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It has been suggested that this article be merged with cult. (Discuss) Proposed since September 2006.

This article describes a 1970s sociological phenomenon known as the cult debate also called cult war.

History of debate

As the Vietnam war wound down in the early 1970s, and the US public's preoccupation with the so-called Red Menace declined, a new idée fixe arose in its place: what it saw as the menace of cults.

Throughout the decade, various organizations both dangerous (Charles Manson's "The Family") and benign (Hare Krishna) came to the forefront of debate over the changing mores of US society. Newspapers and broadcast news, as well as religious leaders and parents who worried over losing their teenaged and college-aged children to the Youth Movement of the 60s and 70s, frequently focused attention on groups they described as "dangerous cults."

While some of these groups were, in fact, notoriously criminal, engaging in behavior such as murder (Manson), kidnapping and armed robbery (Symbionese Liberation Army), prostitution and child sexual abuse (Children of God), and enforced separation from family members (various), others were culpable of nothing more "dangerous" than indoctrination of adherents into religious faiths or groups whose doctrines seemed unfamiliar, strange or even heretical to outsiders. Some of the groups that entered the national cult debate in the early and mid 1970s were Erhard Seminars Training (est), Exclusive Brethren, Hare Krishna, the Unification Church, and Transcendental Meditation (TM).

Connotative change

During the period, the word "cult" lost its traditional meaning (a system of religious worship) and came to be associated with notions such as brainwashing, mind control, coersive recruiting tactics and sex abuse.

These nefarious associations were cemented in 1978 with the Reverend Jim Jones and the mass suicide of members of the Peoples Temple.

During this period, certain religious clerics and lay members of some evangelical Christian groups took advantage of this wave of publicity, and began using the term "cult" as a pejorative to describe any religious faith group whose doctrines or theology were different from their own. Members of so-called "anti-cult" ministries began publishing and distributing disparaging checklists with titles such as "Checklist of Cult Characteristics", , , where each entry on the checklist described unique beliefs or doctrines of a target religious faith. By disparaging doctrines such as Mariology or Antitrinitarianism, these groups attempted to calumniate even large, established faiths such as Roman Catholicism and Mormonism with the label "cult."

Post-debate change

Acknowledging the now-disparaging connotation of the once-useful term "cult," some scholars of religion and sociology began in the 1980s to use the term "New Religious Movement" to describe smaller and newer religious faith groups. Whilst not in common use -- due in some measure to its unwieldy name -- the newer term has wide currency both in the academic community and amongst religious scholars.

References and footnotes

1. Hofstadter, Richard, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, where Hofstadter argues that the anti-Catholic hysteria of the 1800s, the anti-immmigrant movement that lead to the Palmer raids in the 1920s, and the Red Scare that began in the 1950s are all examples of the thesis that in times of economic, social or political crisis, small conspiracy-minded groups suddenly gain a mass following.ISBN 0-674-65461-7,
2. See also, Victor, Jeffrey S. (Professor of Sociology), The Institute for Psychological Therapies Journal, The Satanic Cult Scare and Allegations of Ritual Child Abuse, which reads in part: "The satanic cult scare is in many ways similar to the "Red Scare" of the 1950s, in the sense that it is a witch hunt for moral "subversives" and supposed criminals engaged in a highly secretive conspiratorial network. It is a collective overreaction to claims about crimes, which are supposedly committed by well-organized groups following a religious ideology involving worship of the Devil."
3. Anti-Cult Movement: Media

Further reading

• Edge, Peter W. – Legal Responses to Religious Difference pp.393-4. Martinus Nijhoff Publishers (2001). ISBN 9-0411-1678-8
• Arweck, Elisabeth – Researching New Religious Movements: Responses and Redefinitions, Routledge (UK) (2005). ISBN 0-4152-7755-8

See also

• Deprogramming
• Cult
• Anti-cult movement
• New Religious Movements
• Doomsday cult
• List of groups referred to as cults

External links

• The Cult Controversy:Spiritual Quest or Mind Control?
• Maryland Cult Task Force

• Articles to be merged from September 2006
• Moral panics