28
Although behavior can be involuntarily affected and shaped by the use of
imprisonment and physical threats, involuntary thought reform was very ineffective at
inducing true conversions.
Cultic Mind Control
Claiming to be building upon the research of Lifton and Schein, a number
of psychiatrists and psychologists have extended the notion of thought reform to include
the methods of persuasion used by various new religious groups. Two of the most prominent
proponents of a mind control paradigm applied to NRMs were involved with the research on
POWs during the 1950s. Strangely, both have done a major about-face on the issue. Margaret
Singer, a psychologist and a leading anti-cult movement figure, especially in court
proceedings against NRMs,29 was involved with
Edgar Schein's research but now proposes a theory significantly at odds with his. Louis
West, the psychiatrist mentioned above, was the junior author with Farber and Harlow of a
1957 article that, following a brainwashing theory based on a conditioning model, differed
markedly from the approach taken by Lifton and Schein.30
West, however, later explicitly repudiated the brainwashing theory as a "hoax."31 Later yet, West was an aggressive participant in
the anti-cult movement32 and the senior author of
Singer's primary theoretical article on her brainwashing thesis.33
Moreover, Singer attributes her SMSPI (Systematic Manipulation of Social and Psychological
Influence) theory, which she uses extensively in court cases but has never published, to
him.34 SMSPI is a conditioning theory based on
the DDD (debility, dependency and dread) conditioning theory of Farber, Harlow and West.
As noted above, Lifton rejects a conditioning explanation for thought reform. So does
Schein, who explicitly critiques the DDD theory in his book Coercive Persuasion and
judges it circular, to lack explanatory value and to rest on assumptions, such as that
sleep deprivation heightens suggestibility, that have not been scientifically
demonstrated.35
The cultic mind control theory essentially holds that an individual's
free will can be subverted by the manipulation of certain techniques, leaving the
individual so subjected compliant and submissive to the will of the cultic brainwasher,
who implants the brainwashee with not only new attitudes and beliefs but even with a new
personality. This new "cultic" personality is not considered to represent the
individual's real self or wishes.36 He or she has
been "programmed" and in need of "deprogramming"
(counter-indoctrination) if the true self is to be restored.
Since it is admitted that NRMs do not use physical coercion to snare
reluctant young people, techniques of psychological coercion are held to exist that keep
people from walking away just as surely as physical restraint (even when much of the NRM
member's time is spent in contact with non-NRM members).37
These techniques include isolation at rural retreat centers; extremely warm and friendly
hosts ("love-bombing"); peer pressure and guilt manipulation; a non-stop round
of activities, including games, personal testimonies and repetition of slogans or
chanting; inadequate sleep and diet; and the gradual revealing of doctrine as the
individual is won over.38 West and Singer, in
their most important professional article, assert:
He wants to leave, but his car has been moved; everyone insists that he
should stay; they all love him; he yields. Sometimes he actually becomes entranced,
entering a dissociated state of altered consciousness, with subsequent amnesia for these
crucial early hours and days.39
As the weeks pass and the new member is drawn further and further into
the NRM's discipline, West and Singer's theory goes, his psychological condition may
deteriorate.
He becomes incapable of complex, rational thought; his responses to
questions become stereotyped; he finds it difficult to make even simple decisions unaided;
his judgment about events in the outside world is impaired. At the same time, there may be
such a reduction of insight that he fails to realize how much he has changed.40
Essentially, a three step process is postulated.41 In an initial stage of "stimulus control," the
individual, who is presumed to be vulnerable for various reasons in the first place,42 is incapacitated by physical deprivation (sleep,
food) and overwhelmed with various group pressures. His sense of reality and
understandings of the larger world outside are broken as he enters an altered state of
consciousness. As he succumbs to the pressures of the initial stage, he begins to identify
with his new environment, to align his behavior accordingly and open up to the group's
ideology. In this second stage of "response control," his "captors"
subject him to intense training and rehearsal of the group's beliefs and practices, all
the while closely monitoring his responses and encouraging the group identification
process. As the individual comes to make the new system of roles, responsibilities and
relationships his own, and to adopt the identity and worldview associated with them, his
personality is transformed and he becomes immersed in the group. In this third and final
stage of "normative control," the individual polices himself.
In order to undo this mind control process, most of the anti-cultists
agree that some form of "deprogramming" is necessary. This process of
counter-indoctrination essentially involves two elements: the separation of the NRM member
from the NRM environment, followed by group sessions in which an attempt is made to
dissuade the member of his NRM beliefs (the deprogramming is not considered successful
unless he does).43 The group normally consists of
a deprogrammer (commonly a non-professional, like Ted Patrick, and often an ex-NRM member44) and parents, with siblings and deprogrammed
ex-NRM members frequently present as well. The form of deprogramming made popular by
Patrick and his protege, Joe Alexander, Sr., in the 1970s,45
of kidnapping an NRM member, imprisoning them (usually in a motel room) and then
subjecting them involuntarily to an assault on the NRM, its doctrines and its leadership,
is now largely passé. Successful court actions against deprogrammers and widespread
criticism from (especially) civil libertarians cooled the enthusiasm for this coercive
method. Besides, contrary to the logic of the cultic mind control thesis, many NRM members
voluntarily walk away. By the early 1980s, a non-coercive type of deprogramming had gained
ascendancy, generally termed "exit counseling" or, focusing on the return to
"acceptable" society, "reentry counseling."46
This process contains the same focus on changing beliefs as the coercive type, although
with the significant movement of mental health professionals into this business (many of
whom are ex-NRM members), exit counseling is more likely to involve such a professional.
Just how the control of the mind of an unwilling individual actually
comes about in the first place -- much less how it is that a few days (and in some cases a
few hours) of attacking the belief system of the NRM can so readily (according to the
deprogrammers, they have a very high overall success rate) undo it and return people to
"thinking for themselves" -- is not clearly explained in the article by West and
Singer.47 Margaret Singer's SMSPI conditioning
theory, which she had been using in court for a number of years prior to her 1980 article
with West, is not even mentioned. Nor is the DDD theory on which SMSPI is based. Rather
the elements of the political indoctrination process outlined by Schein in Coercive
Persuasion are summarized with the statement that NRMs use "such drastic
techniques to control and exploit" members.48
Totalist Environments
This "explanation" is widely followed in the anti-cult
movement. The idea is that cultic mind control is accomplished through the creation of
"totalist" environments and the systematic manipulation of the psychological
elements of this environment. Although West and Singer use Schein's formulation, Robert
Jay Lifton's description of "ideological totalism," which has many elements in
common with Schein's, is much more widely employed within the movement.49 Ironically, the primary sources for the cultic mind control
thesis are books, Schein's Coercive Persuasion and Lifton's Thought Reform,
whose conclusions, as argued above, do not support this thesis. The value of Lifton's book
for the anti-cultists, though, is not for its research conclusions -- as is claimed -- but
for Chapter 22, Lifton's delineation of the totalist environment, the only part of the
book they actually use.
Borrowing a concept from the Freudian ego-psychologist Erik Erikson,
Lifton defines "totalism" as an "all-or-nothing emotional alignment"
by an individual, the capacity for which is probably a product of human childhood itself,
and "ideological totalism" is the "coming together of immoderate ideology
with equally immoderate individual character traits -- an extremist meeting ground between
people and ideas."50 On the basis of his
study of thought reform in Communist China, Lifton distills out features which he regards
as common to all expressions of ideological totalism. From these he suggests a set of
criteria, eight psychological themes, against which any environment can be judged.
Each criteria is presented in its extreme form, as Lifton argues was present in certain
re-education environments in China in the late 1940s to early 1950s, and the psychological
damage to the individual so exposed is briefly explored. His eight themes of the totalist
environment are:
1. Milieu Control. The control of human communication is the most
basic feature of the thought reform environment and positively essential to its success.
Although never absolute, the aim of this milieu control is to "establish domain over
not only the individual's communication with the outside (all that he sees and hears,
reads and writes, experiences, and expresses), but also -- in its penetration of his inner
life -- over what we may speak of as his communication with himself" (p. 420). The
most basic psychological damage is the disruption of balance between self and outside
world. The individual is pressured toward a personal closure, "his strivings toward
new information, independent judgment, and self-expression" (p. 421) are thwarted.
2. Mystical Manipulation. After milieu control comes extensive
personal manipulation of the environment by the "chosen" leaders in order to
provoke patterns of behavior and emotion that appear to be spontaneous but in fact are
devices for maintaining power and creating a "mystical aura around the manipulating
institutions -- the party, the government, the organization" (p. 422). The
psychological response of the individual to this manipulation revolves around the
trust-mistrust polarity (see the discussion of Erikson below), but whatever his response
he is "deprived of the opportunity to exercise his capacities for self-expression and
independent action" (p. 423).
3. The Demand for Purity. In the thought reform environment, the
ideological totalists divide the world into the pure and the impure, into the absolutely
good and the absolutely evil and then declare all-out war on the impure -- any idea,
feeling or action that doesn't square with the totalist ideology. In so doing they create
a narrow world of guilt and shame and an ethos of continuous reform. The guilt and shame
are used as "emotional levers" for control and manipulation. While individuals
vary greatly in their susceptibility to guilt and shame, the tendency is to apply the
"totalist polarization of good and evil to . . . judgments of [their] own
character" (p. 425), projecting their guilt and impurities on outside influences. The
more guilt he feels the more these outside influences are hated and the more threatening
they seem.
4. The Cult of Confession. The vulnerabilities of guilt and shame
and the need to express them are exploited at totalist hands by the demand that "one
confess to crimes one has not committed, to sinfulness that is artificially induced, in
the name of a cure that is arbitrarily imposed" (p. 425). The totalist confession is
a means of personal purification, of symbolic self-surrender and of maintaining an ethos
of total exposure of the individual. While the cult of confession may have an initial
effect of drawing the confessors together and providing emotional catharsis, it leads to
an increase and intensification of personal secrets rather than to an elimination of them.
Furthermore, it makes it "virtually impossible to attain a reasonable balance between
worth and humility" (p. 427), the confessor oscillates between penitent and judge.
5. The "Sacred Science". The totalist ideology is held
out as an ultimate science combined with an absolute body of moral principles, a truth
"for all men at all times" (p. 428). The totalists reinforce their authority
with this science of ideas, a sacred dogma which cannot be questioned and which demands
reverence for itself and for those who created and teach it. The totalist sacred science
initially provides an intense feeling of truth, but, in the name of science, hampers the
search for truth. It fosters personal closure, and represents pressure toward
"avoiding, rather than grappling with, the kinds of knowledge and experience
necessary for genuine self-expression and for creative development" (p. 429).
6. Loading the Language. The certitudes of the sacred science are
distilled down by the totalists into "thought-terminating cliches," into
"brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily
expressed. These become the start and finish of any ideological analysis" (p. 429).
For the individual, this all-encompassing jargon is profoundly constricting, "his
capacities for thinking and feeling are immensely narrowed" (p. 430). His imagination
may even tend to atrophy over time from disuse.
7. Doctrine Over Person. The doctrine of the sacred science is
primary for the totalist and "character and identity [must] be reshaped, not in
accordance with one's special nature or potentialities, but rather to fit the rigid
contours of the doctrinal mold" (p. 431). Human experience is subordinated to the
claims of doctrine, which is seen as ultimately more true, more valid and more real. The
individual is caught between the poles of sincerity and insincerity, with sincerity
defined in terms of doctrinal compliance and deviation in terms of personal
"problems." How much relevance the doctrine may have for the individual will
vary, but even for the convinced it may simply be a temporary "delusion of
wholeness" (Erikson's term).
8. The Dispensing of Existence. For the totalist there is but one
path to true existence: "totalists thus feel themselves compelled to destroy all
possibilities of false existence as a means of furthering the great plan of true existence
to which they are committed" (p. 434). A clear line divides those who have a right to
exist and those who don't; thought reform is the one means by which those who don't can
cross over the line to existence. Even where physical abuse is absent, the fear of
extinction is nonetheless instilled and it is powerful indeed. The individual is caught in
a profound emotional conflict, generally leading to a conversion experience and some
degree of personal identification with the totalist group.
Having outlined his model, Lifton then utilizes it to differentiate
between totalist environments of thought reform and other environments involving influence
and "re-education," such as education, psychotherapy and self-actualization,
processes that are also aimed at producing changes in values and beliefs. As noted
earlier, the key distinguishing characteristic is the absence of physical restraint.
Except when physical coercion is used, alternative life choices are always available
outside the world of the "correct doctrine." To repeat, Lifton's criteria do not
explain how an individual can be psychologically held against his will and
brainwashed to accept ideas that would otherwise be repugnant to him. They represent
Lifton's psychological theory, described in psychoanalytic terms and in a
psychoanalytic framework, of the environmental dynamics by which a certain type of
extremist person comes together with an extremist ideology. Which is what Lifton believes
was taking place in China in settings such as the revolutionary colleges during the late
1940s and early 1950s, based on interviews with a heavily biased sample (those who
escaped) of only 40 people (25 Westerners and 15 Chinese intellectuals).
