“What is a Cult and are You in One?”
June 16, 2024 Dr. Roger Ray
In 1973 more than a 1000 psychiatrists went together to publish their belief that the presidential candidate, Barry Goldwater, was unfit to hold the office of president. Some even said that he was a dangerous lunatic. Don’t you miss the days when Barry Goldwater seemed like a dangerous presidential candidate? But there was a forceful professional backlash against psychiatrists using their position to diagnose a public figure whom they have never actually treated, tested, or even met, and the result of that pushback was the creation of what we call “The Goldwater Rule.” It isn’t a law, but it is a generally recognized matter of professional ethics . . . counselors should refrain from diagnosing anyone we have not actually had a clinical relationship with. And, kind of like the recently published ethical standards for the Supreme Court, it is more often ignored than it is observed.
But, at least it makes us hesitate and think twice. I would challenge you to notice that in the first couple of years of the Trump administration, reporters never wanted to say that Trump had lied about something. They had all kinds of ways around it, saying that he had mis-spoken, or he was factually in error, or that he cited misinformation and then, finally, someone just came out with a “pants on fire” the guy is a liar statement and then it was like a dam broke and diagnosing Trump as a sociopathic liar was as common as weeds in my flower garden.
As a public speaker, I know all too well the temptation to overstate, exaggerate, to strategically use hyperbole to drive a point home. During the invasion of Iraq, it was very tempting to me to say that George W. Bush was a 21st century Hitler because so many people were dying and he obvious had entirely fabricated his case for war. Iraq had nothing to do with the 9-11 attack and we had no plausible reason to start that war.
Especially when you have been preaching to more or less the same audience for 10 years or more, sometimes you feel like you have to preach something like the way a fire alarm sounds to get people to listen again, but the truth is, unless you are setting out to kill five or six million people in a genocide, you are not the same as Adolph Hitler. It is like what I was saying last month about the shepherd boy who cried “wolf” too often. As tempting as it is to use language at the extremes to press your point home, we have to know how to keep our powder dry for when a real Hitler show up.
Too many people were quick to label Bill Clinton as a narcissist but then, 30 years later, we had no idea how much we were going to need to be able to use that word to describe a president who makes Clinton look like Gandhi. Most commentators will add the qualifier “malignant” to narcissist to make it more emphatic. A malignant narcissist is, like, really really narcissistic rather than a Bill Clinton sort of narcissist. I might say that Clinton was arrogant, but it does deem that Trump is on a wholly different level of narcissism.
Lately I have found myself recoiling when I hear people say too easily that Trump supporters are members of a cult. Some news commentators seem to have a need to say it a couple of times a day, just in case someone might have forgotten.
But “cult” is a very specific term, and I would like to ask us to pause for a few minutes and think about it.
Of course, in academic circles, the word is not necessarily a negative term. Sometimes it is used to describe a tribe or a culture. I remember my Old Testament professor often referencing Hebrew “cult rituals,” and by that he did not mean that Jews are a cult but rather that the dietary laws, the dress code, and even restrictions about head coverings and haircuts, all of which distinguished Hebrews from their neighboring tribes, were cult observances. Not in a bad way but in a way that distinguished their tribe from neighboring tribes.
But in our common vernacular, the word carries negative implications. We call a group a cult when we think that they have gone off the rails of rational thought and behavior. I am not a fan of Taylor Swift’s music, even though I am keenly aware of several laudable aspects of her character. Still, songs about adolescent heartbreak are just not my cup of tea, but I have heard several people reference her fan base, “Swifties,” as being a cult, which is absurd. If she starts advocating for putting fans of Billie Eilish into concentration camps, we might have something to talk about but until then, she is just a wildly successful recording artist who has won over all but a few of us who still long for substance in song lyrics.
To seriously talk about what we mean by a cult, we have to consider, as painful as it is to think about, the mass suicide at Jonestown in 1978.
Jim Jones had been a young Pentecostal preacher who eventually sought ordination in my former denomination, The Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) back in the days when the denomination was totally open minded and had no real restrictions on their clergy. Jones actually did a lot of good things. His racially integrated church was very involved in civil rights and poverty issues.
He was an ardent critic of capitalism and eventually insisted that his church members surrender all of their assets and live in a kind of socialist commune, sharing everything in common.
But he mixed that message in with no small amount of paranoia, persuading his members to leave Indianapolis and move first to San Francisco and then into the remote jungle of Guyana, next to Venezuela in South America. His paranoia and need for control grew until he finally insisted that the whole church of nearly a thousand people, including more than 300 children, participate in a mass suicide, drinking cyanide laced Kool Aid.
