Cult panic: Where religious bigotry meets neurobigotry

 As the U.S. descends again into political chaos, our old friend neurobigotry again rears its ugly head. In addition to claims that dissidents and domestic terrorists must be “mentally ill,” there’s also a renewed focus on political factions as “cults,” with their followers allegedly in need of “cult deprogramming.” Moral panic over “cults'' is where religious bigotry meets neurobigotry.

What is a cult? There is no consensus definition, but essentially, it’s a new and/or small religion.

What is a religion? That’s an even murkier question. For something so significant to the lives of so many people, religion defies easy definition. Scholars are divided on the exact boundaries between a religion and a philosophy, or between a religion and a culture. Common, but not universal, elements of religions include some type of belief about something supernatural, metaphysical, or otherwise outside the known material reality; some type of belief or guidance about personal conduct; and some type of community identification. But the nebulous question of what defines a religion is rooted in a scholarly community which generally centers culturally European Christianity as the prototypical religion, which includes aspects like a clear distinction between the spiritual and the secular, and a priority on personal belief, which are entirely alien to many other religions and communities. For many people, religious beliefs are simply “beliefs,” and religious practices are simply “a way of life.”

In popular American discourse, however, a “cult” is a casual, solely negative term, used to describe the concepts of groupthink, people being unreasonably or irrationally loyal to a person or idea, mindless obedience, and the assumption, stated or implied, that the adherents are victims of some sort of “cult brainwashing” (a phenomenon repeatedly proven not to exist). I’m guilty of using this term in this way myself, but it is a term rooted in casual bigotry. The premise that newer, smaller religious groups are inherently more illogical or more prone to groupthink than other religious or cultural groups is rooted in religious bigotry. And, as with the invocation of “mental illness,” the premise that certain people’s beliefs are not authentically their own, or that people need to be forcibly “rescued” from their own beliefs, is inherently a form of neurobigotry.

The notion that people should be punished for having “wrong” or “deviant” religious beliefs or practices is nearly as old as religion itself, and the association of religious deviance with “madness” has existed for centuries, but the modern anti-cult movement dates back to the 1970s. Widespread American cultural changes around the role of religion in society had led to a surge in new religious movements, and family members of converts to these movements were desperate to force their relatives to renounce their new faiths and lifestyles. Because the U.S. nominally protects freedom of religion as a constitutional right, these families turned to institutionalized neurobigotry to seize control of their religious minority relatives. They argued that their relatives had been “brainwashed” by “cult mind control,” and that it was therefore justified to kidnap them and subject them to cruel physical and psychiatric abuse in order to “deprogram” them. Even after research by psychologists and scientists entirely discredited the concept of “cult brainwashing,” the myth persisted, and is now colloquially used to describe any strongly-held belief the speaker disagrees with, from political parties to preferences in cookware. While most people aren’t advocating that these “cultists” be denied rights or subject to psychiatric abuse, they still reinforce the harmful underlying assumptions about cognitive agency and religious minority rights.

Finally, there is no way to talk about anti-cult discourse without mentioning the very real experience of religious abuse. People with power using religion to justify abuse of people with less power is disturbingly common, and is in no way limited to members of smaller, newer religions. However, the problem is abuse, not religious belief itself (even if the abuser sincerely believes that their abuse is religiously justified or is for the victim’s own good), and the problem of abuse is, as always, a problem of power. When governments prosecute individuals for heresy or blasphemy, when parents beat or traffic their children in the name of religion, when men seize control over their non-consenting wives and daughters because they believe it to be divinely ordained, the root of the problem lies in the scope of power held by the individuals and institutions in question. The solution is for legal and economic systems to aggressively protect individuals’ right to freedom of religion and conscience, children’s right to be free from abuse, and all individuals’ right to autonomy independently of their families and communities, along with the material resources and infrastructure to meaningfully exercise it. The solution to abuse -- at the interpersonal, familial, societal, or governmental level -- is always more individual autonomy, never less.