While the concept of totalism will be considered in greater detail
below, it might be noted here that Lifton goes on in later chapters to explore thought
reform's "close relationship to religion." He sees two major totalist tendencies
in religion, the "theocratic search for heresy" (e.g. the Inquisition) and
"revitalizing enthusiasm" (a la Ronald Knox), as well as various general
parallels between Christian faith and Communist ideology -- a deity, faith, stress on
humility, spirit of sacrifice, and so on. Given this close relationship, he asks:
"how can we distinguish totalist practice within religious institutions from more
balanced forms of spirituality?"51 His
answer betrays his biases. First, he favorably quotes an Indian philosopher that the
specific danger is organizing tendencies within religion: "When religion becomes
organized, man ceases to be free."52 Second,
good religious environments are those which
stress man's worth and his possibilities as well as his limitation; his
capacity to change as well as the difficulties inherent in bringing about such change; and
faith and commitment without the need for either self-negation or condemnation of
nonbelievers. These attitudes leave room for emotional and intellectual growth as opposed
to static doctrinal repetitions, and a broadened sensitivity to the world rather than a
retreat into religious embeddedness.53
By "religious embeddedness," he means a retreat into
"doctrinal and organizational exclusiveness, and into all-or-nothing emotional
patterns."54 Third, noting that man is
unlikely to give up his need for the awe and devotion of religious experience, he observes
happily that the role of organized religion is declining anyway. The emotion required for
inquisitions is now directed to science and politics; our watchful eye should be turned in
those directions.55
Anti-Cult
Reinterpretations
The evidence for the indictment that NRMs create Liftonesque totalist
environments by which they snare, control and impair vulnerable young people is
overwhelmingly based on clinical work with ex-members of NRMs, a large majority of whom
have been subjected to the ideological reinterpretations of deprogramming. Margaret
Singer, for example, in an article in Psychology Today notes that some 75 percent
of those attending her discussion groups had "left the cults not entirely on their
own volition . . . . Most of our group had seen deprogrammers as they left their
sects."56 This clinical work is seldom
balanced by observation of active NRM members in their everyday life settings.57 Hence, although a large number of patients are
seen,58 there is a strong tendency for findings
to be distorted in the direction of therapist- or deprogrammer-induced reinterpretations.
As Singer herself notes:
our group members said they met young ex-cultists like themselves [in
deprogramming], who described their own disaffection, provided political and economic
information they had been unaware of about cult activities, and described the behavioral
effects to be expected from the practices they had undergone.59
Coupled with the fact that therapy is inherently biased in favor of
interpretations of past events that are acceptable to the client and the client's family,
the views of ex-members gathered under these circumstances do not offer reliable
conclusions.
Bryan Wilson, the British sociologist of religion, notes the importance
of outsiders in the reconstruction of past NRM experience:
It is widely asserted, particularly by the relatives of converts, that
those who have undergone a conversion experience have in some way been "got at,"
have been misled, duped, taken advantage of, or have, in contemporary parlance, even been
"brainwashed." Converts who later apostacize regularly explain their conversion
in terms either of diminished personal responsibility ("they came when I was
depressed"; "under strain"; "experiencing difficulties") or of
deception, exploitation, and manipulation. This is the limited repertoire of motives which
allow the apostate to claim his own self-esteem and to reclaim his reputation with others.
The press, the anti-cult organizations, and the de-programmers virtually rehearse
reclaimed converts in these reinterpretations of their earlier religious choice.60
There is a body of evidence to support Wilson's point that allegations
of mind control tend to come from individuals who have been involved in deprogramming.
Trudy Solomon, a social psychologist who studied former members of the Unification Church
within a reference group theory model, found the following concerning ex-members'
understanding of their experience:
Results of the investigation into the relationship between
conceptualization and contact tended to support also the thesis that contact with the
anticult movement influences the degree to which one relies on explanations of
brainwashing and mind control to account for attraction to and membership in the church. .
. .
Because the majority of evidence concerning the use of brainwashing and
mind control within the church comes either from ex-members who have been deprogrammed
and/or rehabilitated or from individuals involved in the anticult movement, these data
begin to provide an explanation for how ex-members come to hold such notions, and how they
in turn are perpetuated.61
James Lewis, in a study similar to Solomon's, found the same high
correlation between negative, cult-stereotypical attitudes and exposure to anti-cult
counseling. He also observes how the anti-cult movement uses the subset of former members
who have been deprogrammed with anti-cult ideology to self-generate evidence for that same
ideology. Through this circular process, the anti-cult movement "proves" its
accusations. These same deprogrammees serve as samples for "pseudo-empirical
studies" that are designed to establish that "cult" brainwashing induces
psychological problems.62
Other Mental Health
Research
Although you wouldn't know it from reading the works of Singer, West and
other mental health professionals who apply a mind control model to new religious groups,
there is another body of mental health research on NRMs that reaches very different
conclusions. A number of psychologists and psychiatrists, generally rejecting the
application of a "medical model" (see below) to NRMs, found no psychological
impairment of NRM members in their research and in some cases argued for positive
benefits.63 This research was primarily conducted
with ongoing members of NRMs, or when based on clinical work with ex-members was
supplemented with research instruments utilized to gather active member profiles as well.
Overall, this literature presents a picture of NRM membership on the whole free of
pathology or incapacity, with a very mixed pattern of personal and emotional experiences
for individuals. The process of affiliation and disaffiliation with these groups,
according to this body of research, can be readily understood in terms of conventional
social psychological findings on group dynamics, small groups' sensitivity training
techniques and attitude change.64
While the psychiatric and psychological literature is not unanimous,
Shupe, Bromley and Oliver reached the following conclusion after an extensive review of
the research:
we conclude . . . that the vast bulk of scientific findings -- whatever
clinical, field observation or survey methodologies used -- never supported the ACM
[anti-cult movement] perspective that most "cult" members were duped or
psychologically shanghaied into membership, coercively maintained in subservience as
slaves or impaired in any meaningful way through their membership.65
The relevant professional organizations have taken firm stands on the
scientific status of Margaret Singer's brainwashing theory.66
At the request of Singer and some of her colleagues, the American Psychological
Association (APA) formed a task force to produce a report on "Deception and Indirect
Techniques of Persuasion and Control." Singer was the senior author of the report
that was submitted in 1987 for evaluation to the APA's Board for Social and Ethical
Responsibility (BSERP). BSERP, in turn, sent it to four reviewers for anonymous peer
review. Their unanimous opinion, according to a 1987 memo from BSERP, was that the report
had "significant deficiencies" and "[i]n general . . . lacks the scientific
rigor and evenhanded critical approach necessary for APA imprimatur."67 The APA therefore rejected the report and ordered the
committee not to distribute or publicize it without indicating that the report had been
rejected by the APA on scientific grounds. The Society for the Scientific Study of
Religion, meanwhile, submitted an amicus curiae brief in an NRM appeal before the
California Court of Appeal. The brief argued vigorously that Margaret Singer's testimony
should have been disallowed by the trial court because of its unscientific nature.68
The Social Functions
of Mind Control Allegations
If the concept of cultic mind control lacks scientific value,
sociologists have observed that it does serve several important functions for the
anti-cultists and for apostate former members.69
First, it allows for the disclaimer from the anti-cultists that they are not concerned
with belief (inviolable under the First Amendment) but only with the way these beliefs
have been inculcated.70 In asserting that NRMs
utilize mind control, the anti-cultists usually go out of their way to distinguish between
"authentic" conversion and the sort of thing that joining an NRM involves. In
this view, to oppose "cults," "cult-like" groups or groups manifesting
"cult-like tendencies" is not to oppose religion but rather to separate the
bogus from the authentic in matters religious. They make the "cult" out to be an
entirely different phenomena, so unlike conventional religious groups that making
comparisons is spurious. Differentiating between authentic and bogus groups is simply a
matter of going through a checklist of psychological and sociological traits. Lifton's
Chapter 22 is so useful precisely because it purports to present criteria which can be
used to psychologically judge any social environment seemingly without judging the
personal beliefs that gave rise to or sustain that environment -- a feat contradicted
among other ways by the deprogramming solution: an intense effort to get an NRM member to
recant his or her beliefs.
The fact is that the socialization methods used by Catholic religious
institutes, many other religious communities, movements and sects, military academies, the
Marine Corps and others can be every bit as intensive as, or more so, than those of NRMs.71 They, like a number of the NRMs (though by no
means all), are organized communally.72 In the
case of the Marines, this organization is purely for instrumental purposes. In many other
cases, Catholic religious institutes among them,73
communal organization for the sake of a communal purpose, is explicitly chosen as a way of
life. These forms of community are sociologically termed "intentional
communities." Very briefly, an intentional community is, according to the sociologist
Patricia Wittberg, "a group of persons living together on a more or less permanent
basis, who voluntarily surrender control over some choices which are normally considered
private for the sake of establishing a whole new way of life."74 In other words, in the interest of living a life that makes
certain goals primary -- evangelism, serving the poor, prayer, et al. -- members of an
intentional community voluntarily give up control over such personal choices as what work
they will do, whether they will marry, where they will live, how they use their leisure
time and dispose of their income, and so on. The community, in turn, provides for its
members materially and emotionally. Intentional communities may also be "total
institutions," which means that the members have very little contact with persons or
ideas from the "outside world." This isolation is, in Wittberg's words,
"especially necessary to the extent that the community's way of life is based
on values or beliefs which are different from the mainstream of the society in which they
are located".75
The fact of the similarity between NRMs and other intentional
communities is important. The new religious movements are not attacked because they are
using some unique, exotic and destructive methods to entrap, master and psychologically
injure unsuspecting young people; numerous other groups, many considered fully
conventional and nonthreatening, operate on the basis of the same intentional community
dynamics.76 Rather, NRMs are singled out for
opprobrium because they have come into conflict with major institutions in our society,
such as the family, other religious groups,77 and
the mental health profession (see below), and because they are, in general, socially
unpopular.
The sources of tension with conventional society can be extensive.
Religious practices, NRM or otherwise, especially when aggressively canvassed, arouse
opposition when they challenge the dominant values and institutional order of society. The
very fact that the NRMs' moral assumptions, for example, differ from those of society at
large is a source of tension. Many NRMs (and, of course, many other religious groups)
adopt and advocate rigorous conformity to traditional moral ideals, ideals, which by
current societal standards, are ascetic. "[T]hey choose," in the words of
sociologist Bryan Wilson, "to take up decisive moral positions which differ from the
relaxed indifferentism of the wider society."78
These moral positions are a challenge to conventional social assumptions and a more
explicit threat to the young, because organized and overt, than the "amorphous,
unorganized subcultures of easy sex, drink, drugs, and petty crime."79
The seriousness and depth of commitment which characterizes many NRM
members is another source of fear and tension. Dean Kelly of the National Council of
Churches observes:
It is precisely because such groups [NRMs] believe that religion is
serious business, that it matters for one's eternal salvation what one believes and does
in this life, that they transmit to the less fervent public an elemental quality that is
both disconcerting and frightening.80
Two other sources of tension that might be mentioned are sex roles,
which are now widely regarded in American society as backward, demeaning and enslaving,
especially of women; and child rearing practices, which are also in flux.81 Bryan Wilson notes:
"In a youth-oriented society, in which attitudes to children have
become progressively more positive, and child-rearing ideologies increasingly permissive,
the maintenance by sectarian families of more stringent discipline and of attitudes to
children easily labelled 'Victorian', becomes a subject of vociferous complaint"82
Complaints lodged against religious groups for their approach to sex
roles and child rearing practices have been an important element in the extension of the
anti-cult movement's focus beyond NRMs.
The mind control allegation likewise allows the anti-cultists, parents
and other concerned parties to deny that unpopular beliefs have been freely chosen. For
Margaret Singer, for instance, her interest in the "new cults" from the
beginning (and before she had actually studied any of them) was in trying to explain how
it is that young people could exchange a good worldview for a bad one.
I became particularly interested in the new cults as they sprang up
because it was an era in which many liberal political advances had been achieved;
scientific reasoning had come to the forefront of our thinking and rationalism had become
widely accepted. Yet, I saw many young people turning to extremely authoritarian social
groups, dropping the world of science, liberalism and rationalism and entering a world of
magic and primitive thinking.83
For parents, mind control explanations not only served to make sense of
the bewildering changes that came over their children as they were rapidly resocialized
within the NRM context, but also functioned to suave the wound created by the sudden
rejection of parental goals, authority and faith. Bromley and Shupe note some sociological
features of modern family life that shed light on the intensity of parental reaction to
their childrens' choice of NRM membership:
Among the remaining functions of the contemporary American family,
preparation of offspring for occupational and domestic careers are central. Mobility
opportunities for offspring are the linchpin in family financial planning, residential
location, and career management. . . . Of course, parental feelings of efficacy and family
prestige also are involved in the successful negotiation of childrearing objectives.
Given the enormous investment families have in the outcome of
socializing sons and daughters for career and family formation and the tensions inherent
in that process, it is not surprising that decisions affecting future mobility
opportunities [children joining NRMs and dropping domestic and occupational plans] are of
the greatest consequence to parents.84
While familial response was not uniform, the most common response was
anger and urgency. In many cases, brainwashing allegations met a parental felt need in the
face of apparent childrearing failure and provided a rationale for taking drastic steps --
deprogramming -- to amend the situation. As might be expected, the family conflict doubled
back on NRMs in the form of an accusation that they were splitting families. Yet more
evidence that these groups were illegitimate.
