Why is it that academics refuse to use the word “cult” to describe harmful religious groups? Dr Matthew Bowman says brainwashing doesn’t exist. He details how these words have been modified over the years, and even argues that the term cult was originally a racist term co-opted by evangelicals. Are there a better words to use? Check out our conversation…
Copyright © 2023
Gospel Tangents
All Rights Reserved
Except for book reviews, no content may be reproduced without written permission
UFO Religion & Rise of the Not Religious
Interview
GT 00:25 So there aren’t any real ties to Mormonism in there, no Mormon people being abducted?
Matthew 00:32 Oh, there certainly are stories and that sort of thing, but not in my book. My book is not about Mormons. Well, it’s really about the very first alien abduction story in the United States.
GT 00:44 Do we get into crop circles or mutilated cows or anything?
Matthew 00:48 Later on. That’s really, crop circles and mutilating cows are really 70s and 80s phenomenon. I’m looking at this couple named Betty and Barney Hill, who said they were abducted by aliens in 1961. And their story sets the archetype that gets repeated by many other people who say they were abducted, gets repeated by The X Files. It’s repeated by all sorts of movies, the story being that this craft appeared, small creatures came out of the craft. What did they look like? They are small. They have big heads. They have slanted black eyes, that quintessential depiction of the alien, that’s from Betty and Barney Hill. And we were taken aboard the craft, were medically experimented on. And then they were dumped back by the side of the road, and we forgot all about it until Betty had all these nightmares. They see a hypnotist and the hypnotist puts them under. And under hypnosis, they recover all these memories. That fundamental story becomes the archetype for nearly every UFO abduction story since. Almost every UFO abduction, since Betty and Barney Hill, since their story became famous, on which it became in the 1960s, there was a best-selling book written about them. And then about 10 years after the book, James Earl Jones made a movie about this, and he stars as Barney Hill in the movie. And so the book and the movie, between them, really embedded this story in American consciousness. And it just gets repeated over and over. And, part of the story also, was how Betty and Barney Hill initially, they trusted government. They trusted experts. They went to scientists. They went to the military. They went to all these people and they expected to be believed. And they find that over and over again, even their hypnotist, who is a psychiatrist, tells them, “I don’t think this really happened.” The military just says, “Thanks for telling us,” And doesn’t follow up at all. They end up turning to the New Age people.
GT 00:57 Who believe them.
Matthew 02:06 Yeah. And who not only believe them, but also tell them, yeah, you had this experience. But here’s how your experience connects to all these other stories. It’s not just an isolated thing. It helps us understand how the world really works. And by the 1970s, of course, you have the rise of conspiracy theory. That trust in government that’s present in the 50s and early 60s, has vanished by the 70s because of Watergate, because of Vietnam. There was a famous, now forgotten series of Senate hearings chaired by Senator Frank Church. It’s called the Church Committee. And they discovered that the CIA had been involved in assassination attempts on foreign leaders and Americans were never told about this whole sense of there is a shadowy, conspiratorial world really running things.
GT 03:40 A deep state?
Matthew 03:41 Perhaps. That appears and, of course, UFO folklore. By the 80s UFO stories are really, really deeply bound into the sense of the government is lying to us. You can’t trust anybody.
GT 03:54 Well, you talked about these mostly benevolent aliens, but there’s another strain where–you’ve got War of the Worlds, HG Wells. They’re here to invade the earth. I mean, that’s from the 30s, if I remember right.
Matthew 04:11 Even earlier, even earlier.
GT 04:12 There was the movie V. These lizard people are coming to take over and suck all the life out of humans.
Matthew 04:18 Yeah.
GT 04:19 Can you talk about [that?] Because those are definitely not benevolent.
Matthew 04:22 Oh, yeah, absolutely. So, you do have, early on in the 20th century, you have the sense with War of The Worlds, particularly, this basic story of aliens are frightening and hostile. Then, in the 1950s, there is this whole spate of people who call themselves contactees. The most famous of them is a guy named George Adamski and Adamski lives in Southern California. And he is plugged into the very early stirrings of what would become the New Age movement. And he’s descended from–there’s a 19th century movement called Theosophy that is very interested in ancient religions and theosophists believe that there is a hierarchy of beings in the universe, and they want to help us. They want to help human beings progress. They’re called the Ascended Masters. And they (believe) Jesus was one. Buddha was one, Socrates was one. And they want to help us progress. Adamski and these other ideas are plugged into that. And when Adamski meets aliens, they are tall, blonde, Aryans,
GT 05:32 Oh.
