Cultic Studies Journal, Vol. 8, No. 2, 1991, Page 20
even resentful of many cults‟ activities, at the same time they opposed anti-cult legislation,
concluding that it might weaken First Amendment protection of all religions40.
After the debacle of Jonestown and the press coverage of the indictments of the Reverend
Moon for income tax fraud, of Guru Maharaj Ji for massive corruption, and of EST‟s Werner
Erhard for scandalous and illegal behavior, cults became even more suspect. The media that
provided evangelicals access to huge audiences also provided the information that discredited
them and reduced their recruitment as even they became involved in a series of sex and
fraud scandals --Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggert41.
The result has been not the disappearance of cults but rather their adoption of a low profile.
Many cults have been attempting to acculturate and pass into the mainstream of American
churches as new sects or denominations, as had been done in the past. Even if these
contemporary cults fade away (which happens occasionally), they will be followed by a host of
new ones with even more deviant doctrines, such as the emergence of the Satanic cults.
Change, adversity, and threats to traditional cultural values always result in the emergence of
new religious or secular communities (some may be imported from abroad like the Rastafari-
an)42.
New ideas and sects are not necessarily bad and should not be rejected or condemned out of
hand. Quite the contrary, dissent is a part of both the American and European religious past.
So long as people seek philosophical and psychological truths, so long as they need
reassurance and hope, and so long as change threatens their traditional values and culture,
there will always be new preachers to provide answers and stability. As one historian wrote:
If "passion for community becomes a mutual evasion of all responsibility, a haven for the
undisciplined and bored, the paranoid and amoral...[If] sensitivity groups, through mere
amateurishness or sheer quackery, descend from a level of rescue and redemption to one of
abandonment and exploitation..."43 cults will meet opposition, disdain, and community anger.
If, on the other hand, cults desist from unethical proselytization, desist from separating
parents and children, desist from insisting that they alone have a monopoly on truth, these
new cults --whether strange, alien, or more in the mainstream --can be accepted.
References
1. Natalie Isser and Lita Schwartz, History of Conversion and Contemporary Cults (New York:
Peter Lang, 1988) 1-3.
2. Natalie Isser and Lita Schwartz, "Charismatic Leadership: A Case in Point," Cultic Studies
Journal 3 (no.1, 1986): 57-55.
3. S.V. Levine, "The Role of Psychiatry in the Phenomenon of Cults," in S.C. Feinstein et al.
(eds.), Adolescent Psychiatry, (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980) 8, 123-125 M. Herbert
Danziger, "Towards a Redefinition of Sect and Cult..." Comparative Social Research 10
(1987): 113-23.
4. Natalie Isser and Lita Schwartz, "Psychohistory and Conversion," in Jerrold Atlas (ed.),
Psychology and History (New York: Psychohistory, 1986) 142-51.
5. Some writers as late as the 1960s still considered the Mennonites a cult, cf. Walter R.
Martin, The Kingdom of the Cults (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1965).
6. Hartzell Spence, The Story of America’s Religions (New York: Abingdon, 1960) 1-36.
7. Natalie Isser, "Protestants and Proselytization During the Second French Empire," Journal
of Church and State 30 (Winter 1988): 51-70.
8. Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven: Yale UP,
1972) 403-438 c.f. Edwin Scott Gaustad, A Religious History of America (New York:
Harper &Row, 1966).

Cultic Studies Journal, Vol. 8, No. 2, 1991, Page 21
9. Charles W. Conn, Like a Mighty Army (Cleveland: Pathways, 1977) 47-88.
10. A.J. Tomlinson, dynamic and controversial preacher and leader, brought the Church of
God (a Pentecostal sect) its first great prominence. He was involved in a financial
scandal and forced to resign in 1923 yet that sect has become a large denomination.
Mickey Crews, The Church of God, A Social History (Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1990)
1-37.
11. B. Zablocki and A. Aidala, "The Varieties of Communitarian Ideology," in B. Zablocki (ed.),
Alienation and Charisma: A Study of Contemporary American Communes (New York:
Free Press, 1980) 189-246 R.M. Kanter, Commitment and Community: Communes and
Utopias in Sociological Perspective (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1972) 8-10.
12. Paul K. Conkin, Two Paths to Utopia, The Hutterites and the Llano Colony (Lincoln: U of
Nebraska P, 1964) 76-100.
13. Ibid, 148-153 John F.C. Harrison, Quest for the New Moral World, Robert Owen and the
Owenites in Britain and America (New York: Scribner‟s, 1969).
14. Henri Desroche, The American Shakers, trans. John K. Savacool (Amherst: U of
Massachusetts P, 1971) Diane Sasson, The Shaker Spiritual Narrative (Knoxville: U of
Tennessee P, 1983) is a collection of autobiographical essays which illustrates how
Shakers (years after conversion and communal life) adapted their past experiences to
Shaker philosophy and values.
15. Kanter, 87.
16. Billy Hargis of the Christian Crusade is the best known of present-day millenarians. He
stresses that the Anti-Christ and Satan is personified by the communists and predicted
the final Armageddon will appear in the Middle East. Edwin Scott Gaustad, Dissent in
American Religion (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1973) 102-3.
17. This was true of the Mormons, whose leading disciple William Clayton believed that the
Civil War was the beginning of the apocalypse but was able to adjust his prophecies
successfully. James B. Allen, Trials of Discipleship, The Story of William Clayton, A
Mormon (Urbana &Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987) 303-16.
18. Frederick William Evans, Anne Lee, A Biography with Memoirs (London &New York: J.
Burns, 4th edition, 1869).
19. The best study of the French Utopians is F.E. Manuel, The Prophets of Paris (Cambridge:
Harvard UP, 1962).
20. cf. Rebecca B. Bateman, "Africans and Indians: A Comparative Study of the Black Carib
and Black Seminole," Ethnohistory 37 (Winter 1990): 1-24.
21. George Eaton Simpson, Black Religions in the New World (New York: Columbia UP, 1978)
143-50, 314-20 cf. H. Cantril and M. Sherif, "The Kingdom of Father Divine," Journal of
Abnormal Psychology 33 (1938): 147-67 S. Harris, The Incredible Father Divine
(London: W.W. Allen, 1954).
22. Christopher G. Ellison and David A. Gay, "Religion, Religious Commitment, and Life
Satisfaction Among Black Americans," Sociological Quarterly 31 (Spring 1990): 123-48.
23. Gaustad, Dissent, 85-92.
24. J. Milton Yinger, Sociology Looks at Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1961) 37-52 Charles
W. Bowser, Let the Bunker Burn, The Final Battle with Move (Philadelphia: Camino,
1989) M.E. Knerr, Suicide in Guyana (New York: Belmont Tower, 1978) Charles
Lindholm, Charisma (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1990) 138-55.
25. Yinger, 37-52.
26. J.F.C. Harrison, The Second Coming, Millenarianism 1789-1850 (New Brunswick: Rutgers
UP, 1979).
27. Adrien Dansette, Religious History of Modern France, trans. John Dingle (New York:
Herder &Herder, 1961) I, 320.
28. Thomas A. Kselman, Miracles and Prophecies in Nineteenth Century France (New
Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1983).
29. Ibid.