In a third and similar way, the brainwashing theory provides a rationale
by which apostate NRM members can regain their self-esteem and retake their place in
conventional society after being a member of a stigmatized group. If he or she has been
brainwashed, then the apostate is absolved of responsibility for their actions while a
member of the NRM. The organization and (perhaps) its leader are evil, the individual
members (and sometimes the leaders) are victims.85
As observed above, much of the "evidence" for cultic mind
control originates with the atrocity stories of former members. These stories, as passed
along by the press and in personal testimony books and articles, were very persuasive to
the general public. The sociologists Shupe and Bromley note:
To much of the public, parents and former members of the new religions
had no reason to construct such stories aside from a desire to warn others of the dangers
of cults. As a result, these stories gained widespread credibility and were the most
significant factor in the symbolic degradation of the new religions.86
Atrocity tales are a caricature of the group and fail to convey the
sense of purpose, order, commitment and integration that is involved in many such groups
and that was the thing that attracted the former member in the first place. For the NRM
such stories are by their very nature and force very difficult to refute.87 Their subjective nature makes them invulnerable to
falsification and "facts" that appear to sustain the allegation are easy to
manufacture. For the apostate, downplaying positive elements is essential for creating the
impression that the group has little or nothing positive to offer and that a mysterious
process of influence entrapped them rather than a personal decision to join a group that
offered commitment, community and an integrated worldview.88
Bromley and Shupe observe:
The apostate plays a significant role in discrediting a deviant group
and in authorizing social control measures. He or she can reveal the group's inner
workings and secrets in such a way as to confirm suspicions and allegations about it,
condemn the group with a knowledge and certainty no outsider could muster, and reaffirm
the values of conventional society by voluntarily and publicly confessing the
"error" of his or her ways.
Apostates contribute substantially to the larger-than-life quality of
atrocity tales. Having flouted the dominant value system, apostates can hardly expect to
regain acceptance in conventional society after merely losing interest in the deviant
group. It is incumbent upon them to demonstrate convincingly that their reaffirmation of
the dominant values is genuine, that they share with others negative sentiments toward the
group, and that their former commitment was false witnessing.89
Moreover,
Along with formulating an acceptable public confession the apostate is
likely to feel some need to account for his own conduct. Others may ask, if the group is
as transparently evil as he now contends, why did he espouse its cause in the first place?
In the process of trying to explain his own seduction and to confirm the worst fears about
the group, the apostate is likely to paint a caricature of the group that is shaped more
by his current role as apostate than by his actual experience in the group.90
In a study of atrocity stories by Bromley, Shupe and Ventimiglia, the
most common atrocity reported was the psychological violation of personal freedom and
autonomy. This violation took many forms, including indoctrination technics that created
"childlike dependence" and imposed guilt and rigorous doctrinal and moral
standards, which when internalized enforce conformity; diversions of youthful energy away
from productive channels (like conventional careers); and "forbidding culturally
accepted heterosexual contact and thereby stifling normal human development."91
Significantly, such reinterpretations can be held in spite of contrary
personal experience within the group. Based on her study of former Unification Church
members, Trudy Solomon writes:
while most ex-members were highly negative when questioned about their
attitudes toward the Unification church in general, they were far more positive about
their experiences as a church member.92
These observations cast doubt on assertions about psychological damage
to NRM members, even to those who tell the most lurid atrocity stories. The claimed
psychological damage often turns out to be nothing more than expressions of how the
communal NRM differs from conventional society. In this view, the conventional norms are
the standard of psychological health, substantive deviations by definition foster neurotic
imbalances. Although many ex-NRM members make use of psychological counseling, it is
important to realize that there is a ready reserve of trained and untrained people anxious
to be of assistance to members upon exit. Exit services are not so much sought out as
freely given.
Enlisting the medical profession as an ally -- and an exceedingly
prestigious one -- is yet another function of applying a mind control model to new
religious movements. Defining involvement with an NRM as an induced mental incapacity
represents the "medicalization" of the NRM phenomenon.93
Medicalization refers to a process of "defining behavior as a medical problem or
illness and mandating or licensing the medical profession to provide some form of
treatment for it,"94 and is part of a larger
trend whereby the "belief system underlying medical science [is being] applied to
more and more social problems."95 These
problems include alcoholism, drug addiction, violent conduct and a host of other
compulsive behaviors.96
Medicalizing such behaviors shifts the social control of them from
traditional institutions, especially the churches, to therapists. The mental health
professionals define the illness, diagnosis its symptoms, order the treatment and
administer the cure. Once medicalized, other definitions of the condition, such as sin or
crime, are downgraded as are other perspectives on treatment.97
While approaching compulsive behaviors as medical syndromes has some therapeutic
advantages for the individual seeking treatment (medical explanations are acceptable to
almost everyone living in modern societies), the "cure" is oddly out of sync
with the "illness." The psychiatrist Marc Galanter asks the obvious: if
alcoholism is a disease,
one reflecting both compulsive behavior and physical incapacity . . .
how can social influence, through a self-help fellowship, so dramatically change this
syndrome? . . . the mutual support by members of Alcoholics Anonymous serves to engage
alcoholics and promote their acceptance of the group's values. The combination of intense
social cohesiveness and strongly held, shared belief (in abstinence, in this case) allows
for striking behavioral change.98
Ironically, in the case of the brainwashing theory, the very group
dynamics that effect the condition -- behavior modification through attitude manipulation
-- are in turn often utilized for the "cure." All of this reiterates points made
above: the socialization techniques utilized by NRMs are not qualitatively different from
those used by other, conventional, communal institutions; the bottom line in the NRM
controversy is belief -- the NRMs have socially unpopular beliefs.
Those who have championed the medicalization of NRM socialization --
e.g. Margaret Singer, Louis West, John Clark, Richard Delgado -- are also those who have
insisted that a clear line can be drawn between the behavior of deviant and legitimate
religious groups. As argued above, no such line can be drawn, and, as observed above, the
dimensions and boundaries of the "cult problem" have been continually expanding.
This expansion is a result of the anti-cult groups' shifting focus -- Liftonesque
checklist in hand -- as the older NRMs decline but it is also an effect of medicalization.
If the behaviors that accompany certain religious beliefs -- e.g. restricting (culturally
accepted) teenage dating because of (culturally unaccepted) views about the
age-appropriateness of such contact -- are seen as psychologically damaging, then every
group that holds such beliefs and practices is incapacitating its members, even single
families.99
A new book, Toxic Faith,100
by recovery entrepreneur101 and evangelical
Christian Stephen Arterburn, works the medicalization argument out in this logical
direction. Arterburn, working entirely within a recovery framework and not concerned with
First Amendment issues, shows how transparently about beliefs the whole issue is.
"Toxic faith," according to Arterburn, "is a destructive and dangerous
relationship with a religion that allows the religion, not the relationship with God, to
control a person's life." "It is a defective faith with an incomplete or tainted
view of God. It is abusive and manipulative and can become addictive" (p. 31).
Certain religious beliefs -- this is a book of lists; Arterburn lists 21 such beliefs (pp.
47-98) -- can form the basis for "toxic faith practices" that are as
"addictive as heroin" (p. 32). These practices are developed within a
"toxic faith system" -- Arterburn lists 10 characteristics (pp. 159-189) and 10
rules (pp. 243-263) of such a system -- which can be a family, a church, a religion (such
as an NRM) or simply the teachings of a minister or televangelist (p. 191), and which
includes characteristic roles: persecutor (manipulates religious beliefs to victimize
others), coconspirator (the ultimate team player, actively protects the persecutor),
enabler (goes along with group consensus, passively protects the persecutor), victim
(sacrifices personal needs and desires for the system, used by the persecutor), outcast
(interprets reality for himself, is not a religious addict, resists the persecutor) (pp.
191-241).
What is of interest in this system here is the definition of certain
religious beliefs and practices as an addiction and the consequent treatment that is
required to overcome the addiction. Arterburn defines "toxic beliefs" as an
addiction because "there are steps to fight addiction" (p. 102).
"Addiction's biggest benefit is in its invitation to stop the denial, accept the full
dimension of the problem, and join others in the recovery process" (p. 103). The
addiction label is functionally useful because it identifies a "condition" with
"symptoms" that a "treatment" can be specified for. In other words,
medicalizing certain religious beliefs and practices legitimates and mandates a
professional treatment that attempts to bring about an ideological change, in Arterburn's
case toward the regaining of a "pure faith" (p. 266) -- with what is
"pure" and "toxic" defined according to Arterburn's theology.
Not surprisingly -- since "religious addiction" concerns a
cure not an empirical malady -- "when people are admitted" to Arterburn's
treatment centers, "they rarely identify their problems as religious addiction"
(p. 192). Rather they come with some other problem and the treatment staff --
"recovery professionals" -- finds the toxic faith and religious addiction below
the "presenting problems." Getting the patient to accept the diagnosis --
"breaking through denial" -- is therefore the first step to treating it. The
staff then sets about, using group dynamics, "confronting toxic thoughts and
replacing them with thoughts based in reality" (p. 271). The replacement part of the
process is an effort to "reeducate" the patient, who is "saturated"
with new information, so that a "whole new value system is evolved"; a
"naive believer" becomes a "questioning seeker," who is no longer
"susceptible to manipulation" in the way that he was before (pp. 282-283). Next,
it is essential (p. 284) that the patient join a support group, where the
reeducation process continues in a therapeutic environment, where the new beliefs are
legitimated within a new social reference group and where protection is provided against
falling back into the addiction or developing a new one (p. 284). According to Arterburn:
There is great hope for the recovering religious addict. The hope comes
in developing a new faith [17 characteristics of healthy faith are provided in the last
chapter, pp. 293-314], pure and free of the poison of addiction. Hope does not just spring
forth on its own, however. It must be cultivated through a recovery program that
encompasses every area of the addict's life and includes the addict's family. The
recovering addict must learn to think differently, relate differently, and find different
people and places for support and fun. When it all comes together, the recovering addict
comes closer to God (p. 291).
Through recovery, then, the toxic faith, which "replaced God with
dependency on rules, religion, false hopes, and magical thinking" (p. 293), is
detoxified. Medicalizing religious beliefs and practices considered false according to the
therapist's theology (a glimpse of Lifton's and Singer's was seen earlier) provides the
rationale for changing those beliefs in therapist-induced directions. Whether the
"toxic" beliefs originate in the family, the local Christian church or a flying
saucer cult makes no difference. They are false, they must have been accepted under less
than fully free circumstances and they must be therapeutically changed within a new social
group.
III. Assumptions About the Individual and
Society
A number of assumptions, rarely made explicit, about the individual and
society underlay the anti-cult ideology, mind control theory and medicalization of belief.
The discussion above considered the social conflict between NRMs and certain important
social institutions and society at large. A number of specific sources of tension were
also identified. What remains is to draw out more clearly some of the fundamental
assumptions about the person and the person and society that frame the societal reaction
to NRMs and the extension of that reaction beyond NRMs to other religious groups. To
begin, a brief consideration of how psychological models "work"102 will be helpful for examining the oft overlooked (or
denied) social contextuality of psychological explanations and the difference between a
social and an individualistic understanding of the self.
Psychological Models
Psychological models, such as Freud's psychoanalytic theory, are
assembled for the purpose of self-explanation (what can first be understood, it is
believed, following the scientific model, can then be changed or at least improved103). Like all theories, they are useful to the
degree that they are an empirical description of the reality being studied. Psychological
"reality," however, is not itself some empirical "givenness," a
reality that can be subjected to a scientific procedure, but the "way in which human
beings in a specific situation subjectively experience themselves."104 In other words, a psychological model is a more or less
accurate description of how people at a given time and place are subjectively experiencing
themselves. Of course, how they are experiencing themselves is very much tied up with the
categories by which they interpret their experience. While psychological models are built
upon psychological "reality," they in turn produce psychological
"reality" by acting back on the reality to shape the subjective experience. In
the words of the sociologist Peter Berger, "psychological models operate in society
as self-fulling prophecies."105
An individual, for example, experiences significant mood swings which he
does not understand and for which no physiological explanation is forthcoming. His
psychoanalyst, whose theory places great emphasis on the importance of childhood in human
biography, explores and identifies various childhood traumas and prescribes extensive
analysis of these experiences. Claiming a special faculty for distinguishing between
reality and illusion,106 the goal of the
therapist's analysis is to help the individual "to get in touch with reality."
Having generally regarded his childhood as happy and pretty much normal and unexceptional,
the patient now sees his childhood in a new light, punctuated with anxiety, rejections,
unresolved conflicts, deflated dreams. In recollecting emotional experiences in this new
light, the patient's perception of himself, his parents and other significant individuals
in his life -- e.g. teachers -- is also, perhaps radically, affected. As he comes to grip
with this "reality," his relationships and his emotional life are transformed in
new directions. His subjective experience of himself has been changed by the application
of a psychological model.
The Social Genesis of the Self
While psychological models affect psychological reality even as they
seek to describe it, more fundamentally psychological realities are defined and shaped by
social realities. The "self" arises in the process of social experience and
activity; it is socially generated. In the theory of the philosopher George Herbert Mead,
the individual experiences himself as a subject only by first experiencing himself as an
object.
