Smart Grrl Summer: What are “cults”? Why do we hate that word so much?

Transcript for the first Smart Grrl Summer episode:

PDF transcript & digital transcript!

Shownotes:

This Smart Grrl Summer is starting off with a popularly-requested episode! That’s right: it’s CULTS!

Or, rather: “cults,” because we—really, Megan—spent the whole episode insisting that the word cult must always appear in scare quotes.

Some new keywords this time! Find them in our glossary. They were:

• cults, New Religious Movements (NRMs), Riot Grrl

The 101:

What counts as religion (or doesn’t)—so, what gets called a “cult,” which is to say, not a real religion—is totally political and has a LOT to do with things like white supremacy and Christian imperialism, who gets to decide which practices and beliefs are just TOO different, and if “too much” religious freedom can be dangerous.

Megan was characteristically grumpy about how people use “cults.” She argued that there are three major ways the term gets used—and how those betray some really problematic judgments.

1. People use “cult” to mean: “People who are not like me are doing a weird thing that I think is stupid and possibly dangerous.”

2. People use “cult” to suggest that: “People are only doing that weird, possibly dangerous thing because they have no choice: they have been tricked or forced or brainwashed into doing it.”

3. People use “cult” as an excuse to shut down groups that seem “too free.” So when groups that are overwhelmingly women, queers, or BIPOC get called “cults” and are seen as dangerous, suspicious, or stupid, we should raise an eyebrow (if not a big ol’ fuss).

In short, then, what gets called "cults” often is just a religion, a group of people, a type of behavior we don’t like—not not religion, just religion we’ve already decided is too far beyond the pale of “normal.” And since “normal” often means white, Christian, male, cisgender, affluent (see Ahmad Greene Hayes’ fantastic thread about this, here, for a quick highlight real), we here at KI101 struggle to see the value in a term that is inherently loaded, inherently prejudicial, and inherently seeking to separate—neatly—the “real” from the “inauthentic.”

As Megan yells often, these aren’t petty or egghead concerns. When we decide that humans are not “us,” we are really capable of serious, intense violence; defining groups as “cults” historically leads not only to legal exclusion but state-sponsored execution.

Story Time:

We revisited our old friend Jonathan Z. Smith again. The massacre at Jonestown, where hundreds of people (most of whom were Black women, as Judith Weisenfeld and Sikivu Hutchinson have pointed out), really shook people up—especially people who study religion. How was this religion? Was this religion?

In Imagining Religion, JZ Smith says:

“One might claim that Jonestown was the most important single event in the history of religions, for if we continue … to leave it ununderstandable, then we will have surrendered our rights to the academy.” (Emphasis ours.)

This is so important because as you know, nerds, JZ is one of the foundational thinkers of religious studies—and here he is, insisting that we can’t just dismiss “cults” as stupid or unimportant. And, he’s suggesting that we need to understand why and how people make the choices they do about how to be religious in the world. Without doing this—without being able to see Jonestown within a framework for religion, to dismiss it because it is a “cult”—we scholars lose the right to call ourselves scholars.

Nerds, these are academic fighting words. 

Primary Sources:

• In this week’s Primary Sources, Ilyse said she doesn’t really hear “cult” being used a ton in her neck of the academic woods. She also confessed that when she hears cult she thinks of things like Jonestown or the Moonies, but also the shelf in West Coast Video labeled “cult” (which is how she learned about John Waters and Monty Python and surely, nerds, this is how her brain was made).

• Megan had too many stories to tell and Ilyse gently deleted half of them from the script. The one that stayed was how she likes to yell about cults on the internet because, well, y’all keep using it wrong and it makes her mad. In one fun instance, she got into a Very Public Twitter Battle with a particularly prominent Iranian American sociologist host of a CNN show about religion, who shall remain nameless (if very well described).

Your homework:

It’s summertime! We’re keeping the actual assignments light—but we’re also putting all the sources Megan listed here, too.

Things Megan Talked About in this Episode:

• Judith Weisenfeld’s New World A-Coming. This book is indispensable for anyone thinking about religion and race, or, uh, thinking at all. It’s that good.

• Sikivu Hutchinson’s piece for Religion Dispatches, “Why Did So Many Black Women Die? Jonestown at 35.”

• Eileen Barker’s work, especially The Making of a Moonie: Brainwashing or Choice? and New Religious Movements: A Practical Introduction.

• Sylvester Johnson’s co-edited volume with Steven Weitzman, The FBI and Religion: Faith and National Security before and after 9/11 is chockablock with articles explaining how being seen as the “wrong” religion leads to state surveillance, violence, and persecution. Johnson’s article, “The FBI and the Moorish Science Temple of America, 1926–1960,” specifically attends to how Black religious movements were seen as dangerous, even seditious.

• Megan recommended following Judith Weisenfeld, Ahmad Greene Hayes, and Edward Curtis on Twitter, since they’re all talking about race and religion, but each has also threaded up quite a great deal around “cults,” NRMs, and racialization. Megan’s been tweeting for her class on “cults,” too, so check out this hashtag: #NUCults.

Homework We Assigned For Funsies:

• Megan wants you all to watch the first season of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and then read what she yelled about it, both here at Religion Dispatches and in article form for CrossCurrents. She also has a bunch of syllabi for American minority religions: look here for American Minority Religions and here for Witches: Women in Western Religion, the last unit of which is particularly relevant.

• These aren’t fun per se but they are incredible. Read: Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents.

• Ilyse: Kumaré is pretty OK. For a callback to my West Coast Video obsession with the “cult” shelf, go watch Rocky Horror, or Pink Flamingos, or Army of Darkness, or Monty Python, or Heathers.

Rosé all day, nerds!