Lost Boy

By Brent W. Jeffs, with Maia Szalavitz

Reviewed by Janja Lalich, Ph.D.

New York: Broadway Books. 2009. ISBN-10: 0767931777; ISBN-13: 978-0-7679-3177-9 (hardcover). $24.95 ($16.47, Amazon.com). 256 pages.

 “The stories of my childhood are either idyllic, horrific, or filled with a sense of unreality,” writes the author of this important, highly informative, and poignant book. Lost Boy is the memoir of Brent Jeffs, nephew of Warren Jeffs, the imprisoned leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints (FLDS). The FLDS sect split off from the Mormon church (LDS) in Utah when the LDS abandoned polygamy as a sacred practice in order to accommodate U.S. law and public pressure. Believing that the LDS had lost its way by doing this, some true believers established their own church, the FLDS, as did some others who refused to refrain from being polygamous. The FLDS garnered quite a bit of publicity and some measure of public sympathy when the group’s Eldorado, Texas ranch, Yearning for Zion, was raided by state officials on April 3, 2008. More than 400 children were removed from the compound on suspicion of child abuse and underage marriage. Shortly afterward, the Texas Department of Family and Child Protective Services brought me to that state for a weekend consultation with state officials, representatives from child welfare agencies and foster homes, education department officials, experts in various fields, and so on. We discussed and struggled with the best way to serve and protect the Yearning for Zion children, and their mothers, in that highly unusual situation. Over the course of the weekend, I learned a great deal more than I already knew about the inner workings and ideology of the FLDS, thanks to excellent presentations by, and my own lengthy discussions with former FLDS folks and others there who have worked closely with ex-FLDSers or are related to FLDS members. Therefore, much of what I read in this book corroborated what I heard at that meeting and reinforced my understanding of what life might be like during and after membership in the FLDS.

Lost Boy, as one may gather from the title, focuses in particular on the life of one of those many young men who were and are ejected from the cult at an early age in order not to be “in competition” with the older men in their incessant pursuit of wives. As the author writes, “Since 1999, hundreds of boys have been forced out of the FLDS. Many succumb to drink, drugs, and depression. Even as our prophet’s grandson, I wasn’t exempt.” Brent Jeffs came from what inside the FLDS is considered royalty—a family of “royal blood.” His grandfather, Rulon, was the FLDS prophet who was believed to speak directly to God; Rulon had 19 wives. Brent’s father and his uncle Warren were 2 of 65 siblings. Brent’s father had three wives, two of whom were full-blooded sisters, who gave birth to 20 children. Brent describes having literally thousands of cousins. Given his royal heritage, one might expect him to have been destined for great things within this secretive and reclusive clan. But it didn’t quite turn out that way.

Polygamy was the only world Brent or his family knew. He explains that both his parents came from generations of the practice, having “lived polygamy since Joseph Smith first introduced the ‘principle’ of ‘celestial marriage’ in 1843—and the same is true for most [FLDS] members.” Brent uses plain language, clear descriptions, and sometimes startling examples to paint a picture of family life in such an environment: for example, “Polygamy and its power structure continuously produce a constant, exhausting struggle for attention and resources.” A statement such as this one either precedes or concludes with vivid illustrations, creating an impressive panoply of scenes that forcefully substantiate the author’s claims.

Although shows like HBO’s Big Love tend to romanticize polygamy, showing over and over again how family love and strong bonds keep the protagonist family together through hardship, attacks, exposure, and so on, such viewings rarely depict the much darker side of polygamous communities. For example, absent is the number of deaths in the FLDS related to a genetic disorder that handicaps and kills many children early in life, which, according to Brent Jeffs, is consistently denied within the community, and results from generations of inbreeding reinforced by the fact that the cult rarely recruits outsiders. To make matters worse, under Warren Jeffs’s reign, these birth defects came to be seen as a curse and a sign of sin. Brent also mentions that with 50 percent of births being boys, being male is not such a privileged position in an environment in which the elders like to practice “sexual variety without guilt” and want the best pick of the female crop.

Unfortunately for Brent and many others (boys and girls, men and women), as time went on, successive generations of FLDS leadership instituted a more regimented, spartan, and harsh lifestyle. Isolation and change in leadership led to corruption and abuse. Life in the community became more difficult to cope with; yet, all the while, members tended to go along with leadership demands. In relation to this, Brent discusses the significance of the church command to “keep sweet,” a perfect example of Lifton’s “thought-stopping cliché,” used in this context to enforce members’ “happy” submission to rules and leadership wants and whims. Brent also explains this apparent submissiveness as emanating from family loyalties, family history, and brainwashing. Not only is the fear of losing everything they know quite overwhelming, but also members’ being ignorant of the way the rest of the world works helps to keep them compliant.

When the author was young, his Uncle Warren was principal of the Alta Academy, an FLDS school. There, during school time and during church sessions held in the building, Brent describes horrific sexual abuse of young boys, typically ages 5 and 6, perpetrated by Warren Jeffs, whose unquestioned power and rising stardom gave him free reign. Brent believes that the rape of one of his brothers, Clayne, by his uncle when his brother was 5 years old led to Clayne’s troubled life and later suicide. Another of Brent’s brothers died of a drug overdose. One important insight that Brent mentions is his recognition that, because he went to “regular” kindergarten (that is, not within the confines of the cult), that experience with its exposure to non-FLDS adults and children planted the seed in Brent that not all outsiders are bad. This realization helped him as he grew older and confronted life in mainstream society. As a child and an adolescent, Brent experienced and witnessed more than any human being should have to. His life goes from being considered part of the FLDS elite to being the ostracized son of an apostate after his father is excommunicated. From there, Brent eventually becomes one of the exiled “lost boys” and in this memoir, he expresses clearly the fear, paranoia, and confusion of that life. It is always a wonder to me that these brave young people survive with such a strong sense of life and goodness and compassion. It truly bears witness to the concept of resilience—and the power of self in the face of truth and freedom versus deceit and harm.

In Lost Boy, written with Maia Szalavitz (author of the excellent boot-camp exposé, Help at Any Cost: How the Troubled-Teen Industry Cons Parents and Hurts Kids), Brent Jeffs shares some of the best and worst of his young life. He offers readers a detailed and heartfelt look at a world most people know nothing about: a world that is too often allowed to carry on with exploitative practices and abuse, a world that we all should be concerned about. This is an important book, on a par with Not Without My Sister (reviewed in a previous issue of the Cultic Studies Review) and should be read by all.

People who know of me – rather than knowing me personally – know twothings about me: I have a name that on first glance looks difficult to pronounce, and, for the last 20 years, I’ve been studying cults. Let me explain both.

