Cults

The term cult has traditionally referred to nonmainstream religious groups that practice their own eccentric rituals. In recent years, however, public focus has centered on a number of pathological groups that have come to sensational, violent endings: the mass suicides of 918 followers of the Reverend Jim Jones in Guyana in 1878; the 80 followers, including 18 children, of Branch Davidian leader David Koresh who died by fire or gunfire following the FBI siege of their compound near Waco, Texas, in [Page 107]1993; and the 39 young men of the Heaven's Gate cult who followed leader Marshall Applewhite to their deaths in 1997.

Somewhere between 1,000 and 5,000 cults are currently estimated to exist in the United States alone. Surveys conducted over the past two decades indicate that between 2 and 5 million Americans have at some time been involved with cultic groups. A survey of adults in Montreal and San Francisco found that approximately 20% of respondents had participated in “new religious and parareligious movements,” although more than 70% of these encounters were short-lived. Most of these groups are small, but others have tens of thousands of members (see, e.g., Langone, 1988).

Margaret Singer, in her book Cults in Our Midst, describes 10 categories of cults in the United States: Neo-Christian religious, Hindu and Eastern religious, occult/witchcraft/satanic, spiritualist, Zen and Sino/Japanese philosophical-mystical, racist, flying saucer and outer space, psychology and psychotherapy, political, and self-help and self-improvement.

Many cult experts have observed an increasing heterogeneity on many levels in cultic groups and their members. Marcia Rudin served for many years as director of the international cult education program for the American Family Foundation, generally considered the most important organization for dispensing information about cults and providing recovery programs for cult victims. She argues that five of the biggest changes in cults in the last 25 years are as follows:

1. Cults now market themselves through more socially mainstream goals and issues. Rather than offering spiritual salvation, they offer promises of financial success, social achievement, and personal happiness. As a result, they appeal to a wider, mainstream population.

2. The economic and racial backgrounds of cult members are now more varied. Cults used to mostly target white, middle-class to wealthy recruits, often in hopes of accessing their financial resources and those of their parents. Groups now appeal to a wider spectrum of social classes. In particular, recruitment of minorities has increased.

3. Because the cult population is broader and more heterogeneous, the problems created by these groups have become more complex. Twenty-five years ago, the modal problem Marcia Rudin dealt with involved middle-aged parents worried about their college-aged children. The problems now involve a wide variety of family situations ranging, for example, from young adults worried about their parents or grandparents to parents seeking custody of children from a spouse still in a group.

4. Over the last two decades, however, there has been increasing membership and problems in virtually every region of the world: the Far East, the Middle East, Central Asia, Africa, Australia, South America, Western Europe, and with the breakdown of the Soviet Union, extraordinary growth of groups in Eastern Europe.

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