That was in November of 1978, and I started seminary the following fall at Vanderbilt. My advisor, the late Herman Norton, was one of the nation’s only real experts on religious cults, but prior to the Jonestown suicide, he had done most of his research among snake handling Pentecostals in Appalachia. In his course on religious cults, we spent a lot of time going over the evolution this church that went from a poor neighborhood church in Indianapolis into being a cult in which it was impossible to disagree with or criticize the minister, Jim Jones . . . even though it became evident that he was taking sexual advantage of men and women in the congregation, that he was an obvious drug addict, and month after month, he became more grandiose in his claims about himself until he insisted that he was a messiah.
You don’t have to claim to be divine or lead a group in mass suicide to be a cult, but I think that we need to keep in mind that such things stand at the extremes of what it means to be a cult and we shouldn’t be too quick in throwing the term around.
Most cults do have a charismatic leader who tells people how to think and how to behave and who are almost entirely above being criticized, not even in regard to their most obvious failings. They typically make grandiose claims about themselves, if not claiming out and out divinity, they at least claim to be unique in their gifts, insights, and usually in their ability to predict future events.
I want to be quick to say that not all cults have a singular leader. In Dr. Norton’s course on cults, he insisted that churches like the Mormon Church and the Jehovah’s Witnesses were cults, and they don’t even have ministers. They don’t have an ordained head of their cult, but they do insist on conformity to a set of beliefs which, when plainly stated, seem to be too absurd for any rational person to believe, but within their ranks, they police conformity to these often silly beliefs and will assign virtual handlers to anyone who seems likely to stray from the rules of behavior or belief.
If you put cults on a scale of 1 to 10, with Jonestown being a 10, you can make a pretty good case for Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses being a 3 or 4, and, if you promise not to quote me, I would say that the Church of Christ and Catholic Church would give Mormons and the JW’s a good run for their money in the mind control and silly beliefs arena. And scientologists have to be a 5 or a 6. But that’s none of my business.
And, we have to acknowledge that there are religions and political groups that can be healthy in one area and quite cultish in others.
Most Muslims, for example, hardly stand out from your other neighbors. They tend to be morally circumspect, peaceful, generous, and hard working. But we also see Islam expressing itself in extremely controlling ways, beheading men for being gay and killing women for not wearing their head coverings in public.
The news never talks about the majority of Muslims and their reporting on extremists could make us think that Islam is the same everywhere all of the time and it most certainly is not . . . still, the cultish expressions of Islam are way too common and dangerously out of touch with reality.
So, it would be wrong to say that Islam is a cult but clearly, it is for some extremists while it is not for most Muslims. There are those for whom the Mormon Church was a cult, and many have gone through deprogramming counseling programs to get away from it, but, as with Islam, for most Mormons, it isn’t a cult . . . still kinda strange from my perspective but hardly deserving of being categorized on the whole as a cult.
When people say that the Trump movement is a cult, we should be aware that while it may be for some of the most radical followers of Trump, for many it is simply a conservative political movement that they generally prefer to the other options on the menu. We cannot rationally say that 45% of American adults are cult members.
But what does identify a cult? I think that there are a few markers on which we can generally agree. Cults attract members for whom the cult provides something, it solves a problem for them.
Cults demand a high level of conformity from their members while simultaneously demanding that the cult or, more specifically, the cult leader, cannot be criticized. And because of that, they can defy facts.
Jim Jones always wore sunglasses because, he said, the intensity of his eyes could hurt people if they looked into his eyes. That is obviously not true.
He wore sunglasses so that you could not see how dilated his pupils were from all of the amphetamines he was taking.
Donald Trump says that he is 6’4” and weighs 215 lbs. but if you look at him compared to someone who actually is 6’4” and 215 lbs. it is obvious that he is much closer to 300 lbs. or more and yet he got the White House physician to report his obvious lie. Now, this is just one really minor example, but when he says something like this, which is an obvious lie, his more cult like followers will not allow themselves to question the veracity of his claims. When you are expected to believe things that are clearly not true, and you actually do make yourself believe the lies, then you may be in a cult.
Trump loyalists will insist that the more than 90 indictments against Trump are all fake, not just some of them; all of them. But some of them are regarding election fraud for which we have tape recordings of phone calls in which he was demanding that votes be thrown out and votes for him be fabricated. He has been charged with taking classified documents which he initially claimed to have returned but dozens of boxes of classified documents were found in his home and golf clubs. We’ve all seen the pictures!
You cannot rationally deny these charges but if you refuse to believe what you have heard with your own ears and seen with your own eyes, you may be a member of a cult.
