Part 13 deals with groups that critics call “cults”, members call churches, foundations or movements, and academic specialists call “new religious movements” (NRMs). The choice of word already takes a side. This chapter sets out the vocabulary used in the…
Part 13. New Religious Movements and Cults
Part 13 opens with the contested vocabulary of "cult" and "brainwashing". It quotes Willis's caution that "one person's cult is another person's religion" and sets the Lifton-Singer-Hassan model against its academic critics.
Chapters 125–136
- What Is a Cult? Sect, Cult, New Religious Movement and the Brainwashing Debate
- The American Prophet: Joseph Smith, the Book of Mormon and the Latter-day Saint Kingdom
- The Principle Lives On: Mormon Fundamentalism and the Polygamous Offshoots
- Counting the Days: Millerites, Seventh-day Adventists, Jehovah's Witnesses and Christian Science
- Voices from Beyond: The Spiritualist Movement and the Mediumistic Century
- From Dianetics to the Sea Org: L. Ron Hubbard and the Church of Scientology
- Messiahs of the Cold War and the Jesus Revolution: The Unification Church and the Children of God
- Jonestown: The Peoples Temple, Political Power and the White Night of 18 November 1978
- Waco: The Branch Davidians, the Federal Government and the Legacy of Rage
- Apocalypse Enacted: Aum Shinrikyo's War on Japan and the Transits of the Order of the Solar Temple
- Gods from the Sky and Masters of the Inner Planes: Heaven's Gate, UFO Religions, the New Age, Channeling and the Ascended Masters
- High Control in the Twenty-First Century and the Counter-Movement: NXIVM, Rajneeshpuram, the Anti-Cult Movement and Deprogramming
Chapter 126. The American Prophet: Joseph Smith, the Book of Mormon and the Latter-day Saint Kingdom
Willis lists the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints among the movements that began as “cults” in nineteenth-century America and became an established denomination [Willis, American Cults, #63203]. Its history is also, from the start, a political history: a…
Chapter 127. The Principle Lives On: Mormon Fundamentalism and the Polygamous Offshoots
The 1890 Manifesto ended plural marriage in the official church. It did not end what believers called “the Principle”. Mormon fundamentalists hold that Woodruff suspended, but could not revoke, Section 132 of the Doctrine and Covenants. They built a chain…
Chapter 128. Counting the Days: Millerites, Seventh-day Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Christian Science
The religious ferment of nineteenth-century America produced two kinds of movement that went on to become worldwide denominations. One kind counted the days: it read the prophetic numbers of Daniel and Revelation as a timetable and announced when Christ would…
Chapter 129. Voices from Beyond: The Spiritualist Movement and the Mediumistic Century
The Millerites had looked for Christ in the sky over the “burned-over district” of upstate New York. Four years after the Great Disappointment, the same region produced a different promise. The dead, it was said, could be reached directly, at…
Chapter 130. From Dianetics to the Sea Org: L. Ron Hubbard and the Church of Scientology
Christian Science (Chapter 128) located illness in “mortal mind”. Spiritualism (Chapter 129) claimed that personality survives the body. In the mid-twentieth century a pulp-fiction writer combined both themes, a mental cause of suffering and an immortal spiritual being, into a…
Chapter 131. Messiahs of the Cold War and the Jesus Revolution: The Unification Church and the Children of God
Two of the best-known new religious movements of the post-war decades took shape at opposite ends of the Pacific world and in very different registers. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church came out of the divided Korea of the 1950s. It…
Chapter 132. Jonestown: The Peoples Temple, Political Power and the White Night of 18 November 1978
On 18 November 1978, at a remote agricultural settlement in north-western Guyana, more than nine hundred followers of the Reverend Jim Jones died, most of them from cyanide mixed into a fruit drink. The reference shelf describes it as the…
Chapter 133. Waco: The Branch Davidians, the Federal Government and the Legacy of Rage
Mount Carmel, the Branch Davidian centre outside Waco, Texas, is the most politically contested case in this part of the study. Its story runs from an Adventist schism of the 1920s and 1930s through the Roden family’s leadership to Vernon…
Chapter 134. Apocalypse Enacted: Aum Shinrikyo’s War on Japan and the Transits of the Order of the Solar Temple
Most millenarian movements wait for the end of the world. Two movements of the 1990s acted on it instead. Shoko Asahara’s Aum Shinrikyo built a counter-state, stood for parliament, made nerve agents and on 20 March 1995 released sarin on…
Chapter 135. Gods from the Sky and Masters of the Inner Planes: Heaven’s Gate, UFO Religions, the New Age, Channeling and the Ascended Masters
From the 1930s onward a family of movements moved the source of revelation away from the biblical God. In its place they put Ascended Masters, channelled entities and extraterrestrial creators: the I AM Activity, the Church Universal and Triumphant, Raël’s…
Chapter 136. High Control in the Twenty-First Century and the Counter-Movement: NXIVM, Rajneeshpuram, the Anti-Cult Movement and Deprogramming
This final chapter of the part brings the story to the present and turns to the response to cults: parents’ associations, deprogrammers, exit counsellors, courts, and the scholars who opposed them all. On the “cult” side the cases include a…