Book Review: Cults Like Us
Plus Jordan Klepper of the Daily Show Talking to a Trump ‘gematria’ cultist and the rise of ‘end times’ fascism
Hello Friends,
I had a great time last weekend at my ‘soft launch’ for Keep Sweet, which will officially launch June 21. Beautiful venue, lots of friends and family. A dream come true! I hope to post about that journey—my first book launch was on the day of my mom’s funeral—next week. Meanwhile, I’m back to wondering about America’s cultish behaviors. This is long, a deeper dive, so I’m holding off on “What I’m Reading,” etc. Also, if you’re in a hurry, treat the last section about specific cults like a sidebar. Or go ahead and listen to the audio while you cook, clean, or push the swing. The week’s banned book news is here.
Cults Like Us: Why Doomsday Thinking Drives America by Jane Borden
If you have been a subscriber for a while, you know I have been exploring the question of cults, and, lately, the question of Donald Trump’s popularity in the United States. (Which, granted, may be waning now that he has had a chance to put his ideas into play.) It has always seemed to me that there’s a connection between Trump’s popularity and cults. In seeking an explanation for the connection, I recently read Wild Faith: How the Christian Right is Taking Over America by Talia Lavin and discussed it here.
Wild Faith didn’t answer my questions in that it only accounts for the 14% of voters who are evangelical Christians and not the other 36ish % who also picked Trump repeatedly. In Cults Like Us, I found an answer. Not a perfect answer, of course, but one that makes sense when we look at American thought over time. That overview starts with the Puritans.
While admitting that the Puritans were not a cult (ask yourself who the charismatic, all powerful leader was—there wasn’t one), Borden argues that their arrival to what is now Massachusetts in 1620 brought the beginning of a still active doomsday culture. This current culture in the U.S. is not limited to religious groups, but has gone secular big time with the help of the media we consume—advertising, movies, and now online influencers.
Cults Like Us argues that Americans think in apocalyptic terms because the Puritan/Pilgrim concept of our country as a shining city on a hill—our notions of exceptionalism and, the flipside of that coin, persecution—undergirds all of our thinking.
In an author’s note and then in an introduction, Borden discusses Puritan thought. This is pretty much a requirement since most of us only learn that they were involved in the first Thanksgiving and, seventy years later, conducted the infamous witch trials. Those trials ended in the hanging of 19 people and two dogs as well as one man being pressed to death. This witch hunt effectively ended their community, and they were absorbed into the population at large. How did they manage to so thoroughly self-destruct?
The Puritan work ethic, one practiced in the United States, is based on the idea that pursuing a calling (i.e., working) is the best way to glorify God. Having a calling is an external sign that a person is among the chosen rather than the damned. In addition, as a doomsday culture, the Puritans awaited the end of the world, and their leaders predicted it frequently. (E.g., Cotton Mather predicted it for 1697, 1716, 1717, 1727, and 1736. He died in 1728, so he stopped making predictions at that point. ;-))
Puritans believed it was their duty to destroy sin in others, and they did not allow dissent. It’s no surprise that a high-control group like this ends up accusing one another of practicing witchcraft.
The way the group destroyed sin in its members was to control their “behavior, beliefs, and information intake, all via high pressure to conform. Mandatory church attendance. All transgressions made public. Residents forced into informants.” (17) In addition “Puritans were so obsessed with obedience, as most high-control groups are, that rebellious children could even be sentenced to death. Fortunately, no child received this sentence, but the fear it instilled and made commonplace was effective enough.” (18) Parents who were too indulgent of their children risked their own salvation. High levels of affection were reserved for God.
Once Borden establishes this as the foundation of her argument, she delineates the characteristics of a cult. For the sake of clarity and compression, I’m going to make lists here, which is not the structure of the book.
Psychologist Robert J. Lifton defines cults as having three characteristics:
a charismatic leader who increasingly becomes an object of worship
coercive persuasion or thought reform (i.e., brainwashing)
economic, sexual, and other exploitation of group members by the leader and the ruling coterie.
To these, Borden adds her own characteristics:
the leader enjoys unchecked power
the leader exploits people, specifically by manipulating their latent beliefs and desires
the leader almost always exhibits some kind of narcissistic personality disorder
groups can be of any size
Since thought reform (brainwashing) is central to cult success, Borden includes the criteria that define it:
information and communication are controlled
perfection and purity are demanded
sins and faults are openly discussed and excoriated
doctrine and leadership are ultimate truth and beyond criticism
personal experiences are subordinate to ideology
language and thought-terminating clichés are used to force conformity
everyone in the outside world is evil
experiences are orchestrated to appear spontaneously mystical.