It is one thing to know that Trump interfered with the Georgia election in 2020 and that he stole nuclear secrets, secret military battle plans, and thousands of other classified documents but to still prefer Trump to other candidates. But if you refuse to believe what you have heard with your own ears and seen with your own eyes, if you can flatly refuse to accept reality, then, I’m afraid, you are a cult member.
I think that it is safe to assume that all national leaders are arrogant if not narcissistic, but cult leaders tend to go beyond simply thinking that they are uniquely qualified to hold such leadership positions. Cult leaders will make grandiose claims about themselves, saying things like, “I’m the only one who can fix it,” or “If I had still been president, Putin would not have invaded Ukraine.” Or, “I could end the war in Gaza in one day.”
For most people, when they hear claims like this, we may shrug and say, “That’s just Trump exaggerating,” but for a cult member, they may actually believe these things, and the cult leader will come to believe it themselves. And that does go to the narcissistic personality. They will tell a lie about themselves and repeat it until they actually believe it.
We have lots of reasons to believe that Trump raped E. Jean Carrol, that he had sex with Stormy Daniels, and that he had a months-long affair with Karen McDougal, but Trump will deny and deny and deny these facts until he convinces himself that he is innocent. Just as Jim Jones actually believed that he was a messiah.
For people who have felt that they were unseen, unimportant, that they had been cheated by employers, the government, and probably their own family and neighbors, the Trump cult gives them a feeling of belonging, of importance, of empowerment. People who have had to hide their fear of immigrants, their anxiety about gay and transgendered people, who have had to deny their rabid racism and their fear of being replaced by illegal immigrants, Jews, Muslims, or people with higher education, the Trump cult validates their racism, they misogyny, their homophobia and xenophobia. Being in the Trump movement makes C and D high school students feel superior to and smarter than their peers who made good grades and went on to college and grad school. They are no longer the underachieving failing students and those who made them jealous and ashamed before are now just “lib-tards,” to whom they feel superior. That sense of being seen and heard, of being understood, validated, included, is hard to give up, so hard in fact, that the devoted cult member will not even allow themselves to let facts influence their delusional beliefs.
Trying to be as fair and objective as I can possibly be, I cannot help coming to the conclusion that while many Trump supporters are certainly not in a cult, I am afraid that very many of them are . . . many if not most. And what I find to be even more disturbing is that while Trump is not a modern-day Hitler, he sure says and does a lot of the things that Hitler did on his way to power. And Trump is no Jim Jones, but he sadly exhibits the more extreme narcissism that led Jim Jones to become the monster that he was when he died.
I realize that when voters are angry, when they are dissatisfied and longing for change, that they are more inclined to vote for a chaos candidate, someone who will be a disrupter, who will change the way things are . . . and Donald Trump is surely a chaos candidate but I am fairly certain that very few people would actually like the country he would like to turn America into.
Conservatives clamored for an end to Roe v Wade but when they got it, many realized that they didn’t really want to give up their personal choice. And I know many religious people who are adamantly anti-abortion but even they are discovering that you can be against abortion, but you still want civil rights, you want the right to choose for yourselves . . . and that is just one example of what you will lose if Trump’s fascist agenda is successful.
I grew up in the Christian Church. I can still vividly remember the stained glass window in the Christian Church Historical Society in Nashville, TN that depicts the 25th chapter of Matthew where Jesus says that people will be divided between those who showed compassion on the hungry, the immigrant, the poor, the imprisoned and the sick and those who did not. Those who showed compassion were welcomed into the Kingdom and those who did not, well, it is right there in Matthew 25:41 . . . Jesus told them to go to hell. That’s my translation. In the NRSV he says, “You that are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels;” which means, you know, just go to hell.
Trump, who wants to cut programs that serve the hungry and the poor, to take away the health insurance offered by Obama Care, to close the borders to immigrants and even lock up their children in detention camps, please, don’t let this monster lead you right into the gates of hell. in the Christian Church. I can still vividly remember the stained glass window in the Christian Church Historical Society in Nashville, TN that depicts the 25th chapter of Matthew where Jesus says that people will be divided between those who showed compassion on the hungry, the immigrant, the poor, the imprisoned and the sick and those who did not. Those who showed compassion were welcomed into the Kingdom and those who did not, well, it is right there in Matthew 25:41 . . . Jesus told them to go to hell. That’s my translation. In the NRSV he says, “You that are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels;” which means, you know, just go to hell.
Trump, who wants to cut programs that serve the hungry and the poor, to take away the health insurance offered by Obama Care, to close the borders to immigrants and even lock up their children in detention camps, please, don’t let this monster lead you right into the gates of hell.
