Cultic Studies Journal, Vol. 11, No. 1, 1994, Page 78
Letters
A Comment on “Cult Conversion, Deprogramming and the Triune Brain”
Dr. Geri-Ann Galanti obviously went to stay briefly at a Unificationist training camp already
“knowing” that “brainwashing” was transpiring on the premises. She knew this from her
interviews with deprogrammed ex-Moonies. So when, to her surprise, Dr. Galanti actually
found herself liking the Moonies at the camp, she concluded that, indeed, she has definitely
been brainwashed. Evidently unless one ends up actively disliking the persons whose
sinister doings one has been warned about, one has been insidiously brainwashed and is
urgently in need of deprogramming.
When Dr. Galanti observes that her thinking is still coherent even after she has dangerously
exposed herself to the dreaded mind controllers and that her intellect has not been impaired
and that, moreover, Unificationist ideas haven‟t started to seem appealing, she does not
even consider the possibility that what is indicated is that she really hasn‟t been undergoing
brainwashing. Instead she speculates that the Moonies have been working insidiously on the
lower reptilian and the primitive mammalian (limbic system) levels of her brain and that
here lies the true secret of sinister cultic brainwashing. Of course the only personal
experiential data brought forward by Dr. Galanti in support of this thesis is that Dr. Galanti‟s
rational thought process didn‟t become impaired and that the Moonies seemed likeable. So
it seems to me that Dr. Galanti is rationalizing in order to sustain alarmist preconceptions
about perilous Moonist brainwashing in the face of potentially disconfirming experiences.
I may be mistaken, but I seem to recall that, judging from Dr. Galanti‟s earlier article a
decade ago in CSJ, her initial impressions of the training center were slightly less negative. I
seem to recall that she even eschewed the sinister “brainwashing” label in favor of the more
benign and “normalizing” concept of “socialization.” But Dr. Sagan‟s evolutionary theories
have enabled Dr. Galanti to restore the Moonies to their proper sinister and menacing
status.
Two decades ago (fall, 1974) I was teaching at Queens College, and a student of mine went
to a Unificationist training session at Barrytown, New York. He was converted and I became
curious as to what was going on. So I went up to Barrytown and took a 3-day “seminar.” I
found the set-up to be somewhat manipulative though in a rather transparent way. It was
so overly regimented that one could hardly avoid anticipating a similar regimentation in
subsequent communal life in the movement. I thought that the emotionalism of certain
parts of the presentations might possibly be hurtful to some persons with fragile psyches. I
speculated that other personality types might benefit from the training although the benefits
one might obtain might best be consolidated if one ultimately left the totalist movement. I
subsequently took some interviews and did some more participant observation. I concluded
that the Unificationist ideology was unpleasantly absolutist and authoritarian. But I decided
that allegations about brainwashing and “coercive” mind control were exaggerated and
ultimately misleading, although they had some small basis or grain of truth in the
manipulative and heavy-handed elements of the indoctrination process and in foot-in-the-
door deception (which may have been greater at the Boonville, California, center than at
Barrytown). My student became a CARP activist at Queens College but eventually left the
Church, I think without deprogramming and recriminations.
My conclusions may have differed somewhat from Dr. Galanti‟s because I didn‟t go to
Barrytown with preconceptions about sinister mind control, “snapping,” etc.
Of course I hadn‟t interviewed recriminating “defectors” and had the benefit of their
experience. Yet the views of such persons may partly reflect the influence of
deprogrammers, counselors, and ex-member support groups, who operate in contexts

Cultic Studies Journal, Vol. 11, No. 1, 1994, Page 79
which are also settings for indoctrination in which strong social support (love bombing?),
authority figures, emotional fervor, and sometimes physical captivity are integrated into
persuasive processes. Dr. Galanti simply takes at face value the self-serving formulations of
deprogrammers to the effect that their methods work purely on the intellectual level-
rational dialogues with “clients” in which emotionalism and nonrational influences are totally
absent. Her uncritical and psychologically unsophisticated orientation toward processes of
anticult activism and activists‟ accounts strongly resembles the simplistic and naive
orientation toward converts and their accounts allegedly exhibited by “cult apologists” such
as myself.
Whether deliberately or inadvertently, the author gives the impression that cults are the
exclusive repository of emotional appeals, nonrational processes of spiritual persuasions,
and conversionist influences mediated by the lower and more primitive brain structures. Yet
as historian Elie Halevy points out, early Methodist preachers such as John Wesley and
George Whitfield aimed their sermons “at generating violent emotions in their listeners.”
They sought to evoke in their listeners “a crisis of despair followed by a sudden revelation
and a mood of blissful peace” (The Birth of Methodism in England, pp. 36-37). Is this the
reptilian origins of Methodism? I believe Dr. William Sargent has referred to early Methodist
revivals in terms of Pavlovian conditioning of salivating dogs.
There is a whole tradition of analyses of experiential, intuitive or emotional religiosity as
modes of psychopathology. The analyses may reveal more of the biases and secularism of
the analysts than they do of the religions being typified. From the perspective of such
analyses the only legitimate religion is that in which spiritual experience is limited to
attending a sedate church service once a week, putting something in the collection plate,
and hearing an edifying sermon. Religions involving emotional fervor, mysticism, and
experiential ritual such as meditation, repetitive chanting, or speaking in tongues would
probably be labeled “high coercion” religions.
Dr. Galanti emphasizes the role of ritual as a key nonrational factor consolidating the
commitment of devotees on a subintellectual level. As an anthropologist, Dr. Galanti is
surely aware of Clifford Geertz‟s definition of religion in his well-known essay, “Religion as a
Cultural System” in which he envisions ritual as a vital means whereby religion fulfills its
essential nature in creating “moods and motivations” linked to a general conception of
existence which ritual helps to reify and thus to appear uniquely valid and real. In a ritual
setting, religion “engulfs the total person, transporting him ...into another realm of
existence.” What is depicted by crusaders against cults as a pathological aberration may be
more akin to the traditional function of religion and religious ritual.
Finally, Dr. Galanti stresses the Moonist emphasis on learning without questioning doctrinal
tenets. But similar emphases have long appeared in accounts of parochial schooling, and
more recently published analyses of evangelical “Christian schools.” By implicitly treating
cults as modes of psychopathology and as standing apart from “normal” and “healthy”
institutions, Dr. Galanti perpetuates a reductionist tradition in which stigmatization of
intense, fervent, emotional and dogmatic religion really implies a stigmatization of religion
itself as regressive and as pertaining to the primitive and prerational, even reptilian residues
of human consciousness.
Thomas Robbins, Ph.D.