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While the term “cult” still has a broad popular usage, it’s a term of analysis that has virtually disappeared from the field of Religious Studies. It also isn’t a word that people will hear often when listening to Straight White American Jesus. Instead, they’ll hear a lot about “high control religion.” But what is the relation between these ideas? If “high control religion” names the same things people have in mind when they think of “cults,” why not just call it a “cult?” Why set aside a term that makes so much intuitive sense to so many people? Dan explores these issues in this week’s episode, and explains why the concept of high control religion allows us to examine the American religious landscape with fresh eyes.
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Welcome to It's in the Code, a series as part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College, your host, and glad to be with you as always.
As always, I want to thank all of you who listen, all of you who reach out, and urge you to continue doing so.
Daniel Miller Swag, danielmillerswaj at gmail.com is the way to reach me.
Continue to value your insights, your questions, your comments.
To you know for upcoming episodes responses to episodes that have posted I am, as always, behind in the emails, but I am going to catch up on them, as I do periodically.
My academic semester is now over, which means that one of my things on my to-do list is to work through the mountain of emails that I have from folks.
So, look forward to doing that.
But I do look forward to hearing them.
I value your insights so much.
And today, diving into a question that I received some time ago.
Periodically from from different people I say some time ago.
You know got some emails about this, but it's also a question that comes up from students It comes up from sort of people out in the world whether we're talking about the podcast or it's just people who find out that That I'm in the field of religious studies, and the question is is basically this okay?
In a couple couple different kinds of context the first is that somebody will say that Something about cults, right?
Whether or not I study cults and so forth.
So, like, let's say that I'm, I don't know, I'm at a summer cookout or I'm at a holiday party or something and, you know, you meet somebody and you give your name and what do you do?
I'm a professor.
Oh, what do you specialize in?
I do religious studies.
And somebody will say, oh, do you study cults?
Do you know anything about cults?
Do you talk about cults?
Or In the work that I do through Straight White American Jesus, in the work that I do with the Center for Trauma Resolution and Recovery, somebody will hear references to high-control religion.
I will use that language, or they'll maybe have come across it somewhere else, or they hear us talking about it on the podcast, or something like that.
And somebody wants to know, why don't we just call it a cult?
And that's the title for this episode, right?
Why not just call it a cult?
Why not just do that?
And I think that that's especially true because the language of high-control religion, it's newer, and it is less well-known, and that includes within the academy.
I talk to other scholars routinely, and, you know, I mentioned, you know, work on high-control religion.
They're like, oh, I haven't really heard that phrase before, right?
And so this is the question, right?
So somebody says at the cookout, what do you specialize in?
I do religious studies.
One of the things I do is I look at high-control religion.
I'm like, oh, is that like cults?
Or somebody says, why not just call it a cult?
Why not drop this high control religion like clunky language and just call it a cult?
And it's a fair question.
And it's a question again, that has come up from some of you as you emailed me with it, or asking sort of what's the difference between high control religion and a cult and so forth.
So I wanted to take some time and talk about it, right?
And I want to start by putting on my religious studies scholar hat, okay?
Aside from the work that I do with coaching, aside from the work that I do on the podcast, aside from connections I see between high control religion and contemporary American Christian nationalism and all those things, setting that aside and just putting on like a sort of generic religious studies scholar hat, The reality is that despite the fact that the word cult is still used, I think, pretty widespread, in a widespread way within popular culture.
If you talk to most people and mention the idea of a cult, they have some sense of what you're thinking about.
But within religious studies, the concept of cult, understood in that popular sense, has largely disappeared.
People in religious studies don't talk about quote-unquote cults in the way that people out sort of in the real world do.
Okay?
And there are a few different reasons for this.
Okay?
The first is that there's a technical meaning to the word cult that has nothing to do with all of those popular connotations.
Okay?
And this usually comes up in the context of ancient or what we call antique religious traditions.