As the daughter of Serbian immigrants – there’s the first explanation – I wasn’t supposed to go to college. My “old-country” father thought girls were put on this earth to get married and have healthy Serbian babies, preferably boy babies. But I had different dreams and was fortunate enough to grow up in a time when college was affordable and scholarships were plentiful. I went off to school and completed a BA with Honors at the University of Wisconsin, followed by a Fulbright fellowship at the Université d’Aix-en-Provence in the south of France. Afterwards, I decided not to pursue graduate studies and went to live and work in New York City, then spent four years or so living on a Spanish island, and eventually settled in San Francisco. It was the late ’60s-early ’70s and I was a free spirit, with lifelong aspirations of being a writer.

Why do I tell you all this? Because then I joined a cult!

Democratic Workers Party. Janja Lalich in front on left

If, back in 1974, anyone had ever told me that smart, independent, wise-cracking, hard-headed me would one day be under someone’s thumb, I would have surely laughed and said, “No, not me!” But yes, me – and I give this background in part to shatter the enduring myth that only the weak-willed and stupid could ever be in a cult.

For 10-plus years I lived in an extremely controlled and restrictive environment, a true believer in the idea that I had found my destiny and was working toward positive ends. I, with my comrades, but only because of our leader, was going to change the world –when in fact about the only thing that got changed was me. And not only was I brainwashed – a word I use intentionally and which I’ll come back to later – but I was one of the main brainwashers in my group!

When asked if I regret my cult experience, if I had to do it over again, I have consistently replied that yes, I do regret it and no, I wouldn’t do it again. Sure, I met some nice people and I learned some things; I can even say I learned a lot – with the caveat that I would rather have learned those things another way.

But it’s done. I did join a cult. I did spend more than 10 years constrained, confined,and often conflicted. That background is part of who I am – and so the only sane thing to do as far as I could tell was to “turn a bad thing into a good thing.”

Once out of the cult, after much inner turmoil, self-doubt, anxiety, and deliberation, I enrolled in graduate school and obtained a Ph.D. Today I make whatever contribution I can to bring to people in our society a better understanding of those controversial groups that some of us some of the time identify as cults. I also hope I can help former cult members better understand their own experiences and how they might come to some personal resolution with all that.

I’d like to review some of the relevant events in the 30 years since the deaths in Guyana, to remember and honor some of the notable people in our field,[2] and to suggest what we might look to in the future. Several interlocking themes run through my ideas here–

Who better to start with than my dear old friend and colleague, the late Margaret Singer, who would say, “Yes, Virginia, there is such a thing as a cult.”

And when I use the word cult, I’m not talking about religion or belief systems I “don’t like.” Some of our detractors like to make this all about unjust religious persecution or mainstream traditionalists picking on minority religions. Rather, I’m talking about imbalanced power relationships and ultra-authoritarian and controlling social systems.

I would add that we’d do well not only to study cults, but also to speak out about the consequences of membership in such a group and the controversial and sometimes harmful behaviors ofthe group as a whole.

I do not deny that positive experiences occur in a cult context, but what is of interest for me is the interactional dynamic found in cults that brings moral human beings to occasionally engage in insidious or demeaning behaviors, or sometimes just the plain incomprehensible. Over the years, we’ve witnessed countless violent eruptions – either inward or outward –related to one cult or another.
On November 18, 1978, more than 900 followers of the Reverend Jim Jones died at his command and at the hands of their comrades in the remote jungle of British Guyana, a small nation on the northern coast of South America.

These true believers at Jonestown – all of them U.S. citizens – were living and working in that isolated community which they built from scratch – poorly fed, overworked, yet believing they were creating a utopian society forged out of Jones’s prophesies and fantasies.

How much coercion was involved? How much duplicity, manipulation, intimidation, threat?

We do know that once there, they couldn’t leave without the blessing of the leadership as each person’s passport was taken from them.

We do know that Jones had his people engage in suicide drills, called White Nights – these were loyalty tests.

Jones was not the first cult leader to ask, “Will you die for me?” But he was certainly one of the few to bring that to fruition on such a massive scale.

We do know that families and couples were separated from each other, made to live in separate quarters, and that children were not raised by their parents.

We do know that dissidents were often sedated (heavily drugged against their will) and confined to an “extensive care unit.”

We do know that children, as well as male and female adults, were physically or sexually abused.

We do know that Jones had a highly-functioning leadership body and medical entourage who kept him going and were instrumental in administering the poison on that last day, the ones who carried out Jones’s final call for what he labeled “Revolutionary Suicide.”

There was no exit for anyone who doubted or challenged the directive. The residents of the Jonestown commune were doomed. As they watched the children being forcefully injected first with the lethal mixture of cyanide and fruit drink, afterwards the adults could “choose” to poison themselves. Should one even have had the wherewithal to resist, he or she was threatened at gunpoint by a security squad made up of fellow parishioners. This larger-than-life incident is a hideous illustration of what I refer to as “bounded choice.”[3]

Horrific grisly pictures flooded the airwaves. I remember seeing them on TV while I was in a cult myself. One hard-core true believer – me – seeing the bloated, decomposing corpses of hundreds of other true believers piled one atop another. It was shocking.

Most of these people were from San Francisco, where I was living at the time. The Peoples Temple church building was in one of the very districts where I had walked hundreds of times organizing and recruiting, selling my cult’s newspaper, getting petitions signed, and even doing fundraising among the poor folk who lived in that neighborhood. Some of those same African American ladies who held quilting bees to create and donate beautiful pieces of work for our so-called political efforts may well have gone to Guyana and died in that jungle.

While the images of the dead were endlessly visible on TV, in newspapers and magazines, my cult’s newspaper ran a lengthy editorial in which our leader extolled Jones, his followers, and their socialist mission and vision. We understood why they did what they did, my leader wrote. We too lived in the belly of the beast and knew the desire to flee to a better land. Of course, that editorial was a superficial, knee-jerk sympathetic analysis –one cult leader defending another. And not for the first time. Over the years we’ve seen some strange bedfellows: various far-flung groups with opposing ideologies and goals coming together to join forces – in PR campaigns, legal battles, and so on.

So, what have we learned?

Do some cults induce their members to “commit suicide”?

Yes, but not often. Nonetheless, as much as we know that not every cult will go the way of Jonestown, we also know that one or two will; in fact, one or two or more have since then.

Should we consider these acts of induced suicide as murder?

Yes, I think so.

Should you have any doubts as to the control mechanisms at play, listen to this excerpt from a letter written to Jones by one of his inner-circle nurses. She is proposing how the end will take place:

Dad… The very people who resist Revolutionary Suicide because they want to save their asses would make excellent captives for the enemy… Though the strongest might kill themselves before being taken, the weakest — no matter what they might say in public meetings — would not kill themselves and would be the first to talk.

