Did I Belong to a Cult?

One of the subjects I touch on here frequently (and one of my reasons for having this blog) is “cults.” We don’t hear as much about the issue as some years ago—especially from the late 1970s through the 1990s. That was the era when “cults” became a favorite topic in the media due to mass suicides and deaths in fringe religious movements and communes. Many of us remember well: Jim Jones and the “Jonestown” (People’s Temple) massacre in Guyana and David Koresh and the tragic ending to the government’s siege of the Branch Davidian compound outside Waco, Texas in 1993. But there were other, similar events less well remembered by most people. Several esoteric and apocalyptic religious sects committed mass suicides or bombings, etc. Because of these violent events, the word “cult” came widely to be associated almost exclusively with dangerous religious groups—dangerous to members’ and possibly others’ physical well-being. In a smaller group of people “brainwashing” was the watchword for identifying “cults.” Any religious group believed to practice “mind control” on its members was considered by many sociologists and psychologists a “cult.”