On cults.... the big difficulty is definition. The religious establishment has a lot of clout and perhaps I'm being cynical, but it likes to restrict membership to the "club". It might boil down to controlling who gets access to the collection plate - established players really don't like any newcomers trying to get their snouts in the trough? And Christianity is a surprisingly nebulous entity. You can place most denominations on a continuum running roughly Orthodox - Catholic - Protestant, but rather like those maps that have to put the Shetland Islands/Channel Islands on little inset boxes because they simply wouldn't fit on the same page (substitute Hawaii/Alaska on maps of the USA), some groups go off the scale. But just as Hawaii is still clearly one of the fifty states, or the Shetland Islands are clearly (for now) part of Great Britain, they still clearly belong.
Groupings like the Christian Scientists, the Mormons or the Jehovah's Witnesses clearly still count as Christian, but their theology and concepts are not "mainstream". I think "heterodox" is the appropriate term. But they'd still only tick a few, not all, of the accepted markers for "cult" status.
A real cult might be something like the Worldwide Church of God, an organisation I had an appalled fascination with for a long time. Older readers might recall a truly weird magazine called "
The Plain Truth", that you could pick up for free at many newsagents. I used to read this, pretty much for the fortean value, and - wow. This organisation I'd heard of through its extensive advertising in the
Reader's Digest: promising interested people the plain and simple reasons why American and by extention Western civilization was going to Hell in a handbasket, and what could be done about it. I gathered from context (RD being not exactly left-wing liberal) that the issue was liberalism and the answer was a combination of right-wing political values and old-time religion. Hmm. The promise of simple black-and-white answers to simply stated black-and-white problems. That's got to be a draw for many people.
And then you discovered the Worldwide Church of God was
everywhere. Not all newsagents - but a hell of a lot - had a presentation point for this absolutely
FREE! publication that promised to convey the secret of how the wicked fallen world could sort itself out and return to a state of Godliness. You picked up the magazine, you read the articles, you wrote off for more information, and eventually you'd be invited to a temple. It was as if whoever was responsible for this had moved on from the doorstepping technique of the JW's and LDS: this was doorstepping religion with the Post Office doing the knocking on the door for people who actively
wanted to get the mailings, done by proxy. Evidently a product of a shrewd mind. But how did they pay for it all?
I wrote off for a few of the books. Fair play, they were free, but were accompanied by strongly worded suggestions that I should make a contribution, we suggest $x, to further the Great Godly Work. (Hey. I was a student and living in genteel poverty. I appreciated a free read. What do you think I did?)
And... wow. A new world unfolded. And if FT has never covered the theology, history and social dynamic of the WWCoG, then there's an article - or a series of articles - going begging here.
The USP of this church, I discovered, was not a new idea in Christianity. But certainly a strange one, albeit one which that very elastic book, The Bible, is capable of supporting with a theological infrastructure. British Israelism, but recast for the USA in the latter part of the 20th Century.
British Israelism is a religious world-view that begins with the observed Biblical concept that there were once twelve tribes of ancient Israel. Following the first diaspora - the expulsion of the Israeli people to Babylon following the LORD removing his favour from them, whence there was much weeping beside the river in Babylonian exile - ten of those tribes drop out of the Biblical account and only two remain. only Judea and one other are allowed to return to Israel and eventually - and maybe - become first fathers of the people we today know as Jewish. But where did the other ten tribes go?
After this the logic of the story departs from the Bible and takes strange turns. BI believers assert all ten tribes, wandering in exile, turned to Europe. In defiance of known history, ethnology, archaeology, lingusitic reconstruction and the beginnings of written European history, those ten tribes became the parents of (generally Western) European peoples and nations. One with early promise became Greece and Rome, but the LORD withdrew his favour when the Romans turned to paganism, and cast down the Roman Empire. Despite their adopting a version of Christianity, seemingly. Others became Belgium, Holland, Scandinavia, Germany, France, et c. The most powerful and favoured of all became Britain, and was allowed stewardship of the world in the name of the LORD, until we all voted Labour in 1945 and fell from grace. Stewardship of the world fell to the descendents of Mannaseh (Great Britain) who had fled to new colonies and who had avoided the Satanic taint of socialism and liberalism. Yes, we are talking the good ol' USA here. (This is an editorialised paraphrase of WWCoG theology here, you understand).
And - yes - the real truth was, due to Satanic manipulation, lost to mankind until God's anointed prophet, Herbert W. Armstrong, arose in the early-middle 20th century to speak plain truth into the wilderness and found a Church.
Enter Herbert, a true autocrat and former advertising executive. And one who brooked no argument nor dissent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_W._Armstrong
At the heart of a cult, there's generally one charismatic, autocratic, dictatorial, individual. Who founds a sort of personal empire where he is in charge. and if he also knows how to sell ideas to draw people in... you get an interesting (from the outside) machine. The history of the WWCoG under Armstrong is comparitively banal (no Jonestowns) but demonstrates what a well-organised toxic ideology can do with regard to social control, propagation of some crazy ideas, the degree to which members surrender personal autonomy, and - crucially - a steady flow of money and resources from the membership to the leadership. No accident the Church was headquartered in Pasadena (now more famous as the location for
The Big Bang Theory). Pasadena, California, has been described as the home of the
real three R's: Right-wing, Reactionary, and Republican. A religion appealing to all three would find its home here. I remember that while the British edition of
The Plain Truth was at least superficially tailored to British perceptions, one article asserted that the National Health Service was a symbol of why Britain had fallen from favour in God's eyes, as socialised medicine was clearly Satanic, sapping the will and desire of the people to be self-sufficent and for them to be content to live forever on welfare without needing to pay a doctor's bill at least once. No wonder Britain's once-legendary hardiness and self-reliance had evaporated, and THERE WILL BE A RECKONING COME THE DAY!
In full accord with his philosophy of hardy self-reliance, Armstrong insisted church members paid up to three tithes of all their earnings each year to the Church, restricting himself to the penury of only three Californian mansions and one private jet. The real hardship imposed by the financial demands was ignored, and because the Day of the Second Coming was near, members who took out pension plans or worried about things like banktruptcy or inability to repay debts were berated for lack of faith.
The whole show collapsed after his death, and today there are three or four splinter groups claiming to be the true Church, which all hate each other - largely because no one of them is getting all the money and legal wrangles continue over who gets the real estate - and terrible slanderous stories persist as to why Herbert disowned his son, the famous Garner T. Armstrong. One of the most Satanic is that Garner T. walked in one day to witness his father performing a seemingly Ungodly act with his sister. Herbert apparently said this is Biblical, as Lot, on the death of his wife, had no alternative other than to seek to perpetuate his genes through the distasteful act of sleeping with his daughters. (and, ye Gods, this is what happened after the pillar of salt business. Or so the Bible tells us. And does God's infallible word lie?)
But, if you want a cult that made it big and avoided any of that unproductive Jonestown/Solar Temple stuff (as dead people cannot continue to contribute to the Great Work, wills excepted). I give you the Worldwide Church of God and its Plain Truth. Thank you.