We prepare the people by reading over the p.a. system the words of strong, assertive revolutionaries of the past who took this choice… We will meet in the pavilion surrounded with highly trusted security with guns. Names will be called off randomly. People will be escorted to a place of dying by a strong personality… who is loving,supported [sic] but non sympathetic. They are accompanied by two strong security men with guns. (I don’t trust people to arrange their own death…but [it] can be arranged by outside pressure and no alternatives left open.) At the place of dying they are shot in the head and if Larry does not believe they are definitely dead, their throat is slit with a scalpel. I would be willing to help here if it is necessary. The bodies would bethrown in a ditch. It might be advisable to blindfold the people before going to the death place in that the blood and body remains on the ground might increase the agitation.[4]

So, can the unbridled narcissism of a cult leader lead to acts of violence – inward or outward?

Yes. Remember, not just Jones and his followers died – including 314 innocent children who did not make that choice – but also a U.S. Congressman and four members of the press were killed and others seriously wounded as they tried to leave.[5]

Each of the collective suicides/mass murders I’m about to mention is incredibly complex and warrants full discussion. I cite them briefly here as some of the other incidents we can learn from.

1993: In Texas 80 members of the Branch Davidians, followers of David Koresh, including 22 children, die in a blazing inferno at the Waco compound. We might ask: could Koresh have let his people go? [6]

1994 – 1997: A total of 74 people, members of the Order of the Solar Temple in Canada, Switzerland, and France died. Again this included infants and children, in brutal and ritual deaths. How much was compliance? How much coerced?[7]

1997: In Rancho Santa Fe, California, 39 members of the Heaven’s Gate cult committed “collective suicide.” Two more followers of Marshall Applewhite followed suit within the next six months – and possibly more we’ve never learned about.[8]

2000: In Uganda, more than 400 members of The Movement for the Restoration of the 10 Commandments were brutally murdered and buried in secret mass graves; another 300+ burned to death in the locked church building.[9]

These are tragic, yes, no doubt about it. But in my mind, what is most important about Peoples Temple and Jonestown, and what is so important about other cults, is what they tell us about the systems of influence and control that are instituted to retain members and ensure their loyalty in words and deeds.

When we hear the term “ideological extremism,” we may most immediately think of acts of violence toward outsiders, such as we are seeing in many parts of the world today. However, what we must not lose sight of is that ideological extremism and the violence that may ensue is not just about orchestrated collective suicides or martyrs blowing up airplanes or crowded buses. Rather, at its core, it’s about the social structure that gets set up around that ideology, about the promise of“salvation” and the leader’s recipe for transformation that will take you there, about the institution of systems of influence and control within that self-sealing social structure to ensure obedience and conformity – and about the power relations and the power imbalance between the charismatic leader(s) and the followers.

Ultimately, whether or not one believes that cult members are brainwashed, it’s about taking at least some of the members to the social-psychological and emotional state of “bounded choice.”[10] This is when normal, intelligent, educated people give up years of their lives – and sometimes their very own lives or take the lives of others – because of the deep internalization of the group’s ideology and purported goals. Time and again, we see the unquestioning adulation of an authority figure, combined with personal sacrifice and disempowerment on the part of the follower. I submit that it requires that complex mix of elements to lead to acts of violence. These acts would not be possible, would not come to fruition without the social-psychological manipulation that goes on, unseen and unrecognized by most people on the outside.

But even more crucial, I believe, is understanding and recognizing that ideological extremism is manifested most frequently, not in suicide missions, but rather in the daily manipulation, oppression, subjugation, exploitation of and violence toward cult members and their families within the cult, including the children who are born and raised in that environment. If we take a broader view of ideological extremism and its consequences, we see other forms of violent outcomes, including physical, sexual, and emotional abuse; exploitation; murder; and mayhem. And not just among religious orquasi-religious groups, but groups with a range of belief systems.

Let me illustrate:

The Manson Family in 1969: in southern California, at least eight killed, four jailed, plus Charles Manson himself. Meanwhile Mansonite Leslie Van Houten, 58, has spent almost twice as many years in jail as she was alive at the time of her sentencing. She has completely renounced Manson, has been a model prisoner, completed a Master’s degree, and so on – yet she will never be forgiven and never paroled.[11]

Symbionese Liberation Army in 1974: the kidnapping of heiress Patty Hearst by this political cult, whose other activities included police shootouts, bank robberies, attempted bombing, murder, and loss of life of an innocent

Symbionese Liberation Army

civilian as well as several SLA members themselves.[12]

Here’s a different kind of outcome.

International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), one of most known and visible groups came to the U.S. in 1965, better known as the Hare Krishnas. Then in 2000, a class-action lawsuit was filed for alleged sexual abuse of children raised in ISKCON boarding schools. Of interest is the fact that the Hare Krishnas is one of the few controversial groups to issue an apology and offer compensation, mind you, with strings attached, and which some feel is inadequate.[13]

Children of God in 1968 into the 1970s: David Moses Berg’s group was formed in the heyday of cult activity in America, then moved worldwide. By 1974, this group (now known as The Family) was infamous for its controversial sex practices, which first involved sexual “sharing” with group members, then with strangers (the practice known as “flirty fishing”), then expanded to include children, including one’s own children![14]
In 1984 the cult led by Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh put salmonella bacteria in the nearby town’s salad bars, hoping to sway the local election in the cult’s favor. The cult’s hope was that the townspeople wouldn’t make it to the voting booths that day.[15] More than 700 people were sickened. This was the first act of biological “warfare” – probably better described as a biological crime – in the U.S.

In 1992 the Minnesota Patriots Council, an anti-government militia group, managed to make some ricin, a deadly poison derived from castor beans, but they never figured out what to do with it.[16]

In 1995 Aum Shinrikyo released sarin, a type of nerve gas, in the Tokyo subway, killing 12 and causing more than 5,000 to fall ill. This was chemical “warfare” – and perhaps more rightly called warfare because the Aum cult intended to bring about the destruction of humanity in their quest for Armageddon.[17]

Interestingly, a recent book, Bracing for Armageddon? by UCLA immunology professor William Clark[18] cites these last three examples, those orchestrated by cultic groups, as attempts at large-scale bioterror attacks.
But should we be worried? Dr. Clark doesn’t think so. According to him, the combined expertise needed – in microbiology, bioengineering, meteorology, and other scientific areas – to be successful in creating a biological weapon is highly unlikely to occur, not among terrorist groups, not among nations. And so we may assume, not among cults.[19]

Aum, for example, with all of its high-level scientifically-trained members, spent millions of dollars and almost a decade trying to develop biological weapons and were not successful. Dr. Clark believes we have much, much more to worry about from an avian flu or some other natural outbreak.

Nonetheless, today we are all concerned about terrorism and national security. We read every day of terrorist activities, the deaths, injuries, destruction. We see plenty of the aftermath on TV or the Internet.

