The archive carries the word cult in its name, and the about page explains why. On the shelves themselves the word is used sparingly, because it describes almost nothing. It tells you that the speaker disapproves of a group. It does not tell you what the group believes, how it is organized, whether anyone is being harmed, or why intelligent people joined it.
This entry sets out the method the archive uses instead. It is a way of reading: a sequence of questions to put to any small, new or marginal religious movement, whether one meets it in a library, a news report or a relative's conversation.
Why not cult
In its older sense the word meant simply a system of worship. In the twentieth century it acquired a second meaning, a small group gathered around a living teacher, and then a third: a dangerous, manipulative organization. In common speech the three have collapsed into one, with the result that any unfamiliar religion can be made to sound sinister by the choice of a single noun.
Scholars generally prefer new religious movement. The phrase is clumsy and has the virtue of being accurate. It marks what these groups have in common, that they are recent and stand apart from established traditions, without deciding in advance whether they are benign. Most are. They are small, earnest and short-lived, and they harm no one. A few are not, and it is in order to identify those few that the general suspicion needs to be set aside.
First question: how does the group stand toward the world?
A standard typology sorts movements by their attitude to the surrounding society.
- World-rejecting
- The present order is corrupt and soon to be swept away. Members withdraw, often into a shared household, surrender property and sever outside ties. Commitment is total.
- World-affirming
- The world is acceptable; the individual is underperforming. The movement offers techniques for unlocking potential, usually in courses for a fee. Members carry on with ordinary lives.
- World-accommodating
- The movement supplies spiritual experience felt to be missing from conventional religion and otherwise leaves its members' relations with society unchanged.
The typology is a first sorting, not a verdict. But it predicts where strain will arise. Conflict with families, authorities and the press gathers overwhelmingly around the first type, because a group that rejects the world asks for everything.
Second question: what is promised, and by when?
Many world-rejecting movements are millenarian. They expect an imminent, total transformation: a judgment, a rescue, a new age. Some go further and name the day.
What happens when the day passes is the most studied question in the field, and the answer is not what common sense expects. In a classic case from the 1950s, observers joined a small group whose leader had announced a flood for a particular night. The night was uneventful. The members who had waited alone at home drifted away. Those who had waited together did not. Within hours they had a new message, to the effect that their faithfulness had spared the world, and people who had previously shunned publicity began to seek converts.
The explanation offered was that a person who has given up a job, a home and a reputation for a belief cannot easily conclude that the belief was false. It is less painful to reinterpret the failure and to recruit others, whose agreement makes the interpretation feel more secure. Later research has refined the picture. Movements respond to failed prophecy in several ways, and outright collapse is among the rarer ones. Our calendar of failed prophecies collects some instructive specimens.
A failed prophecy seldom ends a movement. More often it begins the movement's second and more durable phase.
Third question: how does authority work?
Most new movements begin with a charismatic founder: a person believed to have a unique gift or revelation. Charisma is unstable. It depends on continuing proof and it does not survive the founder's death unless it is converted into something else, such as an office, a scripture or a set of rules. Whether and how that conversion happens decides whether the movement lasts.
Useful things to establish are these. Can the leader be questioned? By whom, and what happens to those who do? Is there any body, a council or a constitution, to which the leader answers? Who controls the money? The answers distinguish an eccentric fellowship from an autocracy far more reliably than any doctrine.
Fourth question: what does leaving cost?
This is the question that separates the harmless from the harmful, and it should be asked before all others when someone's welfare is at stake. The warning signs of a high-control group are consistent across very different belief systems.
- Information is managed. Outside sources are forbidden or discredited in advance. Doubt is redefined as a spiritual failing in the doubter.
- Exit is punished. Those who leave are shunned by friends and family who remain, or are told that leaving brings ruin.
- Commitment only increases. Each demand, of time, money or obedience, is a little larger than the last, and none can be reversed.
- The leader is exempt. Rules that bind the members do not bind the person at the top, and there is no mechanism of complaint.
- Outsiders are the enemy. The world is divided into the saved and the lost, and concern from relatives is treated as attack.
- Ordinary supports are removed. Members lose independent income, housing, sleep or contact with anyone who knew them before.
A group that shows several of these is dangerous whatever it teaches. A group that shows none of them is not, however peculiar its cosmology. The library's Manual for the Unconvinced, written by former members, is a practical treatment of the same ground.
A note on brainwashing
Popular accounts explain membership by a special technique of mental coercion. The evidence does not support it. Studies of even the most demanding movements found that the great majority of those who attended a first meeting never joined, and that most who joined left of their own accord within a couple of years. An irresistible technique would not have such a failure rate.
What the research describes instead is ordinary social influence, applied intensively: affection, belonging, gradual commitment, and the difficulty of walking away from people one has come to love. This is less dramatic than brainwashing and more useful to know about, because it is something to which no one is immune.
A worked example
The following file illustrates the method on a movement documented in Alasdair Penhallow's Bestiary of Small Cults.
- Name
- The Assembly of the Unlit Lamp
- Active
- 1954 to the early 1980s
- Type
- World-rejecting, millenarian
- Teaching
- A great darkness was coming in which every artificial light would fail. Members kept an oil lamp, never lit, to be kindled on the night itself.
- Authority
- A founder known as the Trimmer, succeeded on her death in 1963 by a committee of three. No further revelations were permitted.
- Prophecy
- The founder left three dates: 1958, 1961 and 1967. After the third, the darkness was declared to have occurred inwardly.
- Cost of leaving
- Low. Members held outside jobs and kept their homes. Leavers were regretted, not shunned.
- Assessment
- Benign. The movement asked for a weekly meeting and a lamp. It had twenty-three members when Penhallow visited, most of them elderly, and it faded as they did.
The Assembly believed something strange and did no harm. Many groups with entirely respectable doctrines could not pass the fourth question as easily.
Reading the documents
Finally, a word on sources. A movement's own literature shows how members understood themselves and should be read first. Accounts by former members are indispensable for what the official literature omits, and should be read with the awareness that people who leave in pain remember in pain. Journalism supplies events and is usually weakest on belief. Each kind of source is partial in its own direction. The reader's task is to hold all three and resist the wish to have the matter settled by a single word.