She also notes that sociologists agree that cult-like thinking surges under specific circumstances—in times of:
technological revolution
social upheaval
crisis
The bulk of Cults Like Us is made up of chapters, each of which covers a single characteristic of a cult and has many examples that fit the bill, some small, some with large followings:
our desire for strong man to fix our problems and punish those who aggrieve us
the temptation to feel chosen, which justifies acting on our base desires
our knee-jerk anti-authoritarianism (in this meaning, an authoritarian is often a coalition of powerful and evil people who conspire against good guys like you and me—a sort of antagonist. I mention this because the the cult will follow an authoritarian that it believes will fix its problems, say, a fascist); anti-intellectualism
our impulse to buy and sell salvation on the open market
the belief that hard work is holy, while idleness is a sin
how quickly and easily we fall into an us-versus-them world view
a need for order which makes us vulnerable to anyone screaming chaos and then offering control.
She also explores what she calls an eighth credo, which is the grace-nature divide, which distinguishes and creates a hierarchy between humans and the rest of the planet.
One last important element of cult thinking is that they have an apocalyptic vision of the end of the world. A lot of the religious (particularly Christian) groups have this in common. They get it from the New Testament Book of Revelations, so Borden takes some time to discuss it.
“Revelation is not simply the title of this work. It’s the title of a genre. Many works in the genre were produced during the first and second centuries, times of great economic, and martial strife, which were always marked by increases in end time thinking, and the accompanying vision of how it will go down. But of the revelations produced around then, only John’s had stood the test of time. First, its vague and coded language—likely employed to save himself from Roman retribution, via plausible deniability—has allowed groups throughout history to plug their own enemies into its narrative. It’s beloved mostly for its violence. One persecuted group after another has found solace in its visions of its own oppressors squished inside the wine press. We are vengeful creatures, we humans, we grapes of the Earth.” (35)
End Times cults in the United States have been so numerous that I don’t want to go over the examples here. (However, I include some in the list at the end of this post.) Suffice it to say that Borden discusses many, that they are very strange, and it makes for interesting reading. What is important is ‘end times’ thinking leads to the Christian Nationalist movement, which, of course, wants the United States declared a Christian nation. The idea of a nation awaiting a savior is called the American Monomyth here. The argument is that people who consume that myth have a sense that they’re just living on the sidelines, waiting for something to come in and change their lives. This releases them—all of us—of individual responsibility for the success or failures of our communities and our nation. The problem with it is that it undermines democracy. Democracy, of course, is not something where somebody else comes and saves us. (It does not allow for “I alone can fix it!”) Instead, it’s messy. It's painstaking. It’s slow. We have to cooperate with each other, and we can’t wait for a superhero.
While Borden doesn’t set out to write a political book, she must note that people who believe in the American Monomyth combined with an apocalyptic vision of the end of democracy/the beginning of a theocratic Christian nation are more likely to support someone like Trump. In 2023, GOP caucus goers “determined that Trump‘s most autocratic statements make some voters more likely to support him, including 19 percent in response to his claim that he’d have ‘no choice’ but to jail his opponents if reelected. (And 43 percent said that statement didn’t matter to them one way or the other.) Also 55 percent increased their support in response to his interest in rooting out the ‘radical left thugs that live like vermin.’” (42-3)
“When the prophecy fails, when there is no reward, we perceive a grave injustice. We believe someone robbed us. They must be punished. So we empower a strong man, who shows up, promising to cleanse us of the threat and thereby deliver that original reward, whether it’s wealth, safety, power, or superiority.” (44)
An important point about the cult leader is that they are not just a strongman, but also a salesman.
“What is a cult leader if not a salesman? Pay me with money, labor, adoration, and consent of bodily control, and in exchange I will give you… a bed in the fallout shelter (Church Universal and Triumphant) … perfection and immortality (Oneida) … protection from the hidden rulers (Mankind United) … release from reincarnation (M.S.I.A) … a cure for disease (Christian Science) … the removal from your body of alien detritus (Scientology) … or a seat on the spaceship to escape this doomed world for the Evolutionary Kingdom Level Above Human (Heaven's Gate). It’s a quid pro quo: believe to receive. And when a charlatan cult leader decides he really is God, he’s merely bought his own product. He’s found a customer in himself.” (126)
The salesmanship of cultish promise is perpetual. “But you’ll notice salvation is always just out of reach. They assure you it’s around the bend if you pay a little more. How many internet ads offer the secret to [insert stigma here] but then won’t reveal that secret until you’ve watched a ten-minute video/relinquish your data/agree to a trial subscription. This is straight out of the playbook.” (127)
This reference to a video segues into one last and very important point of Cults Like Us. While isolation is a technique used by cults, “the reduction of normative dissonance, increase in groupthink, and eventual shift-to-risk can actually happen faster in an online group then in one living together IRL.” (212)
“Cult expert Stephen Hassan has argued that social media platforms even engage in love bombing, showering ‘users with positive notifications after joining, while personalized feeds create the perception of a community ‘just like you.’ As we more deeply immerse ourselves in virtual groups and separate further from friends and family, we will be—unlike our counterparts in geographically isolated cults—physically alone. And loneliness makes people even more vulnerable to indoctrination by extreme ideologies.” (212)
With Cults Like Us, I have found a better answer to my question of why so many people have taken to Donald Trump. Unlike the supposition of Wild Faith, it isn’t just about being on the conservative religious fringe. “The call to rebel against a group of elite preying on good simple folks has been the rallying cry of demagogues since the dawn of our nation. It’s also how Trump convinced a crowd to storm the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.” (85)
Studies suggest that power diminishes empathy and is often related to wealth; people who grow up with wealth, prestige, and education don’t respond as well as average folks to other people‘s problems. Another problem with power is if people can do whatever they want to do, they lose their inhibitions and act impulsively.