Over the years, we have seen articles in the worldwide press about families remarking on how their loved one was seduced by a radical imam, a fellow student, someone in the mosque, a coworker, or a neighbor into becoming a revolutionary martyr. Words like “coercion,” “brainwashing,” “targeted recruitment,” and “persuasion” tend to surface in these reports.

Sadly, a recent CNN article reported on the prevalence of females being used for suicide bombing missions: “Intelligence gathered from detainees indicates that al Qaeda in Iraq is looking for women with three main characteristics: those who are illiterate, are deeply religious, or have financial struggles because most likely they’ve lost the male head of the household..If the woman’s psychological state is bad, they try to lure her with the illusions that she will be going to heaven. All of them come from the families of terrorists, and they are being recruited and pressured.”[20]

I have no doubt that a number of us have much to contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of the

Suicide bomber with child

recruitment and indoctrination of young men and women into terrorist organizations. They are not all becoming suicide bombers, we know that. For those who are selected for these martyrdom missions, the indoctrination need not be lengthy, as there are many other geopolitical, historical, theological, and personal factors involved that may make it a relatively swift process. But the point is: there is an indoctrination process – and that’s something that those of us who study cults know about. The vast majority of people are not born to kill, much less in that way. The suicide bombers are not psychopaths; they are victims.

It has also become clear to me in my review of the terrorism literature that so many – I’d even venture to say, the vast majority – of the primary authors have a minimal understanding, at best,[21] and a gross misunderstanding, at worst, of the influence processes that we are so aware of and attuned to – and which are certainly at play here. One of the more highly-regarded terrorism experts recently repeated what he wrote in an earlier book,[22] said that young Muslim youth are not susceptible to brainwashing,[23] and therefore that is not an explanation for why they get involved in terrorist organizations and activity. If Marc Sageman understood what brainwashing was, he couldn’t possibly make such a close-minded statement.

Ironically, Sageman goes on to describe the four-step process by which the youth get radicalized – a process that, for him, somewhat magically goes from personal experience to ideology to a social network where they chat about things to action. Not a single word about the change process an individual must go through to proceed from talk to action, especially when it involves violent, extremist action. No mention of the key elements of influence (possibly even, dare I say, coercion?) critical to such a process.

While terrorism is an important issue, we must also bear in mind that a culture of fear has been generated – at least in the United States – which may make terrorist activity appear to be a bigger threat than it is. A recently-released study by researchers at Simon Fraser University indicates that if we set aside the war in Iraq, acts of terrorism and resultant casualties have gone way down in the past five years – by more than 40% since 2001.[24] In addition, there’s been a 54% decline between 1985 and 2004 in the number of groups in the Middle East and North Africa using violence. One cause for this, according to the study, is the tremendous drop in support for Islamist terror organizations in the Muslim world. Much historical evidence reveals that once they lose public support, terrorist campaigns tend to be abandoned or defeated.

We saw that very phenomenon here in the U.S. in the 1970s, when the Weather Underground, a group of radical left-wing extremists, split off from the more moderate antiwar group, Students for a Democratic Society. The Weathermen, who blew up some buildings – and themselves – became very quickly isolated and irrelevant. So did the radical group Earth First!, when it advocated tree-spiking and other potentially violent acts to stop logging. Many lost interest and switched their support to more moderate environmental groups. The same dampening effect took place when extremists spurred on by the Army of God and several other hate groups incited the murder of abortion doctors. At least three doctors and four clinic staff were killed. Clinics were bombed and vandalized; staff and volunteers were stalked and harassed. Ultimately, the outcome was marginalization of that brand of ideological extremism and isolation if its perpetrators.

So while we certainly want to keep our sights on terrorist groups that use cult techniques to recruit and convert loyal followers into deployable agents, we must not forget what I consider to be our first priority – all those cults in our midst.

* * *

I’ve mentioned political groups and terrorist organizations in the same sentence that I’ve used the word “cult.” Let me be clear about what I mean when I use “c” word. Moreover, I’d like to address the ongoing controversy surrounding it, a debate that, unfortunately, still plagues us and sometimes distracts us and diverts us from our greater goals.

In a recent New York Times op-ed piece, the authors argue that terrorists like to be called jihadists because it associates them with a term that has positive connotations,[25] just as some cults surely would like to be called a “new religious movement” (NRM) because it puts them in a positive light. (Except of course a cult like the one I was in, which was political: “religious” is hardly an appropriate identifier for such a group, which is exactly part of the problem with the NRM term.) In the case of terrorists, once they’re called jihadists, it puts them smack dab in the middle of a religious framework, turning the discussion toward theology and away from the terrorizing and intimidation of the public and the murder of innocents. Jihad grants honor; it deflects from the unlawful violence and disorder. The authors of the op-ed piece end with this: “The label may seem passé, but terrorism is an internationally recognized word for an internationally recognized crime. If we want to win the war on words, we would do well to choose the ones we use with greater care.”[26]

As far as NRMs go, I am sometimes struck by the lack of complex thinking among some scholars. For one, they seem to think that if you identify a group as a cult, then you are also saying that it isn’t a religion, or a “new” religion, as though one necessarily precludes the other. They pat themselves on the back and declare “the cult wars” are over. Not so fast, I say.

Given what’s happening around the world today, their stance on the c-word and their incessant incantation that brainwashing doesn’t exist places them on the wrong side of history.

And now a debate among them seems to be about what signifies “new.” How old does something have to be before it’s no longer “new”? I think that misses the point. What is of interest are the features that signify that something is a cult as we understand that term – whether it be an NRM, and old RM, a club, a political group, a karate school, a commune, a family, a psychotherapy group, a UFO group, and so on. In that regard, we must look at the patterns of structure, social relations, power relations, and behavior that would allow us to characterize something as a cult.

Equally important, as touched on earlier, by not having a commonly agreed-upon neutral – or cross-discipline – identifier, we are left with no language with which to talk about those groups that are not theologically based, like my old group and so many others. Just as the term terrorism is internationally recognized, I submit that the term “cult” has a solid foundation: in the social sciences, that is, in sociology, anthropology, criminology, political science, social psychology, and psychology; in the humanities, that is, in religious studies, history, and American studies; as well as in business and organization theory. Never mind that some sympathetic academics and cult spokespersons would have us believe – or more importantly, would have the media, the legal profession and the general public believe – that there is no such thing as a cult and no such thing as brainwashing.

In a kind of misguided political correctness, much of the media may have backed down, opting for “sect” now most of the time. And some courts may have been fooled by the aggressive misleading tactics of a few so-called experts, although some courts have seen through that and have allowed testimony regarding the undue influence of cultic control. And I can tell you that the general public ain’t so dumb either. People understand these terms and have for decades.