Matthew 05:32 Yeah. And they are benevolent.
GT 05:34 Are they German too?
Matthew 05:36 I mean, there certainly is some of that. Right? Theosophy is deeply racialized, and theosophists tend to believe, they actually use the term Aryan in the 19th century. There is a hierarchy of existence that humanity is part of, and that hierarchy even goes into humanity itself. But Adamski is only one. There’s a dozen other of these people in the 50s who say that the aliens are benevolent and want to help us, they look like us. They were archetypical white people, and they’re here to help us progress. The Hills, their story just destroys that. Because, for them, aliens don’t look like us. They are frightening and strange. And the fact that the Hill’s story becomes so popular, I think really embeds this image of aliens as threatening in the American consciousness. Now those older theosophists and their blonde aliens, they stick around. They pop back up in the 70s, when a lot of these New Age people are talking about progression and being aided by higher powers and that sort of thing. They’re called Venusians because George Adamski said they’re from Venus. And you will have then, by the 90s, by the 70s, 80s and 90s, different UFO people talking about different races of aliens and saying there are Venusians and they’re the nice ones. they want to help us. But then there’s also the Grays. The Grays are these little guys with big heads who are maybe threatening, who are hostile. There’s also a group of reptilian aliens. There’s another species called the Mantis man who look like humanoid praying mantises, who are also very threatening. And so if you go into the UFO subculture, you will encounter by the by the 80s and 90s, this whole panoply of different sorts of species
GT 07:25 Do you get into, because there was that guy? I want to say his name was Applewhite. They did a mass suicide.
Matthew 07:31 Heaven’s Gate.
GT 07:31 Heaven’s Gate, right. And they did a mass suicide, I think in San Diego because they were waiting for the aliens to come save them or something.
Matthew 07:39 Yeah, absolutely.
GT 07:40 Is that in your book as well?
Matthew 07:42 No, but I taught a book about them last semester, so I can talk about Heaven’s Gate. Yeah.
GT 07:46 Okay.
Matthew 07:47 This is a book called Heaven’s Gate, America’s UFO Religion by a friend of mine named Benjamin Zeller. It’s a really excellent book. And he traces how, what Heaven’s Gate is doing, what Marshall Applewhite, the leader of Heaven’s Gate is doing, is stitching together. Some of what George Adamski and the contactees are doing, this idea of benevolent aliens who want to help us, he’s weaving that together with Pentecostal Christianity, and dispensationalist Christianity. Dispensationalism, as it’s usually used in America today, is this belief that you’ll find among evangelical and charismatic Christians, some of it has seeped into the LDS Church, as well, that the Second Coming is going to be preceded by this long stretch of, essentially, disasters. And if we read the Bible really carefully, you can stitch together the narrative and so we’ll know that the Antichrist is going to emerge here, and then there’s going to be a war over here. And then there’ll be massive floods and earthquakes and catastrophes. This stuff is really popular. And there’s novels about this, even within the LDS Church, there’s a whole lot of books from people who say they saw visions of how the second coming is going to happen.
GT 09:01 This almost sounds like Chad Daybell and Lori Vallow a little bit.
Matthew 09:03 Absolutely, yes. They are dispensationalist in their thinking. But that emerges, that kind of dispensationalism emerges in the late 19th and early 20th century, and Marshall Applewhite, was very influenced by it when he was a young man. He’s taking some of that dispensationalism, the sense that history is winding up, that there’s going to be all these catastrophes and disasters, he’s tying that in with this/contactee UFO idea and saying, “There will be disasters on Earth, but the benevolent aliens are going to come and save some of us.”