The individual . . . enters his own experience as a self or individual,
not directly or immediately, not by becoming a subject to himself, but only in so far as
he first becomes an object to himself just as other individuals are objects to him or in
his experience; and he becomes an object to himself only by taking the attitudes of other
individuals toward himself within a social environment or context of experience and
behavior in which both he and they are involved.107
Language is the primary vehicle by which an individual may become an
object to himself. Through speech (symbolic communication of all kinds) -- and other
processes such as play and games -- the individual arouses a response in others, which in
turn arouses a response in the speaker. By affecting others, he affects himself and in so
doing he generates a "self," he becomes "self conscious." Through this
process, the individual comes to understand and organize the "particular attitudes of
other individuals toward himself and toward one another in the specific social acts in
which he participates with them."108 As
the attitudes of others are experienced through communication, the individual begins to
communicate with himself. A "self" in the reflexive sense begins to take shape.109
In a second stage of the social genesis of the self, to the particular
attitudes of others, an understanding and organization of the whole range of social
attitudes of the social group to which he belongs, is added. The particular attitudes of
others are generalized and incorporated within his organized understanding of social
behavior. These social attitudes are then brought, as were the particular attitudes of
others earlier, within the constitution of his self. An individual becomes a fully
developed "self" by "becoming an individual reflection of the general
systematic pattern of social or group behavior in which [he] and the others are all
involved."110 This internalization of the
social pattern and attitudes of the group -- an always ongoing process of social give and
take -- shapes the behavior and attitudes of the individual and is the means by which
"social control" of the most fundamental kind is exercised by the social group.
How an individual subjectively experiences himself is overwhelmingly defined and molded by
this process of identity production and confirmation.111
While each individual self expresses or reflects the general behavior
pattern of the social group, it does so from its own unique and particular standpoint. The
theory of the social nature and origin of the self is not inconsistent with individuality
but recognizes wide individual differences and variations. The individual is not the
passive recipient of a personality (as in individualist theories). Rather, the individual
actively reacts to the relational pattern of his society and the social assumptions that
underlie it. In acting back on society, he changes it. Generally these changes are too
minute to identify, but in the case of certain people can be quite pronounced -- Marx,
Freud, Einstein, for instance. Everyone is capable of not only affirming social convention
but of "asocial" behavior and of harboring "asocial" attitudes -- i.e.
behavior and attitudes inconsistent with convention -- because socialization is never
total and never complete. The plausibility of social arrangements can be questioned --
mentally and/or behaviorally -- and frequently are. When that plausibility is undermined,
change takes place.112 Attitudes toward
homosexual behavior is a stark example of a profound and widespread change in social
assumptions. What was not so long ago viewed as abnormal, family threatening and immoral
is now widely perceived in quite a different light. The earlier conventional view is now
unconventional. There has even been an attempt to "medicalize" the earlier view
-- homophobia -- so as to further enhance the plausibility of the new.113
While the theory of the social genesis of the self is not inconsistent
with individuality, or, for that matter, with the existence of private or
"subjective" experience, it does conflict with individualistic understandings of
the self. A social theory, in Mead's terms, "assumes a social process or social order
as the logical and biological precondition of the appearance of the selves of the
individual [persons] involved in that process or belonging to that order."114 An individualistic theory, by contrast,
assumes individual selves as the logical and biological precondition of the social process
or order. The anti-cult ideology is constructed on an individualistic theory of the self.
Anti-Cult
Assumptions About the Self
At the heart of the social tension over membership in new religious
movements and, by extension, other groups manifesting "cult-like" tendencies, is
the question of where to draw the boundary line between normality and abnormality.115 A dichotomy runs through the discussion which
contrasts individuals who "think for themselves" with individuals who
uncritically accept the views of another, who allow someone else to "think" for
them. There is the "autonomous, free agent" on the one hand, and the
"victim of a controlling milieu" on the other. Undergirding this dichotomy is a
major presupposition concerning the autonomy of the person and the ideal of
self-development.
The "true" self is seen to exist in the individual apart from,
even regardless of, the social groups to which one belongs. The ideal state for this
abstracted-from-society individual is autonomy or self-direction, a state which requires
considerable personal privacy, that space wherein the individual (seemingly) holds social
expectations and demands at arm's length. Any form of communal life which does not respect
the legitimate limit (always culturally defined and ever shifting) on intrusion into
private affairs, even if voluntarily chosen, is a violation of the self and a hindrance to
the self development needed to reach full personhood. Communal activity which submerges
the individual in the group hinders maturation and holds persons in, or causes them to
regress to, a child-like condition. This condition does not represent the individual's
"true" self, because the true self is only operative when they are acting
autonomously from the social group. Under other circumstances, they are "not
themselves."
The normal person, then, will resist pressures toward collective thought
and will stand apart from the social group. He is a balance, in James Beckford's words, of
"egoism and communalism." He will seek to defend his privacy and autonomy
against the demands of culture and his social community. The abnormal person, on the other
hand, has never developed or has lost this balance. And without this balance, the
individual is likely to take either a compliant or heroic attitude to the community.
Robert Jay Lifton's concept of "totalism," derived from the Freudian
ego-psychologist, Erik Erikson, is built on this idea of the normal person as a balance; a
balance, which when malformed or upset, can lead the individual toward unbridled,
self-destructive collectivity.
In a paper presented at a 1953 conference on totalitarianism, Erikson,
working from the assumption that totalitarianism is based on universal human
potentialities, sought to identify the psychological prerequisites of a totalitarian
ideology.116 He located the roots of
totalitarianism in the human capacity for "total realignments," that is
"sudden transitions from a balanced 'wholeness' of experience and behavior to states
of feeling and acting 'totally'" -- for example, a child's normal alteration between
sociability and aloneness may shift to a furious insistence on his mother's total
attention or a flat refusal to show any awareness of her proximity (p. 160). Such
realignments "occur as transitory phases at significant stages of infantile
development; they remain a potentiality in the adult, and they may accompany the outbreak
of a mental disturbance" (p. 160). While "wholeness" emphasizes balance,
flexibility, fluid boundaries, "totality" emphasizes rigid, absolute boundaries;
"given a certain arbitrary delineation, nothing that belongs inside must be left
outside, nothing that must be outside can be tolerated inside" (p. 162). "When
the human being, because of accidental or developmental shifts, loses an essential
wholeness, he restructures himself and the world by taking recourse to what we may call totalism"
(p. 162, emphasis in original).
It is organized religion which systematizes and socializes the first and
deepest conflict in life, giving "basic mistrust" (experiences of childhood that
are not successfully integrated within a sense of trust and continuity) a
"metaphysical reality in the form of tangible evil" (p. 164), and giving people,
through its rituals and cycles, opportunities for collective restitution of "basic
trust," a new sense of wholeness. However, "much of mankind finds itself without
a living religion such as gave wholeness of existence" (p. 164) to earlier peoples.
Unanswered, this need for a deep sense of specific goodness will continue to give way to a
deep and widespread basic mistrust which, in areas overcome with all too
sudden changes in historical and economic perspective, contributes to a readiness for a
totalitarian and authoritarian delusion of wholeness . . . (p. 165).117
Given the loss of a living religion that can provide a "deep sense
of specific goodness," what must the modern individual do? For the Freudian school,
in most of its manifestations, this is perhaps the single greatest question and dealing
with it the foremost task of therapy. The older clerical strategy, working implicitly on a
social theory of the self, was, in the words of the sociologist Philip Rieff, to confirm
faith "by strengthening the individual's identification with the community."118 This strategy has been explicitly rejected.119 For Freud, father of the psychoanalytic,
freeing men and women from their sick communities is precisely the goal. According to
Rieff: "To emancipate man's 'I' from the communal 'we' is 'spiritual guidance' in the
best sense Freud could give to the words."120
The new strategy is precisely the opposite of the old one. Rather than
strengthen identification with the community, the psychoanalytic patient learns, in
Rieff's words,
to withdraw from the painful tension of assent and dissent in his
relation to society by relating himself more affirmatively to his depths. His newly
acquired health entails a self-concern that takes precedence over social concern and
encourages an attitude of ironic insight on the part of the self toward all that is not
self. Thus the psychoanalyzed man is inwardly alienated even if he is often outwardly
reconciled, for he is no longer defined essentially by his social relations.121
The older community, with its renunciatory moral demand systems and
communal purpose -- "guilt" culture" -- is rejected. "In what does the
self now try to find salvation," Rieff asks, "if not in the breaking of
corporate identities and in an acute suspicion of all normative institutions?"122 Men can finally be truly free, personality can
be organized apart from communal purpose -- except, perhaps, as a therapeutic device --
self-fulfillment and the enjoyment of the senses can be pursued without the crippling
burden of control and guilt imposed by the old order. For a post-communal culture, men are
helped by this psychological model to live with no higher purpose than that of fostering a
stable sense of well-being.123 Critical
detachment is the essential attitude for living with a greater range of alternatives and,
at the same time, a more conscious sense of personal limitations.124
In an individualistic ideology of the self, self-integrating communal
purposes and binding moral standards must be intentionally rejected because they are
authoritarian and repressive.125 While
preserving the positive moral elements of the old order may be desired (e.g. by
Christians), the old discipline is too high a price, if must be, to pay.126 Personal choice and self-direction are goods which have
been won by the gradual destruction of the old institutional arrangements, they must not
be re-surrendered to new forms of communal purpose and moral demand. The goal of therapy
is to prevent this re-surrender by administering social controls in a (seemingly)
non-authoritative manner -- medicalization of behavior considered deviant is such a
strategy127 -- and by training the individual
to turn inward for the resources needed to psychologically survive without a corporate
identity.128 The self is the new center.
Personal choices, including religious ones, must be either authoritarian or thoroughly
privatized.
While the therapeutic disguise of social control and the rejection of
communal purpose and morally binding structure maintains the illusion of self autonomy it
obscures the social nature of identity creation and the fact that it is in communal
purposes alone that the self can be realized and satisfied.129
Despite their gospel of autonomy and free thinking, the anti-cult movement (like all
movements) is itself socially constructed. The anti-cultists form communal bonds for the
purpose of reinforcing their identity as cultural guardians (lamentably misunderstood in
their view), for recruiting new members and for maintaining the subjective plausibility of
their anti-cult worldview. Ex-NRM members are encouraged to join the anti-cult network,
form fellowships and otherwise be in touch with those who share the anti-cult ideology. As
noted earlier, a "support group" is absolutely essential for the full recovery
of toxic faith victims. Being an NRM apostate or a "cult expert" is an identity
that is socially created and socially maintained; within the congenial anti-cult
community, personal identities can be confirmed and a sense of meaning provided for former
members of socially stigmatized groups. The ex-Moonie Steve Hassan describes how he
discovered a higher calling after meeting Robert Jay Lifton:
Meeting Lifton changed my life. Instead of looking at myself and seeing
a college dropout, a poet with no poetry (I sorely regretted throwing those four hundred
poems away when I joined), and a former cult member, I saw that perhaps there was a higher
purpose for me . . . . The world's most renowned expert on brainwashing thought that I had
an important contribution to make, that what I had experienced could be useful in helping
people. By this time I had started attending cult awareness meetings of people affected by
the problem and was approached by many parents of people in the Moonies. They asked me if
I would talk to their children. I agreed.130
As with other therapeutic communities, however, the anti-cult movement
is essentially a negative community. Its goal is to undermine forms of religious life at
odds with conventional social (and, for some denominational anti-cultists, ecclesiastical)
arrangements. This undermining is achieved by introducing the mind control critique,
confirming reactions against non-conventional and/or communally organized religious groups
and inducing overreactions, and by counseling within a therapeutic model.
By adopting the theory that pits the self against social order, the
anti-cultists cannot make genuine sense of voluntarily-chosen, communally-organized groups
that engage in moral regulation and inculcate communal purpose.131
By their understanding of the self, such activities can only be destructive of what is
unique and creative in human nature. No right minded person would freely choose such
regulation. No rightly organized group would engage in it. No authentic faith would
encourage it. They cannot see, for example, that moral control and communal purpose can be
to strengthen, not repress, to free the individual from the lower instincts in order to
pursue higher purposes. This was the role they played in the Christian culture that has
now been largely superseded. Rieff quotes the philosopher Max Scheler:
Christian asceticism -- at least so far as it was not influenced by
decadent Hellenistic philosophy -- had as its purpose not the suppression or even
extirpation of natural drives, but rather their control and complete spiritualization.
It is positive, not negative, asceticism -- aimed fundamentally at a liberation of the
highest powers of personality from blockage by the automatism of the lower drives.132
In rejecting communal purpose and moral regulation in principal and
lobbying against movements that include such control, the anti-cult movement places itself
in the role of sentinel against rearguard reactions and intentionally chosen
counter-arrangements to the larger cultural movement of modernity.
Postscript: On Influence
While it has been the burden of this essay to argue that the notion of
mind control as expounded by the anti-cultists is without empirical foundation, it must be
explicitly stated that rejecting this explanation does not entail the view that persuasion
techniques are morally neutral.