I became familiar with it because of my background in biblical studies, and particularly, you know, studies related to the Hebrew Bible, the context of the emergence of what we come to call the New Testament, and so forth.
Or, you know, the ancient Greco-Roman world and what have you.
And within that context, the word cult simply means all the elements that are tied in and used for formal worship or religious practice of some sort.
Okay, so the word cult just refers to the buildings, the rituals, the elements for those rituals, the prescribed, authorized people who undertake those rituals, and so forth, right?
And so, for example, if you were studying, you know, Greco-Roman religion and somebody talks about the cult of the emperor, they don't mean cult in that popular sense.
They're not talking about people like, I don't know, living on a mountain somewhere worshiping the emperor.
They're talking about all the, let's call it the paraphernalia and the practices and so forth of emperor worship in the Roman Empire, right?
Or if somebody talks about the cult of Second Temple Judaism, That is not some anti-semitic slur calling Judaism a cult in that popular sense.
They just mean all the elements of temple practice, temple worship, the prescribed elements of that, the role of priests, and so forth.
So that's what cult means.
In a really technical sense.
And the term could be applied to any number of contemporary religious contexts, though it usually isn't.
That brings up its own issues.
But you could talk about the cult of the Catholic mass, the cultic dimensions of religious weddings or funerals, and in none of those senses would we mean, as religious studies scholars, or maybe anthropologists would talk this way too, we don't mean what people popularly mean when they talk about cult.
So, from a wonky religious studies perspective, the word cult has a pretty narrow and technical sense, and the popular usage of cult just unnecessarily muddies the waters.
Okay, so that's the first reason, the wonkiest, the most technical.
Here's a second one, and this focuses, you know, shifts more to the understanding of cult that everybody listening is probably familiar with.
The second reason is that there just simply is no agreed upon definition of what exactly a cult is.
And you might be listening and be like, wait a minute.
No, no, no, no, no, no.
Come on, Dan.
If you say cult, I know what you're talking about.
Everybody knows what you're talking about.
We have some vision of a cult in our head.
It's like, okay.
But if we were to do this exercise, and I've done this in classes, and I were to ask you to come up with a list of some sort, right, of what makes a cult a cult.
What are the distinguishing features of a cult?
And you come up with your list, whatever it is.
If you want, you can pause and, you know, write down five or six things now and see if this is true.
But what happens is, it's always easy to come up with examples that have the same features, but which we do not intuitively identify as a cult.
And again, this is something I do in classes.
We'll come up with a list, we'll put a bunch of stuff up on the whiteboard, and then I'll say, okay, that's an interesting list, but what about this?
Or what about that?
Or what about, you know, this organization or that organization?
Things that we don't identify as religious.
Things that we don't tend to recognize as being a cult, and so that's the issue.
So, for example, someone might describe a cult as, quote, something like, it's a group of religious practitioners who live in isolation from broader society and have to maintain strictly enforced religious practices to remain a part of the group.
Okay, alright, this sounds a lot like a cult, except that would also apply to, say, monastic communities within multiple religious traditions that we typically wouldn't describe, or most people wouldn't describe, as a cult.
And they might even be places that are revered or respected, right?
So the big problem from within this perspective is that it just isn't clear what differentiates accepted or acceptable religious expressions or other social phenomena, right?
From those that we want to label as cults.
It's just, it's not a word that actually does the work we need it to do.
That brings me to the third issue, and I think it comes right out of that second issue, and this is the really big one for me, okay?
Is that stated simply, the difference between a cult, so-called, and an acceptable form of religion is often just broad social acceptance.
That's all it is.
It turns out that cult is typically just a term that we apply to religious institutions or communities that we don't like, or that seem strange, or with which we disagree, for some reason.
Right?
It means that the term cult, as it's used in its popular usage, is typically just used to differentiate acceptable Christian expressions from other things.
That's how it usually works.
It's usually used to refer to non-Christian religions.