Matthew 09:12 And so he melds these two religious strains, to create his own. This religious creativity is, also, I think, I would argue, this is very much a function of how religion works in the West, after the decline of these large institutional religions. Because larger religious institutions/ denominations, the Roman Catholic Church, the Southern Baptist Convention, even the LDS Church, one thing they generally were good at in their heyday, and the heyday of the denominational religion is really the late 17th century through the mid-20th century, was imposing regularity in saying this is what Presbyterians believe. This is what Baptists believe. You would have people, visionaries like Joseph Smith, and other new religious leaders, emerging on the fringes of these old denominations and doing their own thing and exhibiting religious creativity. But by and large, the main center of American religion was these big denominations. As those denominations begin declining, which they begin to do in the 1960s, you would see more and more people like Marshall Applewhite, these religious innovators who would piece together our traditions and pieces of many different traditions, and create these new religious movements. And that’s, I think, really what the religious landscape of America is looking like more and more today. Religion isn’t declining in America. Right? It’s just becoming increasingly fragmented and diverse. And people are being incredibly creative and doing all sorts of different things and stitching together pieces of many different religious practices.
GT 11:22 Well, so the rise of the Nones, basically, if I’m understanding you right. Are you saying, it’s not that they don’t believe in religion, but they’re moving into new age and astrology and that sort of thing?
Matthew 11:37 That’s exactly right. Yeah, if you dig into the survey data among the Nones, you will find that the vast majority, not all of them, but the vast majority of them will say they believe in a higher power. They believe in religious practice. They’re not atheists. Atheists remain a very, very small part.
GT 11:58 So, it’s not the rise of the atheists.
Matthew 12:00 It’s the rise of the Nones. And when they say None, that word, we call them that, because if you ask them, “What religion are you?” They will say, “None.” And what they mean by that is they will say, “I’m not a Presbyterian. I’m not a Baptist. I’m not a Roman Catholic.” But that doesn’t mean that they don’t believe in stuff and they’re not doing stuff. They are. They are doing things. They do believe in things. It’s just not guided by these large central religious institutions.
“Cults” & Brainwashing Don’t Exist?
Interview
GT 12:32 Well, that’s interesting. Last week, when we were talking, we had a conversation about high demand religion versus the term cult. I know some people like to use those interchangeably. Help us recreate that conversation and why is it that most academics don’t like to use the word cult?
Matthew 13:04 Yeah, that’s a really good question. The word cult, when you say that to someone who studies religion, professionally and academically religion, they will usually just cringe.
GT 13:14 Would they do that even with a Marshall Applewhite, Jim Jones?
Matthew 13:18 Yes, absolutely,
GT 13:19 I mean, those are two mass murderers, especially. But you still don’t like to use the word cult with those.
Matthew 13:26 Here’s why. And I want to give people a little bit of background here. The scholars I’m drawing on for this conversation are Gordon Melton, who was the pioneer in studying new religious movements in the United States, and also a guy named Hugh Urban, who’s written a really intelligent book on Scientology, which is another one. Right?
GT 13:46 Yeah, another one people like to call a cult.
Matthew 13:51 There’s two ways to approach the problem with the word cult. I’ll do the historical genealogy of it first, and then I’ll talk a little bit about definitions. So, the word cult emerges from an ancient term cultus. It’s a Latin word, and it simply means, religious ritual, or practice. What you actually do with your body: going to church is cultus. In the LDS Church, taking the sacrament is cultus. It’s something you do, not necessarily something you believe, or community you belong to. It began to be used as cult by really early scholars of religion in the 19th century, people like James Frazer, who would use the word cult to describe behaviors, and they particularly would apply it to groups that they saw as primitive.
Matthew 14:48 So you will read, if you read The Golden Bough, which is a famous 19th century study of religion. you will see them talking about the cult of Dionysus in ancient Greece. What they meant by that was when people would gather to worship Dionysus or interact with Dionysus, that sort of thing. So, it was almost always used in application to non-white, non-Christian people. And this seems to have been maybe unconscious on the part of these late 19th century, early 20th century scholars. They weren’t consciously making that distinction. But it was very clear that what they thought was, what we do is a religion, what these primitive people of color do is cult.
GT 15:31 Of color. That’s interesting.
Matthew 15:32 It’s accurate. Right? Because they were describing Africans. They were describing South Asians. They were describing indigenous peoples.
GT 15:40 Well, Dionysus, those are Greeks. Would they be considered people of color as well?
Matthew 15:44 No, they would not have been. But they are an ancient society. They are not an advanced, civilized society like us. So, they would use this word to describe ancient cultures, and then also contemporary cultures that they were studying. So they would go. These scholars would trek into Africa and study tribes and Africans and say, “Oh, they have a fascinating cult in which they do this and that and the other thing.” And they were using the term to distinguish between religion, which is a word that they often use to describe modern, advanced traditions like Protestantism, which most of them were. “We do religion. Primitive peoples, like the ancient Greeks, like the ancient Babylonians, like modern African tribes/people, they do cult.”