At least since the time of Plato, a distinction has been made in moral
philosophy between persuasion that consists in offering reasons for holding a particular
belief and persuasion that consists in subjecting someone to a psychological pressure
which produces an ungrounded -- i.e. without reasons to back it up -- conviction.133 This distinction is the basis for evaluating
the morality of particular persuasion techniques. Why this is so rests on the belief that
a man's exercise of rationality is essential to his position as a moral agent. Unlike
animals which act on the basis of instinct, men are rational, capable of voluntary choice,
and can thus be held morally responsible for their actions. The exceptions -- very young
children, madmen, for example -- prove the rule for they are exceptions precisely because
they comprise classes of persons who are not yet in full possession of or who have lost
their rationality.
Whether one comes to hold a belief by reasoning or in some nonrational
way, therefore, is not morally neutral.134
Techniques of persuasion not based on argumentation that is backed up by reasons, which
the one being persuaded can inspect and consider, cannot be considered moral. In this
light a great deal of the political grandstanding, mass media advertising, and ideological
sloganeering that is a regular feature of modern American life is morally problematic.135 Using this criteria, some of the techniques
used by some NRMs -- e.g. "flirty fishing" (winning converts through the arousal
of sexual passion), and deception of new recruits -- can clearly be morally rejected.
In general though, in matters of faith, a great deal of caution must be
exercised. Individuals must be allowed to submit their reason to the demands of their
faith and to hold their religious convictions with intensity. Anti-cult polemics work from
the unspoken assumption that many NRM beliefs are so wild that no rational person could
ever adopt them. Thus, the NRM member's rationality must have been subverted by some
clever milieu manipulation techniques, important information withheld, and so on. The very
notion of "totalism" contains a built in moderation-in-all-things bias against
those who hold exclusivist truth claims. But this chauvinistic approach misses the moral
point. Because one does not find the view that the Rev. Moon is the messiah plausible,
does not mean that clear reasons are not put forward for this belief. Or because Moonies
often meet their prospective spouse only a short time before their wedding does not mean
that reasons for this practice have not been explained and accepted by those getting thus
married. We may not believe in such practices, we may think them ill advised, and so on;
suggesting, however, that immoral persuasion techniques are at work requires demonstrating
that beliefs have not been reached on the basis of expounded reasons. The mind control
theory establishes no such thing. Indeed, its propagation raises questions about the
influence techniques of those who spread it.
Footnotes
Joseph Davis earned his PhD at the University of Virginia in 1998 and is currently a Post-doctoral Fellow with the Center for the Study of Post-Modernity. This monograph was originally published by Tabor House Press and appears here with the permission of the author. All rights are reserved to the author.
1. New
religious movement (NRMs) is the most common composite term used in the academic
literature for those groups which in popular parlance are often tagged "cults."
While NRM is a more helpful because less polemical all-purpose designation than
"cult," it is not without its problems. A phenomena of religious innovation
within the youth subculture began in the 1960s that in some particular ways can be
described as "new." For example, their visibility, their political economy and
the fact that many had non-Christian and non-Western sources. On the other hand, according
to the historian Sidney Ahlstrom, "Given the extraordinary pluralism and, more
importantly, the unremitting fecundity of the American religious tradition, the general
observation is warranted that the appearance of many new religious impulses during the
1960s and 1970s can best be seen as a continuation of a venerable tradition . . . ."
For a helpful discussion of the some of the problems with NRM and possible alternative
terms, see James A. Beckford, Cult Controversies: The Societal Response to New
Religious Movements (New York: Tavistock Publications, 1985), pp. 12-20. (Ahlstrom
quote, p. 21, note 6.)
Roy Wallis distinguishes between sect and cult
on the basis of truth claims. A sect regards itself as "uniquely legitimate,"
while a cult is conceived by its members to be "pluralistically legitimate,"
that is, as one of any number of paths to truth or salvation. By this typology, most NRMs
are sects. Only such loosely organized and individualistic groups as the Theosophical
Society, Scientology, spiritualism, New Age, and so on would be cults. Roy Wallis,
"The Cult and its Transformation," in Roy Wallis (ed.), Sectarianism: Analysis
of Religious and Non-Religious Sects (London: Peter Owen, 1975), pp. 35-49. Sect is
not so helpful for general purpose discussions of NRMs because of its connotation in
popular use of a breakoff group from a central tradition, an implication that does not
apply to many NRMs.
2. See,
for example, Anson D. Shupe, Jr. and David G. Bromley, The New Vigilantes:
Deprogrammers, Anti-Cultists, and the New Religions (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications,
1980). Participants in the anti-cult movement seem to prefer "counter-cult."
See, for example, Carroll Stoner and Jo Anne Parke, All God's Children: The Cult
Experience - Salvation or Slavery? (Radnor, PA: Chilton Book Company, 1977).
3. The
issues touched on in this paper are but a fraction of the issues raised by the
"cult"-anti-cult controversy. For a very helpful summary of the nature of the
NRM scare, the ideology it is built upon, the reaction of various social institutions to
the scare and some of the dynamics and implications of the public reaction both for the
new religious movements themselves and for the anti-cult "industry" that grew up
in response to them, see David G. Bromley and Anson Shupe, "Public Reaction Against
New Religious Movements," in Marc Galanter (ed.), Cults and New Religious
Movements: A Report of the American Psychiatric Association (Washington: American
Psychiatric Association, 1989), pp. 305-334. Bromley and Shupe are two of the most
prominent and prolific sociologists that have studied new religious movements and the
anti-cult movement. For fuller treatment of the "cult" controversy, see their
book Strange Gods: The Great American Cult Scare (Boston: Beacon Press, 1981). Also
see Beckford, Cult Controversies.
In his book Cults, Sects, and the New Age, Fr. James LeBar, a
priest of the Archdiocese of New York, carries on a polemic against social scientists who
criticize the anti-cult movement. He specifically names David Bromley, Anson Shupe, Thomas
Robbins and Joseph Fichter (the Jesuit sociologist), and quotes a source criticizing Dick
Anthony and James Richardson (pp. 19-21, 171-176). The problem with these authors in
LeBar's view is that they don't take the cult problem as seriously as he does. No attempt
is made to deal with their research; they are simply dismissed as "self-glorifying
intellectuals" (p. 175). LeBar's approach is characteristic of the anti-cult
literature. See note below on the polemics of Louis West.
Needless to say outside the fever swamps of anti-cultism, analyzing the
dynamics of the anti-cult movement does not therefore make one an apologist for all that
transpires within NRMs, unconcerned with problems that arise within these groups, or,
outside a social science context, indifferent to the truth claims made by them.
4. Other
religious groups who, like the Catholics, have been subject to allegations similar to
those made by the anti-cult movement against NRMs, include the Mormons, Jehovah's
Witnesses, Mennonites, Christian Scientists and Quakers.
5.
Bromley and Shupe, "Public Reaction Against New Religious Movements," pp.
307-310.
6. Anson
D. Shupe Jr., David G. Bromley and Donna L. Oliver, The Anti-Cult Movement in America:
A Bibliography and Historical Survey (New York: Garland Publishing, 1984), pp. 4-5.
7. Ibid., p. 6.
8. James
R. Lewis, "Apostates and the Legitimation of Repression: Some Historical and
Empirical Perspectives on the Cult Controversy," Sociological Analysis, Vol.
49:4 (Winter 1989), p. 387.
9. See
the discussion below for some sociological observations on modern family life that shed
light on the intensity of parental reaction to sons and daughters joining NRMs.
10.
The media, especially newspapers and TV, have also played a very large role in the success
of the anti-cult movement and are the main broker of anti-cult stories to the general
public. In general the NRMs were newsworthy only when there was some sensation or alleged
scandal to report. Apostates' melodramatic tales of control and manipulation at the hands
of cultic abdicators, the anguished cries of parents over a "lost" son or
daughter, and allegations of financial fraud, lavish lifestyles of leaders and/or sexual
improprieties were ideal grist for the media and, in general, the only sort of
"news" that was regarded fit to report. Furthermore, sectarianism in and of
itself is a negative issue for the press and a host of stereotypes accompany it. Very
little effort is made to differentiate between various groups, giving "cult"
stories in the press a distinctly patterned quality.
In more recent years, however, at least in the secular press, media
coverage has become more balanced and the stories of apostates accepted less uncritically.
11.
Lest there be any mistake, the anti-cult movement is not a monolithic phenomenon but
includes deep ideological divisions. Bromley and Shupe distinguish four types of
institutional response to the new religious movements. Each of two basic metaphors --
"possession" and "deception" -- are utilized in two ideological models
-- secular/rational and religious/theological. In the possession metaphor, individuals are
portrayed as zombies, lifeless automatons controlled by either a demon in the religious
model or the evil "cult" leader in the secular model. In the deception metaphor,
by contrast, individuals are seen as zealots, passionate even fanatical enthusiasts of an
illegitimate crusade, whether religious or secular.
The religious/possession model has not been an explicit part of the
anti-cult movement. The response of many Christians to NRMs is mainly of the
religious/deception model with satanic influence regarded as present but in a lower degree
than direct possession. In the secular models, the possession metaphor was represented by
the brainwashing metaphor, the idea that individuals lose their free will and come under
the direct control of the malevolent leader. Much of the anti-cult movement (including
many evangelical Christian authors and some Catholics, see, for example, LeBar, Cults,
Sects and the New Age, pp. 14-16, 180-193) utilizes this perspective and this is the
perspective that is being considered in this paper. The secular/deception model sees the
"cults" in terms of social pathology and rejects the brainwashing idea.
Membership in NRMs is seen as mainly voluntary and not especially dangerous; it is a
coping mechanism for dealing with personal problems and the general cultural malaise. See
Shupe and Bromley, The New Vigilantes, pp. 59-86.
12.
Bromley and Shupe, "Public Reaction," pp. 326-327.
13. Ibid.,
p. 329.
14.
Despite having observed that the concept of brainwashing has no explanatory value,
Margaret Singer, for example, uses it regularly in court cases involving NRMs. Dick
Anthony, "Religious Movements and Brainwashing Litigation: Evaluating Key
Testimony," in Thomas Robbins and Dick Anthony (eds.), In Gods We Trust: New
Patterns of Religious Pluralism in America, Second Edition, (New Brunswick:
Transaction Publishers, 1990), p. 329, note 7.
15.
Beckford, Cult Controversies, p. 95. Beckford lists John Clark, Margaret Singer and
Louis West as examples of such psychiatrists and psychologists.
16.
Louis Jolyon West, "Persuasive Techniques in Contemporary Cults: A Public Health
Approach," in Galanter, Cults and New Religious Movements, p. 180.
17. Ibid.
18.
They list nine grounds for skepticism: (1) conflicting empirical assessments in the
behavioral science literature on the exercise of extreme influence; (2) stretching
brainwashing to fit an ever broader range of recruitment and socialization practices
suggests its use "as a conclusionary value judgment rather than as an analytic
concept"; (3) the rate of recruitment by cults was never high and for some of the
largest declined significantly after the late 1970s; (4) the defection rate of cults was
consistently high; (5) allegations of brainwashing tended to come from individuals who had
been involved in deprogramming; (6) anti-cultists cannot explain why influence techniques
only work on young adults; (7) the field work of social scientists did not find evidence
of brainwashing; "the very limited anticult-associated research has either provided
very little empirical substantiation or has yielded unimpressive results"; (8) the
cults were wracked by internal conflicts inconsistent with the idea of an all-powerful
leader with unquestioning followers; and (9) the brainwashing notion implausibly implied
that "highly intrusive behavioral modifications techniques" were routinely
learned and accomplished by diverse and disconnected people without professional training
of any kind. Bromley and Shupe, "Public Reaction," pp. 325-326.
19.
Quoted in Trudy Solomon, "Programming and Deprogramming the Moonies: Social
Psychology Applied," in David G. Bromley and James T. Richardson (eds.), The
Brainwashing/Deprogramming Controversy: Sociological, Psychological, Legal and Historical
Perspectives (New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1983), p. 167.
20.
The ironies in the "cult"-anti-cult controversy are many layered. Deprogrammers,
those who seek to forcibly remove NRM members from their group and subject them to
counter-indoctrination in an effort to get the member to recant his or her beliefs, admit
they are fighting "fire with fire" (see Ted Patrick and Tom Dulack, Let Our
Children Go! [New York: E.P. Dutton, 1976], p. 71). The "Moonies" in the San
Francisco Bay area have passed out copies of Lifton's book to help them understand and
protect themselves from the dynamics of such deprogrammers.
21.
Robert Jay Lifton, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of
"Brainwashing" in China (New York: W.W. Norton, 1961), p. 4.
22.
Edgar H. Schein, with Inge Schneier and Curtis H. Backer, Coercive Persuasion: A
Socio-psychological Analysis of the "Brainwashing" of American Civilian
Prisoners by the Chinese Communists (New York: W.W. Norton, 1961).
23. A
number of semantic derivations of "brainwashing" are in play, many of them
dating from the 1950s POW studies. These include mind control, mental coercion, thought
reform, coercive persuasion, and mentacide.
24.