It is used to refer to, from within some Christian circles, minority expressions of Christianity.
For example, Jehovah's Witnesses, or the Church of Latter-day Saints, or movements like that.
It is used and applied to new religious movements.
So, as popularly used, it turns out the cult is really just a form of name-calling often.
It's typically just code.
For forms of religion that we don't like or that we're uncomfortable with, right?
And so that's another reason why religious studies scholars have largely abandoned the term is, you know, you press on that and say, well, what makes a cult a cult?
And you come up with your list, you say, well, here's some other religions that do that, that we don't call a cult.
What it reveals is that it's just kind of a name, a form of name calling.
It doesn't name anything all that clear.
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Okay.
So, those are some problems with the term cult, okay?
And that might seem pretty technical.
That might seem, as I say, pretty wonky.
So, let's turn our attention to the language of high-control religion, right?
If the term cult is such a problem, I can hear somebody saying this.
Okay, Dan, we get it.
Cult's a problem.
Why replace it with anything at all?
Why not just do away with the term?
Why not simply set it aside and just leave it at that?
And here's the reason why.
The concerns about so-called cults that are expressed in popular usage still get at something real and important.
Excuse me, important.
There are particular issues of practice.
Of control.
Of coercion.
Issues related to, you know, levying social consequences against people who are viewed to be out of line.
Issues related to the policing of bodies and so on.
We could roll out this list longer and longer and longer.
There are particular issues related to all of those things that are present within some religious expressions that are problematic and they are worth naming and condemning and challenging.
It is worth singling them out and looking at them and challenging them.
Okay?
The problem with the word cult, as I see it, right?
And here I'm wearing not just my religious studies hat, but I'm putting on my religious trauma coaching hat as well, okay?
So the problem with the term cult isn't just that we don't have a sense of exactly what we mean.
The problem is that I think when we label things a cult and then we take other things and we keep them outside, we draw a circle and say, we're going to put all the cults in here.
Here's what we're talking about when we talk about cults.
Everything outside that circle is okay.
I think what it does is it ignores that the same issues are at work within well-established, respected, and mainstream expressions of religion.
In other words, the kinds of things that cause us concern about quote-unquote cults, they are not limited to what we think of as cults.
They are defining features of some of the most well-established mainstream religious expressions within American culture, and other cultures as well, but I'm focused on the context that I know, right?
And this is where the language of high-control religion becomes useful to me, right?
And I want to say, I owe this language to Dr. Laura Anderson, right?
The person who runs and founded the Center for Trauma Resolution and Recovery invite you to take a look at her, to look at her work, her podcast, Sunday School Dropouts, on and on.
She's been featured here.
She's been on our podcast.
I've been on her podcast.
Nothing but just mad respect for Dr. Anderson and everything that she does.
So that's where I get the language, high control religion.
So when we identify particular practices and expressions of religion as high control, we're focusing on features that are certainly present in what people call cults.
Right?
Whatever they would pick out and say, that's a cult, or that's like a cult, or that's cultish, or something like that.
And if you were to, you know, sort of tease that out, what do you mean?
What are they doing that makes you give them that name?
We focus on those features, but we also find out that we're focusing on features that are absolutely not limited to so-called cults.
Right?
We see them in myriad expressions of Christian practice.
And they are not limited to Christian practice.
We can see them in our own context within some forms of Judaism, some forms of Islam, some forms of Hindu practice.
You just name any tradition, and you can find this.
And certainly, religion is not the only social institution that can be high control, okay?
But our focus here in this podcast is high control religion, usually in those Christian contexts.
Because that's the world that I know, that's the world that I study, that's the world I'm familiar with, okay?
And what happens is that if we say, okay, so we do think that there are practices or defining features of a certain kind of religious expression that should be named and critiqued, but they're not limited to what people have traditionally called cults or part of mainstream religion.