GT 16:31 Okay.
Matthew 16:32 So, the term then gets picked up in the early 20th century by evangelical Christians, and evangelical Christians start using the word cult to describe (and this is a kind of Evangelical theological definition of it) perversions of true Christianity. Of course, for them, true Christianity is, again, Protestant Christianity.
GT 16:59 Because they even apply it to Catholics sometimes. I’ve seen books that say, “The Catholic cult.”
Matthew 17:04 There is a famous book by an evangelical scholar, I believe it’s Anthony Hoekema, called The Four Major Cults. And what he means by that is Jehovah’s Witnesses. He means Mormons, as well. And then Seventh Day Adventists. And I forget–oh, Christian Science was the last one.
GT 17:24 So not Catholics.
Matthew 17:25 He doesn’t call the Catholic a major cult, but many others do, certainly. Then you see, in the 50s, this famous book by Walter Martin called The Kingdom of the Cults.
GT 17:33 Yes.
Matthew 17:33 And in that he describes Mormons there, as well.
GT 17:36 Right.
Matthew 17:37 And what they mean and what these evangelicals mean, is a cult is a religion that’s pretending to be Christian, but isn’t. So, then what happens?
GT 17:47 They worship the wrong Jesus.
Matthew 17:48 Right. Then in the 1960s, I mentioned this earlier. in the 1960s, Congress changes immigration laws, the Hart-Celler Act, and allows many more people from Asia to come to United States. And you see then, in the mid-60s, the explosion of Asian traditions in the United States. Transcendental Meditation is a famous one. But there are others, the Hari Krishnas, ISKCON,[1] a lot of these Asian groups. And all these white Protestants see this and they’re thinking, “Oh, well, these are cults.” They’re primitive, people of color religions. And so, the word cult starts to get used in the late 60s and 70s by two groups, particularly. The first is what evangelicals call their counter cult movement. And this is an evangelical saying, “Oh, we have to save our kids from joining these weird, often non-white, religious traditions.” And they call them cults. The second group are not evangelicals. They’re secular. And they’re mostly centered around people who call themselves deprogrammers, who draw on the language of psychology and psychiatry, and they say, “Why would anyone join a primitive religion? It’s because they’re messed up in the head. I can save your kid. If your kid becomes a Hari Krishna, I can save your kid by deprogramming him, by putting him in a hotel room and yelling at him for a while,” which happens. These deprogrammers say—they literally go out and kidnap young people and take them into hotel rooms and berate them until they say they will leave whatever Asian tradition they joined.
GT 18:28 So it’s almost a form of torture, it sounds like, at least psychological.
Matthew 19:38 And so what you see, then, emerging from both of these groups, both the anti-cult psychiatrists people and the counter cult evangelicals, is they start talking about “definitions of cults.” And they start coming up with a lot of, I mean, really ad hoc definitions like cults have charismatic leaders. Cults make you wear funny clothes. Cults take you away from your families. And if you think about this, all of these definitions are, is simply saying, “These are ways in which this religious tradition is not like Protestantism. And for evangelicals, that’s quite overt. They basically make lists describing the ways in which Jehovah’s Witnesses or Mormons, or practitioners of transcendental meditation, or the Unification Church, which is a charismatic Korean Christian Church…
GT 20:33 Sun Myung Moon.
Matthew 20:35 Exactly, or the ways are not like Protestantism. And their definitions are always that. Eeven the anti-cult, the psychiatrists, the secular people adopt that, too, because America is so overwhelmingly a Protestant country, that Americans tend to think Protestantism is normal religion, and things that don’t do Protestantism, those are abnormal, weird religions. Those are cults. And there’s a long process in American history, in which American culture, or even the state sometimes makes other religions become, basically, Protestant. That’s essentially the story of what happened to the LDS Church in the late 18th century. All the non-Protestantism was beaten out of the Church, and it became, essentially, just another Protestant church with chapels, and no more polygamy and capitalism and all the other stuff that Protestant churches have in America.
GT 21:23 So the LDS Church has been Protestantized?