Robert J. Lifton, "Thought Reform of Chinese Intellectuals: A Psychiatric
Evaluation," Journal of Social Issues, Vol. 13:3 (1957), p. 17. There were a
number of psychiatrists and psychologists working with Western POWs after the Korean War
and a few working with Western and Chinese civilians who experienced thought reform in
China during the early 1950s. See Schein, Coercive Persuasion, pp. 199-211, for a
discussion of the 1950s mental coercion literature that employ's Pavlovian and other
conditioning theories. In Schein's view, "no evidence exists of the use of Pavlovian
methods in thought reform operations and . . . in any case, coercive persuasion as a
process of influence could not possibly be explained by such a simple basic
mechanism" (p. 204). See Stoner and Parke, All God's Children, pp. 153-162,
for a presentation of conditioning theory typical of popular anti-cult presentations.
25.
Quoted in Anthony, "Religious Movements and Brainwashing Litigation," p. 305.
26.
Lifton, Thought Reform, p. 13 (emphasis in original). In his testimony during the
trial of Patty Hearst, a case in which a brainwashing defense was used (unsuccessfully),
Lifton argued that what was unique to the thought reform environment was the presence of
"life or death coercion." See Anthony, "Religious Movements and
Brainwashing Litigation," p. 305. Alan Scheflin and Edward Opton draw the same
conclusion in their major work on mind control: The Mind Manipulators (New York:
Paddington, 1978), p. 23.
27.
Schein, Coercive Persuasion, p. 18.
28.
Schein, ibid., quoted in Shupe, Bromley, and Oliver, The Anti-Cult Movement,
p. 84.
29.
Singer has testified in more than 35 cases involving NRMs.
30.
I.E. Farber, Harry F. Harlow and Louis Jolyon West, "Brainwashing, Conditioning and
DDD: Debility, Dependency, and Dread," Sociometry, Vol 20. (1956), pp.
271-285.
31.
See Anthony, "Religious Movements and Brainwashing Litigation," p. 327, note 3.
32.
Louis West has been an especially aggressive polemicist. He describes the many people who
reject his interpretation as "apologists for the cults." These include
"romantics," the ACLU and other civil libertarians, the media, the courts,
people deceived by charismatic cult leaders, armchair philosophers, church officials,
physicians and "a good many mental health professionals and behavioral
scientists." Those who criticize the anti-cult movement or reach different
conclusions from their research on NRMs are dupes of the cults. See West, "Persuasive
Techniques," pp. 172-173, and Louis Jolyon West, "Contemporary Cults -- Utopian
Image, Infernal Reality," Center Magazine, Vol. 15:2 (March/April 1982), pp.
10-13.
33.
Louis J. West and Margaret Thaler Singer, "Cults, Quacks, and Nonprofessional
Psychotherapies," in Harold I. Kaplan, Alfred M. Freedman and Benjamin J. Sadock
(eds.), Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry/III (Baltimore: Williams &
Wilkins, 1980), Volume 3, pp. 3245-3258.
34.
For an extensive critique of Margaret Singer's participation in legal cases involving
NRMs, see Anthony, "Religious Movements and Brainwashing Litigation," pp.
297-325.
35.
Schein, Coercive Persuasion, p. 206-210.
36. If
cultic brainwashing thus deprives an individual of his true self and wishes, anti-cultists
argue that groups that use such methods should not be protected under the First Amendment
right to free exercise of religion. More basic than freedom of religion and essential for
its enjoyment is freedom of thought, allegedly denied by NRMs. Richard Delgado, who has
written extensively on the legal implications of NRM practices in light of a brainwashing
theory, has made the most sophisticated attempt to give the cultic brainwashing theory
legal status. See Richard Delgado, "Religious Totalism: Gentle and Ungentle
Persuasion Under the First Amendment," Southern California Law Review, Vol.
51:1 (November 1977), pp. 1-98. See also Richard Delgado, "Awaiting the Verdict on
Recruitment," Center Magazine, Vol. 15:2 (March/April 1982), pp. 25-29; and
"Limits to Proselytizing," in Bromley and Richardson, Brainwashing/Deprogramming
Controversy, pp. 215-233.
37.
The best inoculation for everyone is "education," i.e. to read the anti-cult
literature and an assortment of other material, such as Lifton's Thought Reform,
that is highly recommended.
38.
Most of the evidence for these practices invariably leads back to the observations of
researchers on only one faction of the Unification Church, the Oakland Family, which ran
the church's missions in Oakland, Berkeley and San Francisco. The Oakland Family used
high-pressure manipulation in its recruitment tactics and deception, practices that have
not been found by independent researchers in other branches of the Unification Church or
in most other NRMs. For a discussion of recruitment evenings and weekend retreats in the
Oakland Family, see Bromley and Shupe, Strange Gods, pp. 115-124.
The other NRM that has drawn considerable attention for its deceptive
recruitment tactics -- such as "flirty fishing," the use of sex to recruit new
members -- is the Children of God (Family of Love). As with the Oakland Family, these
recruiting tactics are commonly generalized to be characteristic of all NRMs.
39.
West and Singer, "Cults, Quacks," p. 3248.
40. Ibid.,
pp. 3248-3249. See p. 3249 for a summary of lawyer Richard Delgado's "cult
indoctrinee syndrome," which lists a number of the "signs and symptoms" of
neurosis that West and Singer believe affect the NRM victim.
41.
The three stage formulation follows James T. Richardson and Brock Kilbourne,
"Classical and Contemporary Applications of Brainwashing Models: A Comparison and
Critique," in Bromley and Richardson, Brainwashing/Deprogramming Controversy,
p. 35.
42.
While the cultic mind control theory holds that everyone is vulnerable to being snared by
an NRM, certain factors are acknowledged to predispose certain individuals. The anti-cult
literature contains a host of theories about the ailments that NRM members suffered before
joining. These include identity crisis; meaninglessness; alienation from family,
materialism, etc.; a need to conform; a low tolerance for ambiguity; and others.
43.
West and Singer define a deprogrammer as "a person who presents to a cultist
information that may cause him to reconsider his commitment to the cult and to leave
it." West and Singer, "Cults, Quacks," p. 3251. It is the view of Shupe and
Bromley that the presence of parents and the volatile parent-child confrontation that
takes place is the decisive factor in the success of deprogrammings. See Anson D. Shupe,
Jr. and David G. Bromley, "Apostates and Atrocity Stories: Some Parameters in the
Dynamics of Deprogramming," in Bryan Wilson (ed.), The Social Impact of New
Religious Movements (New York: The Rose of Sharon Press, 1981), p. 186-193.
44.
"As more young people have left cults, they have joined the growing ranks of those
who now act as deprogramers. . . " West and Singer, "Cults, Quacks," p.
3251.
45.
See Patrick and Dulack, Let Our Children Go!, for descriptions of coercive
deprogramming sessions. Patrick, an evangelical Christian, claims to have been involved in
more than 2,000 deprogrammings between the mid-1970s and mid-1980s. Deprogrammings of the
coercive variety were not always limited to NRM members; attempts have also been made on
members of established religious groups, such as a member of a Roman Catholic community in
Canada and a member of the Episcopal Church of the Redeemer in Houston, on members of
political parties, such as the Socialist Labor Party, and even on children not belonging
to any group but whose parents wished them back under their wing.
46.
Exit counseling can be of greatly varying levels of intensity. Some have questioned just
how voluntary some such deprogrammings really are.
47.
West and Singer argue that the NRM novice "must surrender his or her critical
mind." They then assert that "[s]pecial methods are used to manipulate recruits
into such an accepting state of mind." This state of mind is produced by "trance
induction through hours of incessant, mind-numbing" chanting; "long repetitive
lectures"; "guilt-inducing dogma"; and "social measures of every
kind." In other words, they are conditioned in submission by the NRM leader, guru,
prophet. However, no evidence whatsoever is presented that the "critical mind"
can be surrendered by the methods suggested. West and Singer, "Cults, Quacks,"
p. 3250.
48.
West and Singer, "Cults, Quacks," p. 3248.
49.
There are a number of pop-psychological theories about how mind control is achieved, some
of which are used in combination with the milieu control technics described by Lifton. The
deprogrammer Ted Patrick uses a theory of "spot-hypnosis" (Patrick and Dulack, Let
Our Children Go!). Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman, a behavioral scientist and
journalist, respectively, use theories of "information disease" and
"snapping" (Snapping: America's Epidemic of Sudden Personality Change
[New York: J.B. Lippincott, 1978]). Steven Hassan, a former Moonie turned exit counselor,
believes mind control is achieved through a combination of hypnotic processes and
manipulation of group dynamics (Combatting Cult Mind Control [Rochester, VT: Park
Street Press, 1988]. Margaret Singer's SMSPI conditioning theory posits a process very
much like hypnosis (see Anthony, "Religious Movements and Brainwashing
Litigation," p. 314).
50.
Lifton, Thought Reform, p. 419.
51. Ibid.,
p. 456.
52. Ibid.
53. Ibid.
54. Ibid.,
p. 436.
55.
Since Thought Reform was first published in 1961, a number of scholars have made
nuanced applications of his resocialization process to religious groups. See Benjamin D.
Zablocki, The Joyful Community (Baltimore: Penguin, 1971), pp. 239-285, for an
application to the Bruderhof. See James T. Richardson, Mary Harder and Robert B. Simmonds,
"Thought Reform and the Jesus Movement," Youth and Society, Vol. 4:2
(December 1972), pp. 185-202, for an application to the Jesus Movement. These studies find
significant deficiencies as well as strengths in using the Lifton model. Chief among the
problems of application are understanding what utility the model offers when dealing with
individuals whose participation is voluntary, the role guilt plays in Lifton's model, the
considerable contact with non-members and the much lower level of intensity observed. In a
speech published in 1987, Lifton himself considers NRMs in light of his eight
psychological themes of a totalist environment. His perspective is that "cults are
not primarily a psychiatric problem, but a social and historical issue." Robert Jay
Lifton, "Cults: Religious Totalism and Civil Liberties," in The Future of
Immortality and Other Essays for a Nuclear Age (New York: Basic Books, 1987), p. 218.
56.
Margaret Thaler Singer, "Coming Out of the Cults," Psychology Today, Vol.
12:8 (January 1979), p. 75.
57.
Massachusetts psychiatrist John Clark, another prominent figure advancing a cultic
brainwashing theory, makes a point of never going near the NRM groups he argues that he
knows so much about. The urgent question motivating his work, as formulated in a
professional paper, is: "What kind of nutty people get into these crazy groups?"
Quoted in James T. Richardson, "The Brainwashing/Deprogramming Controversy: An
Introduction," in Bromley and Richardson, Brainwashing/ Deprogramming Controversy,
p. 5. Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman note that 71 percent of their sample had previously
participated in some form of deprogramming. "Information Disease: Have Cults Created
a New Mental Illness?" Science Digest, January 1982, p. 88.
58. In
the forward to a book published in 1988, Margaret Singer claims to have provided
psychological counseling to more than 3,000 persons "who have been in cults."
Margaret Singer, "Forward," in Hassan, Combatting Cult Mind Control, p.
xii.
59.
Singer, "Coming Out of the Cults," p. 75. Also see West and Singer, "Cults,
Quacks," p. 3251.
60.
Bryan R. Wilson, The Social Dimensions of Sectarianism: Sects and New Religious
Movements in Contemporary Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 62.
61.
Trudy Solomon, "Integrating the 'Moonie' Experience: A Survey of Ex-Members of the
Unification Church," in Thomas Robbins and Dick Anthony (eds.), In Gods We Trust:
New Patterns of Religious Pluralism in America (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers,
1981), pp. 288-289.
62.
Lewis, "Apostates and the Legitimation of Repression," pp. 386-396. Fr. James
LeBar writes: "If there had been only one or two, or even a dozen people speaking out
on the evils of the group after leaving it, we might dismiss them as malcontents or
misguided people deceived into leaving the group. But when the overwhelming majority of
people leaving the cults -- for whatever reason -- speak the same story, relate the same
techniques, and in some cases detail the same horrors of cult life, the truth itself is
there to be perceived" (Cults, Sects and the New Age, p. 21). There is no
empirical evidence that the "overwhelming majority of people leaving the cults"
speak the same story. However, a vocal subset of ex-NRM members do. Given the extreme
dissimilarity of the groups called "cults" -- a point readily acknowledged by
the anti-cultists -- the fact that people leaving such diverse groups should tell such
remarkably similar stories is hardly the overwhelming evidence for the veracity of those
stories that Fr. LeBar believes it to be.
63. A
number of scholars that have studied NRMs have argued that many of these groups have had a
positive impact on the lives of members, including the breaking of drug addictions and
socialization of "alienated" and maladjusted persons to conventional values.
See, for example, Thomas Robbins, Dick Anthony and Thomas Curtis, "Youth Culture
Religious Movements: Evaluating the Integrative Hypothesis," The Sociological
Quarterly, Vol. 16 (Winter 1975), pp. 48-64; Bromley and Shupe, Strange Gods,
pp. 207-210; Marc Galanter, Richard Rabkin, Judith Rabkin and Alexander Deutsch, "The
'Moonies': A Psychological Study of Conversion and Membership in a Contemporary Religious
Sect," American Journal of Psychiatry, Vol. 136:2 (February 1979), pp.
