Title: Joining a "Cult": Religious Choice or Psychological Aberration?
Abstract: I. Introduction II. What Is A Cult? III. The Civil Liberties Issues IV. Medicalizing A Political Issue V. The Conversion Phenomenon VI. Conclusion I. Introduction America has always been fertile ground for a multiplicity of religious groups, whether homegrown sects like Mormons, Shakers, and Jehovah's Witnesses, or immigrants from abroad like Mennonites, Quakers, and Jews. In the 1970s and 1980s we saw an explosion of new religious groups in America, many of which came to be labeled by their detractors as cults. The groups were based on a variety of ideologies drawn from Eastern and Western religious traditions and were organized in different ways, but they shared some basic characteristics: all were relatively high demand religions, requiring much more of their followers than weekly church attendance and a nominal tithe; all had a charismatic leader; most involved communal living as at least an option and very often a requirement. Further, since these were truly new religious movements, they all needed to grow and therefore to make converts, and they concentrated their conversion attempts upon young, idealistic, mostly white, and middle-class Americans. That, of course, brought them into conflict with the young people's parents, who tried to bring legal pressures to bear against the new religions. The parents of these converts, as well as the defenders of mainstream religions from whom the young people were defecting, had some hurdles to overcome in their fight against the cults. The young converts were almost always legal adults, and the parents--much less the mainstream religious leaders--could hardly claim to be against religious commitment per se, so on what grounds could they forcefully object to their children's new allegiance? The answer they found was to claim that these were not genuine religious movements--i.e., not worthy of tolerance and respect--and the converts' choices were not actually free choices at all, but the result of brainwashing, sometimes called coercive persuasion, thought reform, or mind control.(2) Thus, the parents were not interfering in the converts' right to choose their religion, but rescuing their adult children from the clutches of evil people who had rendered them powerless. The brainwashing theory has important legal implications. After all, the religion clauses of the First Amendment forbid government from preferring some religions over others, and from interfering in a person's religious practice without a compelling reason.(3) Thus, if parents are to have the law on their side while engaging in activities that are normally illegal--e.g., kidnapping and imprisoning an adult in order to deprogram her--they have to find a way to describe these cults, and the conversion experience, as completely divorced from our usual understanding of religion. Two 1980s cases highlight the importance of the brainwashing theory. In 1989, Robin George and her mother brought suit against various groups and individuals associated with the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), claiming, among other things, that they had falsely imprisoned Robin.(4) Since Robin appeared to have had run away from her parents' home of her own free and was never physically restrained during the nearly two years she spent in the movement, it would have been impossible to sustain the false imprisonment claim (for which a jury initially awarded Robin five million dollars) without the argument that Robin had been brainwashed and her will ... overborne by the defendants.(5) Similarly, in 1986 David Molko and Tracy Leal, former members of the Unification Church, claimed that they were falsely imprisoned, despite their ostensible freedom to leave at any time, because agents of the Church had gained control of their minds, stripped them of independent judgment, and thus rendered them incapable of resisting the inducement to join the Church and work diligently to further its purposes. …
Publication Year: 1996
Publication Date: 1996-03-22
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 1
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