Matthew 21:26 Yeah, in many ways. Yes. So, all this is to say, then, when you look at these definitions of cults, when you ask people to define cults, nearly all the time, they will give you a list of ways in which cults aren’t Protestant. A couple more points on that; The first is, if you’re thinking about it, using these definitions, Roman Catholicism is a cult. Even you could say, like, being a fan of the Green Bay Packers is a cult.
GT 21:59 The cult of Donald Trump.
Matthew 22:00 Yeah, yeah, right. And that term gets used very frequently and really sloppily. There’s a scholar of religion who says that, essentially, the rule of thumb is a cult is a religion I don’t like, which is, I think, a really apt way to do it.
GT 22:16 Well, I’m glad you mentioned sports. I’m a huge sports fan. You look at the fanaticism of some fans…
Matthew 22:23 And there’s another word. Right? What’s fanaticism?
GT 22:28 {Hesitation then laughter by both Matthew and Rick.} Go for it.
Matthew 22:30 What is fanaticism? Right?
GT 22:31 Well, it’s a fan who goes crazy about their team. Right?
Matthew 22:36 Okay.
GT 22:36 Am I giving it the right answer?
Matthew 22:38 Is that right? {Rick laughing} I don’t know. And I think, again, often fanaticism is applied to things that I’m uncomfortable with, not things [that] I do.
GT 22:45 Well, and I just watched on Netflix. There’s a [documentary] called Malice at the Palace.
Matthew 22:52 Well, yeah.
GT 22:53 The Pistons and the Pacers…
Matthew 22:54 Ron Artest went up into the stands.
GT 22:55 Oh, it’s a riot!
Matthew 22:57 Yeah, yeah.
GT 22:58 But that’s the perfect example of fans gone wrong.
Matthew 23:02 Okay. I’m glad you brought this up. Because often when I will say this, when I will give this explanation and tell people, “Don’t use the word cult, because the word cult, its origins and its fundamental meaning are, essentially, racist, and evangelical.” And it just boggles my mind how all these people who will say, “Well, I’m not racist. I’m anti-racist.” But then they’ll still throw around this word cult, which has its roots, essentially, white Europeans saying people who aren’t white Protestants are inferior and less advanced and they do weird things, and we don’t want to be like them. What they’ll often say is, but when we use the word cult, we mean to describe someone bad, like Jim Jones.
GT 23:45 Right.
Matthew 23:45 Someone who becomes abusive and manipulative, and all this other stuff. The last thing is the word brainwashing and as a tangent, brainwashing doesn’t exist. Academic psychiatrists, they will tell you that brainwashing is an invention. The term was coined by a journalist named Edward Hunter in the 1950s to describe what, again, and here’s the thing, Edward Hunter used the term to describe what he said the Red Chinese were doing to American POWs in the Korean War. And he’s saying, “Look, these Chinese Communists,” who have a uniform society, all those Chinese people are exactly the same. “They are forcing Americans. Rhey’re brainwashing Americans into becoming like them.” Brainwashing is a term, I think, essentially racist in its origins. And we use it, we use the term brainwashing to say, “This person is doing something I wouldn’t do, and I can’t understand why they’re doing it.”
GT 24:45 Well. Let’s go deeper on that because there’s the famous Patty Hearst kidnapping. She gets kidnapped by the Symbionese, Lebanese.
Matthew 24:54 Symbionese Liberation Army, Donald DeFreeze.
GT 24:55 Which is just a made up thing.
Matthew 24:57 I mean, it’s one of these ‘70s radical groups, like “We’re going to overthrow capitalism,” and that kind of stuff.
GT 25:03 Yeah, but the idea here is she’s like–well, who was the big newspaper guy, Hearst?
Matthew 25:09 Yeah, yeah.
GT 25:10 So the Bill Gates of his day, his daughter gets kidnapped and then ends up, and I’m going to use the term, ends up getting “brainwashed” and becoming a bank robber for the people who kidnapped her. So, you’re saying brainwash shouldn’t be used in that situation?
Matthew 25:28 It’s not a psychological concept. There is something called coerced reasoning, whereby…
GT 25:36 And there is the Stockholm Syndrome, too.
Matthew 25:39 Yeah.
GT 25:39 Isn’t that just another word for brainwashing?