Now I don’t mean to imply that this is so simple, or that there aren’t some misunderstandings or instances of jumping the gun or mislabeling that may go on. Realistically, that’s the case with anything controversial.
Yes, cult is a contested concept.[27] Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean we should throw out the term. It has a good foundation; it’s been recognized repeatedly; and it serves a purpose.

Do we need to do a better job of explaining it? Sometimes, yes.

Do we need to speak out when it’s used improperly or too hastily? Yes, of course.

Does the term cult carry a negative connotation? Yes, I suppose it does for some people in some instances.

Do the cults bear some, if not all, responsibility for that? Yes, I believe they do.

Do cults get desperate and sometimes act out under the threat of outside pressure or the perception that they are being “persecuted”? Yes, some of them do. But that doesn’t mean we should shut up and go away, that we should discontinue our study of them or cease holding them accountable to decent human behavior and the laws of the land. In fact, we have seen that outside pressure has sometimes led a cult to change or “soften” its practices, as the polygamous FLDS is now claiming to no longer sanction underage marriages. Public scrutiny sometimes pays off, and I say that with the clarification that I am not advocating unwarranted government intervention or the passage of laws that would restrict our freedoms. But freedom also comes with the obligation to act responsibly.
Do we need to improve and deepen our own understanding of the phenomenon in all its manifestations? Yes, of course. This is why our ongoing research is so vital. Why we must strive to publish across disciplines. We must get our point of view out there in serious, substantive, grounded articles and books.

We must continue to fight – strategically and smartly – against the academic blacklisting that Ben Zablocki wrote about more than 10 years ago.[28] And not just the blacklisting of any discussion of brainwashing, as he was writing about in that particular article, but also we must fight against and expose the difficulty of getting anything published that presents a critical perspective of cults in general or of a specific group – no matter how well-researched and substantiated the work may be.

And – extremely important – we still have to work on getting people to better understand the complexities of cult involvement and commitment so they don’t blame the victim.

As with any area of study, we have to call our subject of interest something or we can’t study it, can’t talk about it. Frankly, I believe that we create more confusion and trouble for ourselves and deflect from our educational and research goals when we use a hodgepodge of terms – totalist, high-demand, closed, authoritarian, and so on. These are all well and good. I’ve got nothing against them, really. In fact, I myself have been guilty of this exercise in avoidance. But in reality, aren’t we really just shying away from saying it like it is?

I was quite heartened last month when the British Crown Prosecution Service ruled that the word cult was neither “abusive or insulting.” This was in relation to the London police issuing a summons to a young man picketing at one of the Anonymous demonstrations in front of the Scientology HQ there. The police insisted the boy remove his placard with the word “cult” on it. When the summons got thrown out, his mother said the decision was “a victory for free speech”[29] – and indeed it was.

What Does The Future Hold?

As I wrote in my book Bounded Choice, “The combination of charismatic leadership, a transcendent belief system, personal commitment, and social and psychological pressure is the key dynamic.”[30] It’s key to the transformation of the individual from dedicated believer to deployable agent and is the core of what we must strive to convey to others. Submitting oneself to the domination of a charismatic leader is an intimate and complex process; it is unique to each leader and each devotee. Yet, by examining the similarities of charismatic influence and control in its various forms, we stand to gain a more profound understanding of this enigmatic phenomenon. We also become better equipped to share our knowledge with other concerned professionals and the general public.

So much is happening in today’s world where we can contribute. A never-ending series of events is calling us:

• The recent situation with the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS) community in Texas.
• The prophet/leader of the FLDS, Warren Jeffs, convicted last year of being an accomplice to rape for performing a wedding between a young man and a 14-year-old girl, and facing more charges in Arizona.[31]
• The wildly creative Anonymous protests around the world.
• The incessant flow of vulnerable individuals into terrorist organizations.

And there are plenty of other incidents:

• Three large “dream homes” set afire by eco-terrorists, the Earth Liberation Front, a group that. along with the Animal Liberation Front, has committed and claimed responsibility for hundreds of criminal attacks in the past decade. This one did seven million dollars in damage.[32]
• A group of followers (including at least four children) of a Russian cult leader barricaded themselves in a cave about 400 miles southeast of Moscow for more than seven months waiting for doomsday.[33]
• A media interview with an egocentric cult leader claiming to be the Messiah, who admitted on tape to “lying naked” with three underage girls (one as young as 12 years old), got busted and charged with criminal sexual contact with a minor about a week after the program aired on the National Geographic channel.[34]

All of this and more tells us that ideological extremism is alive and well. Cults thrive on ideological extremism. Through well-known mechanisms of influence and control – patterns we’ve seen time and again in these groups – individual lives become more and more constrained, sometimes gradually, sometimes rather quickly. Minds are shaped to respond in cult-approved ways. In the case of those who are born or raised in a cult, these controlling influences are everywhere around you, from birth, from childhood on. Growing up in such an environment may leave an imprint far beyond what many of us can begin to comprehend.

I’m currently engaged in a research project interviewing people who were born or raised in a cult. What’s unique about the population I’m interviewing is that all of these people left the cult on their own, either in adolescence or early adulthood. I am so humbled and awed by the life stories that these brave people are sharing with me. And the good news is, they survive. They build lives, they have relationships, they go to school, they establish careers, they figure out their emotions and what they believe in, they valiantly struggle with identity issues and with practical life matters, often without a helping hand.

It’s been clear for some time now that this is the new population that demands our attention. Their experiences, their insights are adding a whole new dimension to our knowledge base. Because of them, I would submit that the scientific understanding of “resilience” will be greatly expanded. They, too, are our heroes.

I read something on the Internet the other day: a Ph.D. professor wrote, “Suicide bombers are hardwired to become killers,” meaning they were born that way. Personally and professionally, I don’t believe that for a minute.
In fact, new brain research is showing us that the years of the “hard-wired traditionalists” are over. This new area of study, called neuroplasticity, is about whether or not the brain is fixed or flexible in its structure and capabilities.[35] And from this research, we are learning that the adult brain can change, that “the human brain is almost infinitely malleable.. People used to think that our mental meshwork . was largely fixed by the time we reached adulthood. But brain researchers have discovered that that’s not the case.”[36] Even the adult mind is very plastic, they tell us. And these adaptations occur also at a biological level. If the brain has the ability to reprogram itself “on the fly,” as one neuroscientist put it,[37] then surely our brains can also be tampered with by others who have influence over us. This new science serves us in two ways:

First, it will help substantiate our stance that brainwashing does exist. That people can be and are changed through the concerted efforts of cultic systems of influence and control.

When I wrote in a poem shortly after leaving my cult, “They took my brain and made me something other than I wanted to be.,”[38] I didn’t have the scientific words for it then, but I knew I’d been brainwashed – and I knew I had done it to others as well.

Second, neuroplasticity research gives us new ways to understand and study the recovery process after someone leaves a cult.