165-170. See J. Thomas Ungerleider and David K. Wellisch, "Coercive Persuasion
(Brainwashing), Religious Cults, and Deprogramming," American Journal of
Psychiatry, Vol. 136:3 (March 1979), pp. 279-282, for a general study that found no
mental illness and normal intellectual functioning among NRM members.
64.
The cultic mind control theory follows an earlier pattern of psychologizing conversion
phenomena. A single mysterious event -- Paul's conversion on the Damascus road -- leads to
a religious change which must, by definition, be accompanied by a parallel psychological
change. A change in belief, involving a total negation of the old self and assertion of a
new, comes first, followed by a corresponding change in behavior. Conversion, in other
words, is an event.
A number of studies by sociologists and social psychologists, however,
suggest a different model of conversion to NRMs, seeing conversion not as an event but as
a social process. See the discussion in Richardson, "The Brainwashing/Deprogramming
Controversy: An Introduction," in Bromley and Richardson, Brainwashing/
Deprogramming Controversy, pp 1-5.
While the concept of "brainwashing" has been repudiated, there
is no doubt that the demands of the new religious groups can be intense, that contacts
with the outside world are greatly restricted and that members' needs, personally and
socially, are provided for within the context of the close-knit community. Many of the new
religious movement are, sociologically speaking, "intentional communities."
These types of groups can bring about very rapid and significant re-socialization. In
their book The New Vigilantes, Shupe and Bromley utilize a role theory to explain
how an intentional community, by restricting contact with the outside world and drawing
the time, energy and resources of the members inward is able to actualize in microcosm the
new social order that they envision. In a "context of clearly defined role
expectations and a high degree of control over sanctions" the group is able to
achieve intense socialization; "this produces the kind of rapid behavioral changes
characteristic of conversions to the new religions." Such rapid change, made possible
by the assumption of readily assumable roles, can leave outsiders, such as parents,
befuddled and disconcerted. Shupe and Bromley, The New Vigilantes, p. 236.
65.
Shupe, Bromley and Oliver, The Anti-Cult Movement, p. 82.
66.
The discussion that follows is based on Anthony, "Religious Movements and
Brainwashing Litigation," pp. 322-325.
67.
Quoted in ibid., p. 342, note 37.
68.
See ibid., p. 341, note 35.
69.
The term "apostate" is here reserved, following Shupe and Bromley for those who
have left a new religious movement and then joined an organized counter-movement. See
Shupe and Bromley, "Apostates and Atrocity Stories," p. 193. The majority of
those who leave NRMs do so without "vituperative recriminations." See Bryan R.
Wilson, "Forward," in Wilson, The Social Impact of New Religious Movements,
p. xvi.
70.
The Cult Awareness Network (CAN), for example, in its promotional literature defines its
purpose as "dedicated to promoting public awareness of the harmful effects of mind
control. CAN confines its concerns to unethical or illegal practices and does not judge
doctrine or belief." The anti-cult activist John Clark states: "It is not the
private beliefs of the members of these groups that matter -- in specifics their doctrines
vary enormously -- it is their behavior toward those outside their worlds and the effects
on the health of both the involved persons and their families that deserve our
attention." John Clark, "Cults," Journal of the American Medical
Association, Vol. 242:3 (July 20, 1979), p. 279.
Many of the organizations run by evangelical Christians that have
concerned themselves with the activities of NRMs are very keenly interested in the
doctrines of the groups they monitor. These organizations are sometimes termed
"cult-apologetic" groups. While they are a part of the larger anti-cult movement
and draw from its well, their origins, purposes and focus are somewhat different. In
general, the cult-apologetic groups were created to inform people of and respond to the
non-Christian nature of NRM doctrine. Their primary purpose is to aggressively defend
centrist evangelical beliefs, a task that commonly takes them well beyond the NRMs and
into the teachings of other Christian organizations, the New Age Movement and the occult.
For a recent overview, see Tim Stafford, "The Kingdom of the Cult Watchers," Christianity
Today, Vol. 35:11 (October 7, 1991), pp. 18-22.
71.
For a sociological description of the essential elements of socialization within Catholic
religious institutes, see Patricia Wittberg, S.C., Creating a Future for Religious
Life: A Sociological Perspective (New York: Paulist Press, 1991), pp. 11-22, 82-91.
For a general introduction to the sociological concept of "total institutions,"
see Erving Goffman, "The Characteristics of Total Institutions," in Amitai
Etzioni (ed.), Complex Organizations: A Sociological Reader (New York: Holt,
Rinehart and Winston, 1961), pp. 312-340. Goffman identifies five types of "total
institutions," that is, institutions which erect powerful barriers to social
intercourse with the outside world, very often by building physical barriers right into
their physical plants: (1) homes for the aged, the blind, the orphaned and the indigent --
places for persons thought to be both incapable and harmless; (2) TB sanitariums, mental
hospitals and leprosoriums -- places for persons thought to be incapable and a
(unintended) danger to the community; (3) jails, penitentiaries, POW camps and
concentration camps -- places for persons thought to be an intentional danger to the
community; (4) army barracks, ships, boarding schools, work camps, etc. -- places pursuing
some special technical task and justifying themselves on such instrumental grounds; and
(5) abbeys, monasteries, convents and other cloisters -- places designed as retreats from
the world or as training centers for the religious. (p. 313). In the sociological sense,
very few NRMs are total institutions.
72. A
number of NRMs there were formerly committed to a communal organization have moved
substantially away from such an organization in recent years. For a description of the
structural changes in one of the most intensely communal NRMs, the Children of God (Family
of Love), see Roy Wallis, "Yesterday's Children: Cultural and Structural Change in a
New Religious Movement," in Wilson, The Social Impact of New Religious Movements,
pp. 97-133.
73.
Since Vatican II, many religious institutes in the United States have ceased to function
as intentional communities and have taken on a great many features of associations.
Associations are a much looser social grouping and make many fewer demands than an
intentional community. Members, whether many or few, on a temporary or more permanent
basis, come together to advance some common purpose -- reading "great" books,
running a soup kitchen, playing bridge -- but they do not, in general, surrender control
over any aspect of their personal life. The change from intentional community to
association has played a major role in the decline of religious life in this country. See
Wittberg, Creating a Future for Religious Life, and Elizabeth McDonough, O.P.,
"Beyond the Liberal Model: Quo Vadis?" Review for Religious, Vol. 50: 2
(March-April 1991), pp. 171-188.
74.
Wittberg, Creating a Future for Religious Life, p. 11.
75. Ibid.,
p. 12 (emphasis added). Communal structures of virtually all kinds include a cognitive
survival function. Total institutions are at the intense and most complete end of the
spectrum. But less intense forms of separation from "the world" are to be found
in many other forms of communal structure. Some degree of separation from the
contamination of other worldviews is the only means by which a socially deviant meaning
system can be maintained.
76.
These intentional community dynamics include grounding the community's vision in
particular social customs, observing common rituals, living, working and recreating
together, formation practices that bring about a change in one's identity and a way of
life that calls for sacrifice, self-denial and continual "conversion." In order
to maintain the clarity of the founding vision it is constantly reinforced. Various other
mechanisms, such as religious garb and family terminology -- brother, sister -- also serve
the function (among others) of "boundary maintenance" and public witness.
77. In
the case of religious groups, it was the conservative evangelical churches who were by far
the most active in anti-cult activity. The reasons for this are complex but include the
perceived threat these churches experienced from groups that appeared to be having such
success among young people. The evangelical churches, unlike the mainline denominations
and the Catholic Church, are heavily involved in the regulation of the day-to-day behavior
of their members. It was especially important, therefore, to the evangelicals that the
NRMs not gain access to the symbols of religious legitimacy through which they exercised
authority. Indeed, the anti-cult literature of the evangelicals not only denies legitimacy
to the new religious movements, but also frequently reasserts a continuing denial of
legitimacy to churches born in the nineteenth century such as the Mormons, Jehovah's
Witnesses, Seventh-Day Adventists and Christian Science.
A reaction similar to that of the evangelicals can be seen in the
response of the Catholic leadership in Latin America to the success that the Protestant
groups are having in that region. See Joseph E. Davis, "The Protestant Challenge in
Latin America," America, Vol. 164:2 (January 19, 1991), pp. 37-38, 44-46.
78.
Wilson, The Social Dimensions of Sectarianism, p. 64.
79. Ibid.,
p. 68.
80.
Dean M. Kelley, "Deprogramming and Religious Liberty," in Bromley and
Richardson, Brainwashing/Deprogramming Controversy, p. 314.
81.
The list could be greatly expanded. In his study of sectarianism, for example, Bryan
Wilson locates three general areas of social tension: (1) "public comportment"
issues include distinctive dress, speech, diet and behavior, as well as devices of
boundary maintenance, which explicitly identify who is included and who is excluded from
the sectarian group, and physical segregation (often read as suggesting sinister
intentions); (2) aggressive proselytizing practices, especially of the young; and (3)
"family relations" issues, such as ascetic sexual mores and allegations of
"breaking up" families. Wilson, The Social Dimensions of Sectarianism,
pp. 61-65.
Social tension with NRMs depends substantially on the mode of insertion
in society that a particular NRM adopts. James Beckford, in his book Cult Controversies,
identifies three typical modes: first, a "refuge." These types withdraw from
society either by vicinal segregation or by strict rules restricting contact with outside
influences (p. 18). Second, a "release." "This means that people seek
services from these movements as a way of being released from an unwanted condition or of
having inner potential released from conditions which supposedly obstruct its full
realization" (p. 129). Third, revitalization movements. These can be of two kinds:
(1) "movements aiming at the revitalization of religious traditions without
introducing fundamentally new elements of belief, value or practice. Such movements are
distinctive mainly for their capacity to mobilize resources in novel ways for the
achievement of ends which may not be at odds with those of traditionally valued
spirituality." And (2) "movements which seem to be seeking genuinely novel
spiritual ends and/or means to their attainment" (pp. 24-25).
82.
Wilson, The Social Dimensions of Sectarianism, p. 65.
83.
Quoted in Anthony, "Religious Movements and Brainwashing Litigation," p. 319.
According to Anthony, Singer, by her own testimony, is not using "authoritarian"
in any technical sense. She has testified that the religion of her youth, the Roman
Catholic Church, is an "authoritarian organization" according to her definition
(pp. 337-338, note 30).
84.
Bromley and Shupe, "Public Reaction," pp. 314-316. See Shupe and Bromley,
"Apostates and Atrocity Stories," pp. 181-186, for a fuller discussion.
85. It
is perhaps this sense of victimization that explains the intensity and intolerance which
tends to characterize former NRM members who have adopted the mind control explanation for
their involvement.
86.
Shupe and Bromley, The New Vigilantes, p. 245.
87.
The lower the degree of social legitimacy bestowed on a group by important social
institutions, the less control that group has over its own public image. The NRMs,
enjoying little legitimacy, were easy targets for atrocity stories of every kind, much as
the Catholic Church was before it gained "respectability" (which it still, only
in part, commands).
88.
For a typical apostate story, see Hassan, Combatting Cult Mind Control, pp. 12-34.
"By the end of those three days the Steve Hassan who had walked into the first
workshop was gone, replaced by a new 'Steve Hassan'" (p. 19).
89.
David G. Bromley, Anson D. Shupe, Jr. and J. C. Ventimiglia, "Atrocity Tales, the
Unification Church, and the Social Construction of Evil," Journal of Communication,
Vol. 29:3 (Summer 1979), p. 50.
90.
David G. Bromley, Anson D. Shupe, Jr. and J.C. Ventimiglia, "The Role of Anecdotal
Atrocities in the Social Construction of Evil," in Bromley and Richardson, Brainwashing/Deprogramming
Controversy, p. 156.
91.
Bromley, Shupe and Ventimiglia, "Atrocity Tales, the Unification Church, and the
Social Construction of Evil, pp. 46-47.
92.
Solomon, "Integrating the 'Moonie' Experience," p. 289. Also see the comments by
Benjamin Zablocki on the views of former Bruderhof members who confessed that they were
afraid to make even a short return visit to the Bruderhof because they were afraid that
the members' joy would "draw them back into the fold again, despite their firm
resolutions to the contrary." Zablocki, The Joyful Community, p. 160.
93.
Although the initial impetus for the anti-cult movement came from the distressed parents
of NRM converts, the introduction of psychologists, psychiatrists and other mental health
professionals into the controversy introduced vested medical interests. Many of the mental
health professionals who joined the fray did so because of the perceived challenge that
NRMs represented as alternative and competing psychotherapies. See Clark,
"Cults," p. 280, and Margaret Singer quoted in Anthony, "Religious
Movements and Brainwashing Litigation," p. 319. Moreover, exit counseling,
deprogramming, and other therapy with ex-NRM members became a lucrative business. See
Robbins and Anthony, "Deprogramming, Brainwashing and the Medicalization of Deviant
Religious Groups," Social Problems, Vol. 29:3 (February 1982), pp. 288-290,
for a discussion of the role of the medical profession in the anti-cult movement.
94.
Peter Conrad quoted in Robbins and Anthony, "Deprogramming, Brainwashing," p.
284.
95.
Merlin Taber, Herbert C. Guay, Harold Mack, and Vicki Nealey, quoted in ibid.
