Doomsday Cults
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Learn what a cult really is and separate the truth from the propaganda.
While most small, non-mainstream religions are harmless, certain circumstances do make them an easy breeding ground for destructive practices. The People's Temple began as a charitable organization in the United States that ran a free medical clinic and drug rehabilitation program. But you probably know it as the doomsday cult whose Kool-Aid mass suicide/murders took more than 900 lives in Jonestown, Guyana, in 1978. How can something that began with so much hope go so very wrong? There's a lot of speculation about what happened to the members of The People's Temple, but for the most part, what went wrong is what goes wrong with most destructive cults: the leadership.
It Takes All Kinds Not all destructive cults are religious in
nature. They can be driven by political or financial goals as well. In
the end, it's all about subjugating members' individuality to achieve
the desires of the leader(s), whether that means reinforcing a
self-proclaimed messianic status, participating in destructive
activities in the name of political revolution or simply filling the
leader's pockets with their hard-earned money. There are radical
political groups, commercial pyramid schemes and self-help seminars
that employ similar recruiting and indoctrinating techniques as
destructive religious cults, targeting people with certain
vulnerabilities and then playing on those vulnerabilities to keep them
"in the fold." The end result is a "convert" who will blow himself up
in the name of destroying capitalism, try to get all of his loved ones
to buy into the same business deal that he is losing his life savings
on, or keep signing up for an unending series of lectures, seminars and
retreats that promise psychological and spiritual healing but really
only drain his bank account. |
It's really a two-part problem. First, many of these religions are founded by a single person who retains a position of exclusive power within the organization, and power tends to corrupt even the most ethical among us. In the case of The People's Temple, there is evidence that its leader, Reverend James Warren Jones, was abusing prescription drugs and becoming increasingly paranoid through the 1970s. Next, because these groups operate outside the mainstream, there is usually no one checking up on their operating procedures, so a corrupt or mentally unstable leader is free to exploit his followers to his heart's content. In addition to this authoritarian leadership structure, some primary characteristics of a destructive cult include:
- Charismatic leadership
- Deception in recruiting
- Use of thought-reform methods
- Isolation (physical and/or psychological)
- Demand for absolute, unquestioning devotion and loyalty
- Sharp, unsurpassable distinction between "us" (good, saved) and "them" (bad, going to Hell)
- "Inside language" that only members fully understand
- Strict control over members' daily routines
For the remainder of this article, when we refer to techniques employed by "cults," we're talking about destructive cults, not the small religious groups that keep to themselves and don't hurt anybody. In the following sections, we'll examine destructive cults more closely and find out how they function. Let's start with the leadership structure.