I conclude with a challenge and a hope. Cults come in all sizes and shapes, with a variety of beliefs and practices. But they aren’t really mysterious as the media sometimes implies, leaving us with bewildering sound bites rather than substantive explorations that would shed light and bring clarity. We have some long-standing definitions and a set of characteristics that can be associated with these groups. Let’s stand by them. Let’s use them. Let’s be the ones to shed light. If a 16-year-old boy in London wasn’t intimidated by scare tactics, don’t you be either.

We can’t shy away from the new developments, such as in neuroscience, but neither should we forget the foundational works of Robert Jay Lifton, Edgar Schein, and Margaret Thaler Singer. The work of Bruce Perry[39] is worthy of our attention. And of course, we must not ignore the basic social-psychological explanations emanating from Asch, Milgram, Janis, Goffman, Cialdini, Zablocki, myself, and others.

Cults don’t really do anything new or different from what’s been done for eons. They are just very good at packaging influence and control in a very deliberate way. I believe it is our responsibility as a movement and vitally important to train and nurture the next generation of scholars and practitioners to meet this challenge.

[1] This article is adapted from the paper given as the Keynote Address at the annual meeting of the International Cultic Studies Association, Philadelphia, PA, June 27, 2008. Copyright © 2008 by Janja Lalich. Do not cite or reproduce without permission of the author. Contact: Janja Lalich, Ph.D., Professor of Sociology, California State University, Chico, Chico, CA 95929-0445; jlalich@csuchico.edu

[2] This section of the presentation honoring people in the field of cultic studies has been deleted from this version of the Keynote Address.
[3] Lalich, Janja. Bounded Choice: True Believers and Charismatic Cults. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.
[4] Isaacson, Barry. “The secret letters of the Jonestown death cult.” The Spectator (UK), May 14, 2008.
[5] Singer, Margaret Thaler, with Janja Lalich. Cults in Our Midst. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 1995.
[6] Lalich. Bounded Choice, p. 10.
[7] Mayer, Jean-Francois. “‘Our Terrestrial Journey Is Coming to an End’: The Last Voyage of the Solar Temple,” Nova Religio, 1999, 2(2), pp. 172-196
[8] Lalich, Bounded Choice.
[9] Ibid., p. 12.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Associated Press. “Manson follower Van Houten denied parole for 18th time.” Enterprise-Record (Chico, CA), August 30, 2007.
[12] Taylor, Michael. “SLA’s Legacy a Violent Void.” San Francisco Chronicle, November 11, 2002, pp. A1, A12.
[13] See http://www.surrealist.org for the perspective of former gurukulis.
[14] Williams, Miriam. Heaven’s Harlots: My Fifteen Years as a Sacred Prostitute in the Children of God Cult. New York: Eagle Brook/ Morrow, 1998. See also: Lattin, Don. Jesus Freaks: A True Story of Murder and Madness on the Evangelical Edges. San Francisco: HarperOne, 2007; and Jones, Kritina, Celeste Jones, & Juliana Buhring. Not Without My Sister: The True Story of Three Girls Violated and Betrayed. London: Harper Element, 2007.
[15] Lalich, Bounded Choice, p.10.
[16] Palmquist, Matt. “Bioterror in Context: How and Why the Threat of Bioterrorism Has Been So Greatly Exaggerated.” Miller-McCune, June-July 2008, pp. 72, 73-76.
[17] Lifton, Robert Jay. Destroying the World to Save It: Aum Shinrikyo, Apocalyptic Violence, and the New Global Terrorism. New York: Metropolitan Books, 1999.
[18] Clark, William R. Bracing for Armageddon?: The Science and Politics of Bioterrorism in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
[19] Palmquist, “Bioterror in Context.”
[20] Damon, Arwa. “Iraqi woman describes daughter’s descent into suicide bombing.” CNN.com, June 6, 2008.
[21] For an intelligent understanding of indoctrination of terrorists, see The Faces of Terrorism: Social and Psychological Dimensions by Neil J. Smelser (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).
[22] Sageman, Marc. Understanding Terror Networks. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.
[23] Sageman, Marc. “Explaining Terror Networks in the 21st Century.” Footnotes (American Sociological Association), May/June 2008, p. 7.
[24] Zakaria, Fareed. “What’s really scary about terror statistics.” San Francisco Chronicle, May 27, 2008.
[25] Singer P.W., and Elina Noor. “What Do You Call a Terror(Jihad)ist?” New York Times, June 2, 2008.
[26]Ibid.
[27] Smelser. Faces of Terrorism, p. 239.
[28] Zablocki, Benjamin D. “The Blacklisting of a Concept: The Strange History of the Brainwashing Conjecture in the Sociology of Religion.” Nova Religio 1997, 1(1), pp. 96-121.
[29] Dawar, Anil. “Schoolboy avoids prosecution for branding Scientology a cult.” The Guardian (UK), May 23, 2008.
[30] Lalich. Bounded Choice, p. xvi.
[31] Dobner, Jennifer. “Jury reaches verdict at polygamist trial.” Associated Press, September 25, 2007.
[32] Gillespie, Elizabeth M. “Dream homes set afire, apparently by eco-radicals.” San Francisco Chronicle, March 4, 2008, p. A3.
[33] ‘Hope for end to Russia cave siege.” BBC News, March 29, 2008. http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/europe/7320086.stm
[34] “Inside a Cult,” first broadcast on the National Geographic Channel, April 23, 2008. See also: Baker, Deborah, “New Mexico sect leader accused anew of sex abuse.” Associated Press, May 20, 2008.
[35] Doidge, Norman. The Brain That Changes Itself. New York: Penguin, 2007. See also: Schwartz, Jeffrey M., and Sharon Begley. The Miind & The Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force. New York: Harper Perennial, 2003.
[36] Carr, Nicholas. “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” The Atlantic, July/August 2008, pp. 56-63.
[37] Ibid., p. 60.
[38] First published in Lalich, Janja. “The Cadre Ideal: Origins and Development of a Political Cult.” Cultic Studies Journal, 1992, 9(1), 1, pp. 66-67
[39] Perry, Bruce, & Maia Szalavitz. The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog and Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist’s Notebook: What Traumatized Children Can Teach Us About Loss, Love, and Healing. New York: Basic Books, 2006.

Book Review Awesome Families: The Promise of Healing Relationships in the International Churches of Christ. By Kathleen E. Jenkins. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2005. Pp. 283. $22.95.

Reviewed byJanja Lalich, Ph.D.
California State University, Chico

Awesome Families is a thoughtful, well-written, and engaging ethnography on one of the more controversial new religious movements to emerge in recent decades. A family member’s involvement sparked Kathleen Jenkins’s interest in the International Churches of Christ (ICOC), which led her as a sociologist to undertake six years of fieldwork. To her credit, Jenkins did not succumb to the prevalent (and myopic) practice among many sociologists of religion of disregarding the experiences of ex-members, although occasionally she uses dismissive language when referring to statements by ex-members, concerned family members, and critics.

