Cultic Studies Journal, Vol. 8, No. 2, 1991, Page 15
The Great Awakening also led to the development of the Baptist churches, which made their
greatest inroads among the poorer farmers and workers. In the wake of this revival, groups
organized around their favorite ministers, and sects such as the Stonites and Campbellites
appeared briefly. In essence, the missionary, oratorical, individualistic aspect of Christianity
became an important segment of the American religious experience.
Communes
During the nineteenth century, a vast economic transformation led to the burgeoning of the
secular spirit and with it the emergence of a variety of new teachings that would challenge
traditional Christian values. In France in the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s, new social ideals were
being enunciated by the Englishman Robert Owen, Charles Fourier, and Etienne Cabet. These
men advocated a new communal type of society predicated on economic as well as social
equality. Though some founded communes in France and England, it was much easier to
engage in communal experimentation in a more fluid and mobile society in which family,
village, and social status were less fixed, as it was in the United States at the time. Besides,
these socialist doctrines found in America a religious counterpart that fitted in with
contemporary evangelical Christianity.
Communal organization was one of the features of many of the contemporary, the older, and
fundamentalist religions. This type of arrangement established the psychodynamics that
promoted coherence, commitment, and obedience. Communes were groups of individuals
and their children, unrelated by blood, who agreed to live together, bonded by common goals
or beliefs, and who shared their resources and finances. Features common to communes --
whether cultic, secular, political, or psychotherapeutic --were that they could and did
renounce the established order as either sinful, unjust, or unhealthy. They stressed the
possibility of perfection through restructuring social institutions. They were utopian political-
economic (Owen‟s New Harmony, Modern Times, Llano Colony) or religious (Oneida
Community, Shakers, Hutterites) or psycho-social (Walden Two, Synanon)11.
Communes differed in their methods of control and governance. The Hutterites, who traced
their roots to the Reformation, relied upon physical isolation from the larger society and
massive indoctrination of the young. Coupled with censure and threats of expulsion, they
commanded absolute loyalty, although decisions were made democratically by the men.
Allegiance was firmly cemented by early adulthood12.
On the other hand, many of the socio-political communes such as Brook Farm, New Harmony,
or the Llano Colony were democratic, cooperative, and socialistic. They did not indoctrinate
they preached harmony and reform. For the most part they failed, torn by dissension and
economic disaster13. Other communes encouraged dependency upon the community and
conformity by reducing the emotional bonds of their members. Their methods included
separation from family and community and departure from normative family patterns.
Shakers encouraged celibacy 14 some Fourierist groups, such as the Oneida Community,
preached free love and some, like the Unification Church, advocated group marriages15.
Millenarianism was embodied in the Judeo-Christian religious heritage which looked to the
arrival of the Messiah or to his Second Coming. These beliefs, which were never abandoned,
were firmly entrenched in many religious sects of the nineteenth century (and are held even
today)16. Evidence of the deeply held vision of impending doom was expressed throughout
European history. The best-known movements were those that arose in the sixteenth century
during the peasant revolts in Germany and in the Anabaptist sects that were part of the
religious conflicts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But those groups that persisted
ceased to be prominent in Europe, having migrated to the United States, where, in the more
fluid atmosphere of the new world, new cults manifested themselves and flourished.

Cultic Studies Journal, Vol. 8, No. 2, 1991, Page 16
These groups were varied, peculiar, and widespread. The Oneida Community, the Shakers,
the Hutterites, and the Mormons were religious communes that expressed millenarian
aspirations. Some, like the Millerites under the leadership of William Miller, were short-lived.
Miller predicted that the end of the world would come by 1840, but he was forced to change
the dating. His failures may have ended the cult but those who believed in the Second
Coming followed Ellen G. White into the more enduring Seventh Day Adventist faith, while
others joined the Jehovah‟s Witnesses. These sects flourished because they adapted to
realities and could temper some of their prophetic interpretations without changing their
fundamentalist beliefs17.
In contrast, Owen‟s New Harmony, Brook Farm, and The House of David were more secular.
Most of these failed since they rejected the established order and sought to create a perfect
society, focusing on socialist economic utopian alternatives18. The contemporary communal
cults that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s and the Kibbutz utopian movement in Israel are
simply variants of the older ideals. Today, however, communes tend to be more narcissistic,
quasi-therapeutic, or Eastern-oriented. Nevertheless, they represent, as did the earlier
communes, an attempt by many to escape the injustices or emotional scars of a fast-paced
post-industrial society19.
Black and Native American Developments
Another factor in the emergence of more cultic and evangelical ardor in the United States was
the presence throughout the South of the Black slave. In both the Caribbean and the slave
states, Blacks torn from their roots were forced to develop new ways of coping with their
subordinated and psychologically damaging life. Religion was one of their most dependable
solaces. They adapted the Christian church to their needs, gradually creating their own Black
religious experience. As they were freed and subjected to the vagaries of unfeeling economic
competition and insecurity, subjected to the racist discrimination of the North and Jim Crow in
the South, Blacks found in cultic movements a source of comfort, assurance, and self-
expression20.
Groups led by Marcus Garvey, Black Muslims, Father Divine, and Move21, all spoke to Black
economic frustrations, abject poverty, and racist victimization. Their charismatic leaders
preached self-help, separation, racial pride, and sometimes simply comfort22. Garvey and
Father Divine were charismatic figures who, in their lifetimes, were able to attract funds,
admiration, and love. Garvey, however, was convicted of mail fraud while Father Divine
(George Baker), though accused of manipulation and exploitation, remained the head of his
cult until his death, and his wife has preserved his memory and his work.
Native Americans, too, found religious cults a useful way to confront the dominant culture,
which denied them their lands and their traditional values. Like the Blacks, they developed
cults that embodied both ancestral practices and many new Christian beliefs propagated by
zealous missionaries. The two most pronounced of these cults were the Ghost Dance
movement and the Peyote cult. The Ghost Dance differed from the Peyote because it stressed
hostility toward the dominant white culture, while the latter used drugs to induce Christian
ecstasy, remaining passive and inward. The Ghost Dance cult was eventually suppressed. The
Peyote cult was ignored until the 1960s when apprehension over the increasing use of drugs
caused its practices to be challenged. In spite of a series of court decisions and the passage of
the Drug Abuse Act, permission to use peyote for religious purposes is still pending23.
Both Native Americans and Blacks turned to cults that reflected the frustrations of
displacement, poverty, and racism. Their responses to the prevailing society were attempts
to assuage communal despair and anger. Acculturation and assimilation were far more
difficult and almost impossible because of racial discrimination. Their religious responses
ranged from a return to traditional fundamentalism and "born again" churches to adherence
to a host of cults that denied the values of the intrusive majority. Appearing bizarre, these