When we identify particular practices and expressions of religion as high control, what we do is we focus on features that are present in cults, but again, which are not limited to them.
The focus on high control religion, then, helps us to look back at the culture that we're in, to look past the cultural deference that we give to mainstream, well-established religious expressions, especially in this country, forms of Christianity.
To critique those systems wherever we find them.
So the focus, not just doing away with the idea of looking at quote-unquote cults, but capturing what it is in that term or that interest that we're really concerned about, and I think it is high-control practices, right?
That focus on high-control religion gives us sort of new eyes that we can use in examining and evaluating the American religious landscape.
It gives us the eyes to re-examine practices and institutions that are often thought of as, you know, just simply American, as American as baseball and apple pie.
And I can give an example, I give this example a lot.
I work as a trauma resolution practitioner with the Center for Trauma Resolution and Recovery, and when I share that with folks, they often say, oh, wow, that must be like, you know, people coming out of what, Scientology or, talking about religious trauma, must be people who've had like, you know, lots of clergy sexual abuse issues and so forth.
And the answer for me with my clients is no.
My clients almost all come from very mainstream American religious expressions, primarily white evangelicalism, sometimes Mormonism, sometimes the Jehovah's Witnesses.
But very mainstream and what they're talking about are not things like clergy sex abuse.
They're talking about long ingrained patterns of shame, of financial coercion, of sort of, you know, a constant observation, right?
Constant judgment and the effects that this has on them and so forth.
Being told who they can love and how they can love and what their life is supposed to be like and on and on and on and on.
The point is, That we find that many of the same mechanisms that are operative in quote-unquote cults are also operative in those mainstream religious traditions.
And shifting the focus from the language of cults, which I think just kind of leads us astray, to the language of high-control religion allows us to bring those into view And again, to just re-examine what is a very sort of naturalized American conception of religion with new eyes and in a new way, right?
Gotta wind this up.
Those are some of the reasons why I and religious studies people generally don't talk about cults, those first reasons that I rattled through.
But here's the key takeaway.
You can sort of tie all that together.
For me, it is that the move away from the language of cults, it is not due to an unwillingness to name things as what they are.
I run into that sometimes where people are like, so you're just saying all religion's fine?
It's all good?
It's all okay?
You don't want to offend anybody by calling a religion a cult?
I'm like, no, that's not really the issue.
It's actually the opposite.
My interest is to highlight that cult-like patterns of behavior.
Again, things like control, coercion, practices of shunning, practices of shaming, practices of financial manipulation, on and on.
I want to highlight that those cult-like patterns are not exotic or extreme or fringe.
They are a mainstream part of the American religious landscape.
And if We are critical of those practices within what we conventionally think of as cults.
In my view, we ought to also be critical of those practices when they occur in the Catholic Church down the street, the Baptist Church down the street.
The African Methodist Church down the road, the Jehovah's Witnesses Sanctuary down the road.
Wherever they are, we ought to be critical of those and not be misled by the fact that, you know, if you live in parts of this country, you can't throw a rock in any direction without hitting a Baptist church.
It doesn't mean that many of them are not also high control, just because there's a lot of them, just because they're mainstream.
So those are my reasons for not talking about cults.
Those are my reasons why I don't just say cult instead of high-control religion.
I hope that makes sense.
Let me know.
Drop me a line.
I will get to your email.
It may take a while, but I promise I will get to it.
Let me know what you think.
Let me know if that makes sense.
Let me know if that feels illuminating to you.
Always love to hear from folks, including when folks disagree with me, which does happen, and I welcome that.
Daniel Miller Swag, DanielMillerSWAJ at gmail.com, best way to reach me.
Please, until we get a chance to talk again, please know that I thank you so much for listening.
I think those of you who subscribe, if you're in a position to consider doing that, I would humbly ask you to do so.
But regardless of what it means for you to support us, the fact that you're listening means the world.
The fact that you reach out with your questions, your comments, your input, your insights means the world.