96.
There is a substantial debate in the psychiatric profession over the question of applying
the medical model to mental illness. See Christopher Lasch, "Sacrificing Freud,"
The New York Times Magazine, February 22, 1976, p. 72, for a description of the
debate.
"[Stephan] Chorover illustrated what he considered to be the
ultimate relativity and temprocentrism of the 'medical model' in his discussion of
'drapetomania' (i.e. 'the insane desire to wander away from home'), a presumed mental
disorder which had reached epidemic proportions among black slaves in ante-bellum
Louisiana, prompting the Louisiana State Medical Society in 1850 to investigate why this
particular subpopulation was so mysteriously afflicted." Shupe, Bromley and Oliver, The
Anti-Cult Movement, p. 86.
97.
Robbins and Anthony, "Deprogramming, Brainwashing," p. 284.
98.
Galanter, Cults, p. 4-5.
99.
Margaret Singer, while arguing in one place that there is a type of thought reform unique
to NRMs, argues in another that identical techniques are commonly used to ensure
ideological conformity in families. See Anthony, "Religious Movements and
Brainwashing Litigation," p. 306. Lifton's concept of ideological totalism has one of
its roots in an "individual totalism," the degree of which depends on early
childhood experience. "[A]n early sense of confusion and dislocation, or an early
experience of unusually intense family milieu control, can produce later a complete
intolerance for confusion and dislocation, and a longing for the reinstatement of milieu
control." Lifton, Thought Reform, p. 436.
100.
Stephen Arterburn and Jack Felton, Toxic Faith: Understanding and Overcoming Religious
Addiction (Nashville: Oliver Nelson, 1991). While this book lists two authors on the
title page, only Arterburn's presence is felt in the book (first person stories are all
Arterburn's) and he writes as though ignorant that he has a co-author (Felton gets
mentioned in the acknowledgments, but nothing in the book is attributed to him). The
commentary here, therefore, treats Arterburn as the sole author.
101.
Arterburn is the director of recovery treatment centers, but is not a mental health
professional.
102.
In its essential aspects, the discussion of psychological models follows Peter L. Berger,
"Towards a Sociological Understanding of Psychoanalysis," Social Research,
Vol. 32:1 (Spring 1965), pp. 26-41.
103.
Freud differed markedly from virtually all of his disciples over the issue of how much
change was possible through psychoanalysis. The neo-Freudian schools have transformed, in
the words of Peter Berger, "the gloomy vision of the great Viennese pessimist into a
bright, uplift and social-engineering-oriented program of secularized Methodism." Ibid.,
p. 29. See Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud
(New York: Harper and Row, 1966), pp. 79-107, for a discussion of how Freud viewed the
efforts of two of his disciples, Alfred Adler and C.G. Jung, to transform the
psychoanalytic into a total theory, that is, one which not only increased the power to
choose (Freud's limited goal) but also attempted to "cure" by telling people
what to choose.
104.
Berger, "Towards a Sociological Understanding of Psychoanalysis," p. 33.
105.
Ibid., p. 34.
106.
See Arterburn, Toxic Faith, p. 271. According to Robert Lifton: "Psychiatrists
. . . extend the concept of reality to suggest something on the order of the way things
are, as opposed to the way that the patient imagines them to be. In fact, we regard the
therapeutic relationship as a means of enhancing the patient's reality-testing, of helping
him to recognize his own distortions."
He adds, however, an important caveat: "All of these usages [of the
concept of reality] have validity; but the therapist's notion of reality is nonetheless
highly colored by his own ideological convictions about such matters as psychological
health and illness, social conformity and rebelliousness, commitment and detachment, and
especially about what constitutes wise or mature attitudes and behavior." Lifton, Thought
Reform, p. 451.
107.
Anselm Strauss (ed.), The Social Psychology of George Herbert Mead (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1956 [selections from Mead's Mind, Self and Society,
originally published 1934]), p. 215.
108.
Ibid., p. 235.
109.
Mead's emphasis on the importance of communication as a behavior by which an individual
may become an object to himself and from there a subject to himself is especially
interesting in light of the role that talk plays in modern therapy. Freud emphasized the
therapeutic nature of talk and saw it as an essential means of liberation. By talking
about the instincts, making them self-conscious, the individual gains self-mastery. See
Philip Rieff, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (New York: The Viking Press, 1959),
p. 335. Psychoanalysis, in all its various permutations since Freud, has been essentially
a talk therapy. In light of Mead's theory it is easy to see why talk should play such a
large role in a process concerned with the self. It can also be seen that the attitudes of
those who are talked to -- therapist, therapy group -- play a very large role in the self
that is being changed by all the talking.
110.
Ibid.
111.
Identity crises arise so frequently for modern individuals because they predominantly
relate their "true self" to the private sphere of life, a sphere which has few
social controls and identity-confirming processes to assist them. A "private identity
market" has thus been created whose demand is being supplied by various institutions
including the psychotherapeutic agencies. See Berger, "Towards a Sociological
Understanding of Psychoanalysis," pp. 36-37.
112.
The social theorist Arnold Gehlen calls this process "de-institutionalization."
Institutionalization occurs when a social pattern -- e.g. child rearing customs -- has
become so habituated in a society that it takes on a normative structure and becomes part
of that society's taken-for-granted reality. De-institutionalization, on the other hand,
occurs when the normative codes regulating a particular social pattern lose their
plausibility. The process of de-institutionalization, according to Gehlen, characterizes
modernity to an unprecedented degree.
De-institutionalization, however, according to the sociologist James
Davidson Hunter, is very unevenly distributed in the social world. The functionally
rational world of work, for instance, remains highly institutionalized, although these
institutions are generally experienced as alienating by the individual and are
"unable to provide the individual with an overall sense of concrete, personal
attachment which reinforces personal meanings and purpose" (p. 5). For these things,
the individual must turn to the "private" sphere of family and personal life.
"Yet, it is in the private sphere that the processes of de-institutionalization have
gone the furthest. The areas of child-rearing; courtship; marriage; sexuality; vocation;
religious belief and practice; consuming patterns; leisure; and the basic norms which
guide social behavior and social exchange -- are, in advanced industrial countries, all
radically de-institutionalized" (p. 5).
Thus, the modern individual is caught between an oppressive and
non-meaningful public sphere and a private sphere "which is structurally unable to
provide reliable social parameters for the more mundane activity of everyday life and a
plausible, well-integrated system of meaning which gives location and purpose to the
individual's total life experience" (p. 5). A kind of "permanent identity
crisis," in Peter Berger's words, results. See James Davidson Hunter, "The New
Religions: Demodernization and the Protest Against Modernity," in Wilson, The
Social Impact of New Religious Movements, pp. 1-19.
113.
Even in matters of social acceptability, the best defense is a good offense.
114.
The Social Psychology of George Herbert Mead, p. 256.
115.
The discussion of normality versus abnormality broadly follows Beckford, Cult
Controversies, pp. 96-98.
116.
Erik H. Erikson, "Wholeness and Totality -- A Psychiatric Contribution," in Carl
J. Friedrich (ed.), Totalitarianism: Proceedings of a Conference Held at the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences, March 1953 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1954).
117.
It is an ironic twist that the phenomena of totalitarianism should be used to defend an
anti-communal and anti-moralistic doctrine of the self. It was against just such
barbarisms as totalitarianism, that the Christian West, based on a theological proposition
(and implicitly psychological theory) that such barbarism existed in the heart of every
man, developed the institutional mechanisms necessary to deeply internalize moral demands.
Now, in the name of a new freedom, these institutional arrangements are being
disestablished.
118.
Rieff, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist, p. 330.
119.
The concern with the immersion of the individual in the group expressed by the idea of
totalism is but one manifestation of a much larger cultural phenomenon.
120.
Rieff, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist, p. 330.
121.
Ibid.
122.
Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic, p. 19.
123.
The idea of a psychological model designed for the anomie of a post-communal culture can
be understood in terms of Arnold Gehlen's de-institutionalization theory briefly described
earlier. A corollary to Gehlen's notion of de-institutionalization is a process of
"subjectivization." When social routines and habits lose their plausibility and
are no longer taken for granted, they are relocated to the realm of choice.
"Individuals then must necessarily turn inward to the subjective, and must seriously
and continuously reflect, ponder, and probe their newfound choices" (p. 12). The
de-institutionalization of identity brings a change in self-perception that makes choosing
"who one is" an issue (in pre-modern societies, identities are essentially
assigned). The complexities of the self become an issue of considerable personal and
cultural preoccupation. See Hunter, "The New Religions," pp. 11-13.
124.
It should not be assumed that the new therapeutic model of relationships is opposed to all
"community" in principal. Indeed, among therapists who no longer hold
"naive ideas of self-sufficiency," there is considerable interest in promoting
"caring networks, an interconnected system of family, friends, intimates, and
community that is needed to restore and sustain those now-absent feelings of
belonging." Such "personal support networks," however, are essentially
utilitarian, consciously built up and maintained for the purpose of maximizing
self-interest. See the discussion of the "therapeutic quest for community," in
Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler and Steven M. Tipton, Habits
of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (New York: Harper and Row,
1986), pp. 134-138.
125.
As argued above, there is an important sense in which the personal in-ward turn to the
subjective is a structural necessity in light of de-institutionalization and its resulting
subjectivization. Everyone is affected by it. Individualist ideologies of the self,
however, go further and insist that communal purpose, with its externally imposed binding
moral demands, must be a priori rejected both personally and culturally.
126.
"The kind of man I see emerging, as our culture fades into the next, resembles the
kind once called 'spiritual' -- because such a man desires to preserve the inherited
morality freed from its hard external crust of institutional discipline." Rieff, The
Triumph of the Therapeutic, p. 2. Also see Max Weber, "The Sociology of
Charismatic Authority," in H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (eds.), From Max Weber:
Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), pp. 245-252.
127.
As many scholars, including C.S. Lewis, have observed, therapeutic social control, because
less explicit, is, ironically, potentially highly repressive and intolerant of individual
differences.
128.
The proscribed therapy is a process of self-clarification undertaken from the fundamental
premise that each person's ultimate responsibility is to himself (the Christian versions
of this therapy add a few twists -- before you can love others you must love yourself, et
al. -- but the key premise is unchanged). Strategic considerations of self-fulfillment are
upper-most. Commitment, for example, which is embedded in the very dynamic of genuine
love, is negotiated in contractual terms, in a "giving-getting" model. In this
model, ones own values and feelings are constantly being metered, those of others intuited
according to therapeutic technics. The results are used as the basis for interpersonal
calculations. The freedom to choose, to make adjustments according to the calculations, is
essential, vital to the process of maturity and personal fulfillment. For a cogent
description of therapeutic contractualism, see Bellah, et al., pp. 128-130, and the
general discussion on "finding oneself", pp. 55-84.
129.
As the famous social psychologist Charles Horton Cooley put it in 1909: "One is never
more human, and as a rule never happier, than when he is sacrificing his narrow and merely
private interest to the higher calling of the congenial group." Charles Horton
Cooley, Social Organization: A Study of the Larger Mind (New York: Schoken Books,
1962), p. 38. Robert Bellah and his colleagues observe: "We find ourselves not
independently of other people and institutions but through them. We never get to the
bottom of our selves on our own. We discover who we are face to face and side by side with
others in work, love, and learning. All of our activity goes on in relationships, groups,
associations, and communities ordered by institutional structures and interpreted by
cultural patterns of meaning. Our individualism is itself one such pattern" (p. 84).
And, in another place, note: "We cannot know who we are without some practical ritual
and moral 'structure' that orders our freedom and binds our choices into something like
habits of the heart. Yet we also hear the familiar therapeutic hostility to external
authorities who would impose meaning on our lives, and with that the whole ambiguity of
the therapeutic attitude" (p. 137). Bellah, et al., Habits of the Heart.
130.
Hassan, Combatting Cult Mind Control, p. 30.
131.
Some see moral regulation as appropriate for children, but not for responsible adults. In
adults, it impedes maturity rather than enhances it. It might be noted, that the cultural
phenomena under discussion here is being increasingly directed precisely against the moral
socialization of the young. Surely, the self must be especially protected from unchosen
social and moral demands during that period of life when it is most vulnerable to external
control.
132.
Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic, p. 18 (emphasis in original; translation
from the German by Rieff).
133.
See the discussion of Plato's Gorgias in Alasdair MacIntyre, A Short History of
Ethics (New York: Collier Books, 1966), pp. 26-28.
134.
Perhaps consistent with their readiness to limit human choice and voluntariness of action,
some anti-cultists argue that persuasion techniques are morally neutral. Steven Hassan,
for example, holds that "the use of mind control technology is not inherently
evil." Indeed, it should be used but "reserved exclusively for ethical
uses" (p. 192). Hassan is entirely prepared to jettison the "age-old
philosophical notion" that man is a rational being. He argues that "such a
worldview does not allow for any concept of mind control." Hassan, Combatting Cult
Mind Control, p. 42-43.
135.
There is an extensive literature critiquing methods of modern persuasion and influence.
See, for example, Robert B. Cialdini, Influence: The New Psychology of Modern
Persuasion (New York: Quill, 1984). |
