Cult. The word has a sinister ring to it – and has done since the 1970s, when the Unification Church, a messianic hybrid of Christianity and Korean tradition, started large-scale recruiting of young people in America and Europe. Adherents were called Moonies, after their leader, the Rev Sun Myung Moon, and the media had a field day. The papers were full of accounts of teenagers being held against their will in Moonie compounds, of brainwashing and broken families. Some of these stories were true, others completely false; many were exaggerated. "Anti-cult" activists made a nice living trooping in and out of studios warning that all "cults" – Moonies, Scientologists, Hari Krishna, Mormons (they cast their net wide) – played the same tricks with people's minds. Elaborate theories of "mind control" were wheeled out to explain why cults were different from legitimate religions. The result? A young person had only to attend a meeting organised by a fringe religion and their parents would utterly freak out.
Enter Dr Eileen Barker of the London School of Economics, surely the only sociologist in the world to have begun her career as a professional actress. In 1981, she published The Making of a Moonie, a book that meticulously followed the progress of people who attended Moonie recruiting sessions. Only a tiny percentage ended up joining the Unification Church, she discovered. So if the Moonies were practising brainwashing, they were spectacularly bad at it.
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