Nonetheless, this is a welcome addition to the study of cults and new religious movements, where well-executed studies of a single group are still rare. Detailed works such as this help to illuminate the complexities of conversion and commitment to controversial religious and social movements. Jenkins embeds her analysis in the context of contemporary issues related to family, gender relations, and culture (including conservative evangelical Christianity). This makes Awesome Families all the more relevant; it could easily be adopted for courses in sociology of religion, family, or gender. The author succeeds brilliantly in her effort at contributing to a “middle ground” in the field of cultic studies, as called for by Benjamin Zablocki and Thomas Robbins (Misunderstanding Cults: Searching for Objectivity in a Controversial Field [University of Toronto Press, 2001]).

Jenkins set out to understand the attraction of a group that some hailed as “awesome” and infinitely rewarding, and which others saw as destroying families and intimate relationships. From its founding in 1979 until its demise in 2004, the ICOC, with “family” as a prominent theme in its structure and ideology, baptized more than 100,000 individuals worldwide. Jenkins’s astute observations on collective ritual and the orchestration of large events validate just how savvy such groups have become in their use of media (chap. 3). According to Jenkins, contemporary paradoxes of family, gender, and sexuality create personal (and cultural) confusions that were cleverly mined by the ICOC to lure converts with the promise of a fail-safe healing system. The rub, as she points out, is that such high-demand groups tend to be unable to sustain themselves. Once the promise is recognized as empty, believers—even the most loyal—tend to stray. Often this exodus is aided by revelations of corruption, leadership abuses, financial mismanagement, and duplicitous behavior (chap. 7). This is not a new story by any means, but Jenkins’s lively descriptions and artful analyses allow us better to understand true believers and the dilemma of living under the burden of too many contradictions (which boil down to individualism vs. submission to authority).

Jenkins deftly handles her wily subject matter. Systematic contradictions in ideology and practice, and the ways in which they were sustained through group discourse, are clearly delineated. ICOC’s promised awesome families were attainable only through “discipling,” nonoptional, one-on-one counseling that occurred everywhere in the ICOC environment (chap. 1). Ironically, with everything riding on disciplers’ wisdom and guidance, none were formally trained in counseling (chaps. 2, 5). Adherents subjected themselves to this incessant intrusion into their lives, Jenkins argues, because today, family therapy is acceptable, even inevitable, and ICOC convinced its members that discipling was a God-given therapeutic method for resolving all relational, familial, and personal problems. Members’ most troubling conflicts centered on relationships with non-ICOC relatives, stemming in part from the group’s goal of converting all family members. While instructed to remain true to their family of origin, except those too critical of ICOC (chap. 4), adherents also were taught that church family was the only “real” family (chap. 6). Even though “family” was touted as a number-one concern, members quickly learned that recruitment and fundraising were the actual priorities. Jenkins portrayed members making heroic efforts at dealing with the multiple demands on them to proselytize widely, raise perfect families, have awesome intimate relationships, be a wage earner, study the Bible, recruit, disciple, and be discipled.

To explain how ICOC members made sense of their lives, Jenkins employs Ann Swidler’s “culture in action” concept. This works to a point. Jenkins acknowledges she heard and saw only what members and leaders wanted her to. Thus, the front-stage performance of contented but confused cult members rationalizing the chaos and dissonance in their lives by extracting from a cultural toolkit felt overdrawn at times. Given the stress devoted members must have experienced, one wonders why Jenkins did not observe or learn about more eruptions and meltdowns instead of the many blissful narratives of “saves” and satisfaction. Here, former member accounts could have invigorated the analysis. Jenkins mentions frequently that ex-members told different stories about aspects of ICOC life, yet she rarely elaborates or shares those details so that we might see a more complete picture. This is the greatest weakness in an otherwise riveting account of life in a high-demand group. By relying so heavily on current members’ perceptions, Jenkins fails to explicitly explore and so downplays the ever-present mechanisms of social influence and social control in the ICOC. Such an addition might have told more about why someone submits to such an authoritarian cultic system. Nevertheless, the widespread and powerful organizational and social-psychological mechanisms are quite evident in Jenkins’s descriptions of everyday life and special events, and remain central to any understanding of what made this movement work, and ultimately fall apart.

But there I was, new to the San Francisco Bay Area and before long cleverly recruited into a group that preached Marxism and feminism and a passion for the working class. I was told that we would be unlike all other groups on the Left because we were led by women and because our leader was brilliant and from the working class. I was told that we would not follow the political line of any other country, but that we would create our own brand of Marxism, our own proletarian feminist revolution; we would not be rigid, dogmatic, sexist, or racist. We were new and different—an elite force. We were going to make the world a better place for all people.

The reality, of course, was that our practical work had little if anything to do with working-class ideals or goals. Our leader was an incorrigible, uncontrollable megalomaniac; she was alcoholic, arbitrary, and almost always angry. Our organization, with the word democratic prominent in its name, was ultra-authoritarian, completely top down, with no real input or criticism sought or listened to. Our lives were made up of eighteen-hour days of busywork and denunciation sessions. Our world was harsh, barren, and unrewarding. We were committed and idealistic dreamers who were tricked into believing that such demanding conditions were necessary to transform ourselves into cadre fighters. We were instructed that we were the “uninstructed” and that we must take all guidance from our leader who knew all. We were never to question any orders or in any way contradict or confront our leader. We were taught to dread and fear the outside world which, we were told, would shun and punish us. In fact, the shunning and punishment was rampant within; but, blinded by our own belief, commitment, and fatigue, in conjunction with the group’s behavior-control techniques, I and the others succumbed to the pressures and quickly learned to rationalize away any doubts or apprehensions.

I remained in that group for more than ten years.

When I got out of the cult in early 1986, I had to begin life anew. I was a decade behind in everything. Both my parents had died, and I had lost touch with former friends. I had to play catch up, so to speak, culturally, socially, economically, emotionally, and intellectually. But most important of all, I had to repair my soul. Who am I? How could I have committed the many unkind acts while in the group? Where do I belong now? What do I believe in now? Will I ever restore my faith in myself and in others? These are the kinds of questions and dilemmas that troubled me. Over time, and most recently through my contact and work with former members of many types of cults, I’ve come to see that the single most uniform aspect of all cult experiences is that it touches, and usually damages, the soul, the psyche.