Matthew 25:41 Yeah, but again, it’s casual. It’s not one that really has good grounding in academic literature. Patty Hearst, if you dig into that case, what you’ll find is that she was fairly alienated, and didn’t like her family at all. And [she] appears to have–certainly, she was held in a closet for a long, long time, this sort of thing. But she comes to, I think, believe in what her kidnappers were telling her. And what her kidnappers were telling her was essentially, “The Western capitalist world is corrupt. And you should join us because we are a utopian idealists who are going to build something better.” Now, is that brainwashing? Or is she predisposed to accept some of these things, which she tells people later she was. She bought into it. She was not reprogrammed. I think because that’s just not something you can do to the human mind.
GT 26:36 Well, even Elizabeth Smart, let’s take her. I mean, she’s the poster child of Stockholm Syndrome. She gets kidnapped. She’s got a loving family. And then Brian David Mitchell is such a terrible person, basically coerces her into, “If you say anything, I’m going to kill your whole family.”
Matthew 27:00 And that’s it. That’s coerced reasoning. Right?
GT 27:02 Okay.
Matthew 27:03 It’s cruel. And if you ask her, I mean, maybe you have I don’t know. But if you look at her books, right…
GT 27:08 I need to get her on. Elizabeth Smart will you come on?
Matthew 27:10 What she will tell you is that she was terrified.
GT 27:12 Yeah.
Matthew 27:13 And that’s not being persuaded, necessarily. That’s being coerced.
GT 27:18 Okay.
Matthew 27:19 Brainwashing, as it’s come in the news, means something distinct from that. All this is to say, though–and this is not my phrase. I’m borrowing from Hugh Urban, who wrote about Scientology here. And what he will say is, “The term we should use here is ‘abusive religion.’
GT 27:37 Okay.
Matthew 27:38 Which is absolutely a thing; That’s when Jim Jones was abusing people. But we shouldn’t pretend–I mean, there are terrible, terrible sex abuse cases in the Roman Catholic Church and many other mainline denominations, including the LDS Church.Right? We shouldn’t pretend as though there’s a special category of organizations that we can call cults that are all like this, and they are inherently bad. And that’s the problem. If you say a cult is an organization that has a charismatic leader, that may separate you from your family, that puts you in a special place, separates you from modern society. You wear interesting clothing. If that’s a cult, and therefore, things that do that are always bad and abusive, then what you have just done is told me that the Amish are a cult.
GT 28:34 Well, the Protestants would probably argue that wouldn’t they?
Matthew 28:37 Some do. The evangelicals do.
GT 28:38 Yeah.
Matthew 28:39 But while, at the same time, while such an organization that is so integrated into American life, and is so normalized, that a majority of our Supreme Court justices or a president are members of it, the Roman Catholic Church, is not a cult, even though the Roman Catholic Church has had a sex abuse problem. And so, the lines and distinctions that that phrase cult try to build, just fall down, if you push on them a little bit. Now, this isn’t to say–and I think when I make this argument, what many people think I’m doing is saying, [that] religions are good, and all religions are good. And when I tell them, “You can’t call this religion a cult,” they seem to think I’m defending Jim Jones and People’s Temple.
GT 29:25 Right.
Matthew 29:25 Which I’m not doing.
GT 29:26 Right.
Matthew 29:26 Which I am not doing. I’m simply saying this category that you’ve invented of cult, just doesn’t work. It falls over. Now, if you want to say that Scientology is an abusive religion, or The People’s Temple became an abusive religion, absolutely.
GT 29:42 There are going to be people that say Mormonism is abusive towards women, towards gays.
Matthew 29:49 Yeah.
GT 29:50 I mean, you can say the same thing about Catholicism and you can say the same about evangelicalism. They have their own sex scandals.
Matthew 29:56 Yeah, I think fundamentally the argument I’m making here is that the term cult is deeply rooted in evangelical theology and early 20t century racism. It’s not useful, because it draws such clear delineations that don’t actually map onto the real world. There are spectrums of these things. Something like People’s Temple, the faction of People’s Temple that eventually moved to Guiana, and built Jonestown there and died by suicide there, what they are doing is maybe on one end of this. But there’s a wide range of institutions and religious institutions that have many dysfunctions and problems that flow from that spectrum, They’re not all [bad.] You cannot say the Catholic Church is just like People’s Temple of Jonestown because it’s not. But that’s not to say it doesn’t have problems.