“Since the powerful are rarely checked, they get away with this behavior, which makes them feel more powerful, a self-perpetuating cycle. This is the science behind the phrase, ‘power corrupts’ and is why some cult leaders develop from annoying if relatively harmless narcissists into megalomaniac financial and sexual predators.” (65)
So Trump exploits the same grievances, fear, and anxiety that cult leaders do. “He tells his followers they’ve been screwed by a system of power. They have. Many politicians neglect to acknowledge it. Sure, Trump isn’t totally honest about who does the screwing, since many of them are his fat-cat Wall Street friends. And worse, he was lying when he said he’d help. Instead, he has screwed the average American, even more, to enrich said friends. But he does acknowledge their pain. No one should be surprised by his popularity. He promised to steady their wobbling world. In exchange, they made him sovereign.” (230)
The solution to our cultishness is to engender empathy and compassion in our communities and in our political culture. And we shouldn’t discount communing with nature; the effect of experiencing awe brings people together. These, of course, are nonspecific cures. The hard work is in figuring out how to implement them in the place where we live.
If you’d like some examples of the cults discussed in Cults Like Us, including those connected to Trumpism, read on. Otherwise, I look forward to next week.
Jordan Klepper of the Daily Show about a month ago
Side Bar: Some cults discussed in Cults Like Us
The Oneida: technically a free love group, but in actuality, sexually abusive of underage girls
The Shakers: they believed in equality of the sexes
Eugenics believers
The current pronatalists (think Elon Musk): today’s version of eugenicists
“The desire to replicate the self is also a commonality among cult leaders and other elites. Warren Jeffs, former leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, reportedly has at least 60 children. Malachi York, founder of the Nuwaubian Nation … might have up to 300. Jeffrey Epstein had plans to seed the world with his DNA by impregnating up to 20 women at a time, continually, until, presumably, he ran out of sperm. It’s almost like they have a parasite, pushing them to replicate again and again. The parasite is unchecked power.” (72)
Mankind United: the leader claimed to be teleported around the globe to fix the poor’s problems by taking down the coalition of wealthy people who conspired against hard workers. When the U.S. government tried to stop him, he created Christ’s Church of the Golden Rule and freed members “‘from the bondage of ownership’ of their property and resources… and required them to cut off connection with the rest of the world.” (103)
The John Birch Society: a right-wing political advocacy group claiming anti-communism (and quite racist)
Whatever the group following Alex Jones is: conspiracy theorists, including the typical antisemitism of such groups
Sherry Shriner, a YouTuber (now deceased, but still popular on her channel): she argued that “a race of shape-shifting reptiles, most of whom are descended from Satan and comprise the New World Order, are planning to bring the Antichrist to power … and exterminate or enslave us all.” (92)
Louis Beam: a KKK member who hoped to bring the U.S. back to a ‘utopian time’ of white male control by battling the U.S. government.
Branch Davidians (David Koresh): separatists with underaged ‘wives’, lots of kids, and lots of guns. In 1993 they had a fatal standoff with federal authorities at their Mount Carmel compound near Waco, Texas, resulting in the deaths of 76 Branch Davidians and four ATF agents.
QAnon: claims that Trump instructed them to leak information to the public “about Trump’s shadow war against pedophile Satan worshipers in government and media.” (98-9) Closely tied to MAGA.
Multi Level Marketing groups: these are too numerous to name, but Amway serves as the model. Almost all MLM distributors lose money every year, but they are victim-blamed for not being able to make it. As Borden points out, that's a hallmark of almost every abusive relationship. She also notes that the way things are going in the United States, our entire class system feels like a MLM where the wealthiest one percent of Americans have the same amount of money as about 90% of the population; that’s pretty much a typical MLM payment structure where the top 1% make the same as the bottom 94%.
Large Group Awareness Training (LGATs): such as est, which “Basically stole from Scientology.” (129)
NXIVM: gift link to timeline from NYT
Love Has Won: (The link is to the HBO series) An interesting thing about Love has Won (the cult of the Mother God) is that they sold supplements online, including colloidal silver, the use of which appears to have been a major factor in their leader’s death. It appears many cults sell supplements. This reminded me of Tara Westovers’ memoir Educated, in which her mother had a supplements business on the side.
Related article for a deeper look
The rise of end times fascism from the Guardian
Wow! You found the explanation! It's so eye-opening and makes so much sense—and somehow, this cycle keeps repeating itself. This should be part of the curriculum in all schools (at the high school level). Thank you for writing about it!
Good grief! this is scary stuff! It explains a lot of the current trend in politics.