I define a cult as a particular kind of relationship; it can be a group situation or between two people. Within that relationship there is an enormous power imbalance, but more than that, there is a hidden agenda. There is deception, manipulation, exploitation, and almost certainly abuse, carried out and/or reinforced by the use of social and psychological influence techniques meant to control behavior and shape attitudes and thinking patterns. A cult is led by a person (or sometimes two or three) who demands all veneration, who makes all decisions, and who ultimately controls most aspects of the personal lives of those who are cleverly persuaded that they must follow, obey, and stay in the good graces (i.e., the grips) of the leader.

Cult leaders and cult recruiters capture the hearts, minds, and souls of the best and brightest in our society. Cults are looking for active, productive, intelligent, energetic individuals who will perform for the cult by fund-raising, by recruiting more followers, by operating cult businesses and leading cult seminars. In the 1960s and 1970s it was perhaps more typical for cults to recruit primarily young people; this is no longer so. Today, cults recruit the young and old alike and everyone in between. With anywhere from three to five thousand cults active in the United States today, it is quite likely that a cult recruiter has been knocking on your door or that you have unwittingly answered a cult’s advertisement for a course, a workshop, a lecture, a book or tape, or some other product.

Today’s cults are so sophisticated in their recruitment and indoctrination techniques that their methods go far beyond what anybody imagined in the 1950s when certain scholars and researchers were studying and writing about thought-reform programs and systematic behavior-control processes. Cults today have perfected their approaches and refined their manipulations. They had to—after all, recruiting and retaining bright people isn’t easy. And this is again where the soul comes in.

Cults appeal to that part of us that wants something better. A better world for others or a better self—these are the genuine, heartfelt desires of decent, honest human beings. Cult recruiters are trained in how to play on those desires, how to make it look as though what the cult has to offer is exactly what you’re interested in. Cults can be formed around almost any topic; there are nine broad categories of cults: religious, Eastern-based, New Age, business, political, psychotherapy/human potential, occult, one-on-one, and miscellaneous (such as lifestyle or personality cults).

All cults, no matter their stripe, are a variation on a theme, for their common denominator is the use of coercive persuasion and behavior control without the knowledge of the person who is being manipulated. They manage this by targeting (and eventually attacking, dissembling, and reformulating according to the cult’s desired image) a person’s innermost self. They take away you and give you back a cult personality, a pseudopersonality. They punish you when the old you turns up, and they reward the new you. Before you know it, you don’t know who you are or how you got there; you only know (or you are trained to believe) that you have to stay there. In a cult there is only one way—cults are totalitarian, a yellow brick road to serve the leader’s whims and desires, be they power, sex, or money.

When I was in my cult, I so desperately wanted to believe that I had finally found the answer. Life in our society today can be difficult, confusing, daunting, disheartening, alarming, and frightening. Someone with a glib tongue and good line can sometimes appear to offer you a solution. In my case, I was drawn in by the proposed political solution—to bring about social change. For someone else, the focus may be on health, diet, psychological awareness, the environment, the stars, a spirit being, or even becoming a more successful business person. The crux is that cult leaders are adept at convincing us that what they have to offer is special, real, unique, and forever—and that we wouldn’t be able to survive apart from the cult. A person’s sense of belief is so dear, so deep, and so powerful; ultimately it is that belief that helps bind the person to the cult. It is the glue used by the cult to make the mind manipulations stick. It is our very core, our very belief in our self and our commitment, it is our very faith in humankind and the world that is exploited and abused and turned against us by the cults.

φφφ

When a person finally breaks from a cultic relationship, it is the soul, then, that is most in need of repair. When you discover one day that your guru is a fraud, that the “miracles” are no more than magic tricks, that the group’s victories and accomplishments are fabrications of an internal public-relations system, that your holy teacher is breaking his avowed celibacy with every young disciple, that the group’s connections to people of import are nonexistent … when awarenesses such as these come upon you, you are faced with what many have called a “spiritual rape.” Whether your cultic experience was religious or secular, the realization of such enormous loss and betrayal tends to cause considerable pain. As a result, afterwards, many people are prone to reject all forms of belief. In some cases, it may take years to overcome the disillusionment, and learn not only to have trust in your inner self but also to believe in something again.

There is also a related difficulty: that persistent nagging feeling that you have made a mistake in leaving the group—perhaps the teachings are true and the leader is right; perhaps it is you who failed. Because cults are so clever at manipulating certain emotions and events—in particular, wonder, awe, transcendence, and mystery (this is sometimes called “mystical manipulation”)—and because of the human desire to believe, a former cult member may grasp at some way to go on believing even after leaving the group. For this reason, many people today go from one cult to another, or go in and out of the same cultic group or relationship (known as “cult hopping”). Since every person needs something to believe in—a philosophy of life, a way of being, an organized religion, a political commitment, or a combination thereof—sorting out these matters of belief tends to be a major area of adjustment after a cultic experience.

Since a cult involvement is often an ill-fated attempt to live out some form of personal belief, the process of figuring out what to believe in once you’ve left the cult may be facilitated by dissecting the cult’s ideological system. Do an evaluation of the group’s philosophy, attitudes, and worldview; define it for yourself in your own language, not the language of the cult. Then see how this holds up against the cult’s actual daily practice or what you now know about the group. For some, it might be useful to go back and research the spiritual or philosophical system that you were raised in or believed in prior to the cult involvement. Through this process you will be better able to assess what is real and what is not, what is useful and what is not, what is distortion and what is not. By having a basis for comparison, you will be able to question and explore areas of knowledge or belief that were no doubt systematically closed to you while in the cult.

Most people who come out of a cultic experience shy away from organized religion or any kind of organized group for some time. I generally encourage people to take their time before choosing another religious affiliation or group involvement. As with any intimate relationship, trust is reciprocal and must be earned.

After a cult experience, when you wake up to face the deepest emptiness, the darkest hole, the sharpest scream of inner terror at the deception and betrayal you feel, I can only offer hope by saying that in confronting the loss, you will find the real you. And when your soul is healed, refreshed, and free of the nightmare bondage of cult lies and manipulations, the real you will find a new path, a valid path—a path to freedom and wholeness.

φφφφφ

Janja Lalich, Ph.D. is a researcher, educator and consultant specializing in cultism and extremist groups and ideologies. She is the author of Bounded Choice: True Believers and Charismatic Cults (University of California Press, 2004); coauthor of Take Back Your Life: Recovering from Cults and Abusive Relationships (Bay Tree, 2006); Cults in Our Midst: The Hidden Menace in Our Everyday Lives (Jossey-Bass, 1995); and “Crazy” Therapies: What Are They? Do They Work? (Jossey-Bass, 1996); and editor of Women Under the Influence: A Study of Women’s Lives in Totalist Groups (special volume of the Cultic Studies Journal, 14(1), 1997). Dr. Lalich is Professor of Sociology at California State University, Chico, and may be reached at drlalich@sbcglobal.net. Her current research focuses on the experiences of individuals who were born and raised in a cult, and in particular their adjustment to mainstream society once they leave the cult.