GT 30:50 Right.
Matthew 30:52 So that’s why I think cult is just a deeply problematic term and we should stop using it.
Is “High Demand Religion” Code for Cult?
Interview
GT 30:56 Okay, so I had a conversation with another, more well-known podcaster than me, about this exact subject. His response was, “Well, what do you want me to call it, a high-demand religion?” Is that just as problematic?
Matthew 31:13 I mean, so high-demand religion is a term that some sociologists have used in the past.
GT 31:18 Well and in this case, it seemed like it was just a euphemism for a cult, like, you don’t want me to say cult, okay, I’m going to call it a high-demand religion.
Matthew 31:25 The problem there is to say, high-demand relative to what? Say, if you are a Zen Buddhist, and you live in Nepal, in a monastery, but everybody you know also lives in a monastery, and does all the same things you do. Are you in a high demand religion? Or does being a Zen Buddhist monk in Chicago, Illinois, does it become a high demand when it’s there? I mean the high demand is, it’s a little bit more useful. But it also has that problem of cultural relativity. The implication is that there’s one scale of low demand versus high demand, that is universally applicable to everyone everywhere. And human societies are such that that’s just not the case. And I think one of the issues, as I mentioned before, is that here in the United States, because the United States is such a deeply Protestant country, we have it deep in our bones, even people who don’t–who will say, “I’m non-religious,” in the US are basically Protestants. We assume that real religion, religion should look like Protestantism, which is to say, it’s built out of different denominations. There’s a bunch of them. They all compete with each other. You choose to join the one that you believe in. Similarly, belief is the basic building block of religion. If you believe in a religion, then you do the different things that religion asks you to do.
Matthew 32:50 However, as Reynolds v. United States, the Supreme Court case in which the Supreme Court ruled that polygamy was not protected by the First Amendment, the Supreme Court says in that case, essentially, you are free to believe in polygamy, but you can’t do it. And they rule that, because they assume, because they were all Protestants, that belief is the basic thing that a religion should do. You can believe anything. Just don’t do things that are contradictory to our social norms. That’s a Protestant assumption. And when I say that Mormonism became Protestant, that’s part of what I mean is that Mormonism gave up a lot of its practices, like polygamy, like economic communalism, like theocracy, because protestants said, “No, no, you can’t do that. Religion is about believing something.” And you’ll notice, after the LDS Church abandons polygamy in the late 19th century, it becomes increasingly a religion, about your testimony, and about the things you personally do, the discipline you personally have, not radical new social organizations. But only like, I will follow the Word of Wisdom. I will pray every day, this kind of private devotionalism, which is also Protestantism. So, when I say, what is a high-demand religion? In the United States, that’s usually again, like cult, used to mean a religion that is not Protestant. It’s a religion that makes you wear funny clothes.
Matthew 34:24 But in many other societies in the world, I mean, going back thousands of years, and even for a long time in China in the mid-20th century, everyone wore the same clothes. But we think that’s weird in America, because we don’t think that’s a religion you’re supposed to–we don’t think a religion is supposed to do [that,] largely because we’re a capitalist society. We’ve taught each other that you should buy clothes that you like, and we think wearing clothes that you like is a fundamental human liberty or something. But that’s more or less just what corporations have taught us. {Rick laughing} We also think high-demand religion is a religion that makes you do things that most people in your society don’t do. Like, don’t drink alcohol. Right? Americans are like “Oh, that’s really weird.” Everyone drinks alcohol. And therefore, being a high demand religion is essentially a religion that makes you live in ways that aren’t normal in the society in which you are. And treating that normalcy as though it is some universal, normal thing, and we should all want to be like that. It’s very interesting to me, that leveling that is a critique against Mormonism, essentially, buys in to the notion that the rest of Americans society is good and normal. And we should want to, we should all want to live like Taylor Swift. {Rick laughing} And that’s a deeply capitalist idea, that the way that our heroes live and the way that other people live, we should want that, too.
[1] International Society for Krishna Consciousness. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Society_for_Krishna_Consciousness
Copyright © 2023
Gospel Tangents
All Rights Reserved
Except for book reviews, no content may be reproduced without written permission
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 38:41 — 35.4MB) | Embed
Subscribe: Email | | More
