[content warning: descriptions of spiritual abuse]
I prefer the phrase “spiritual abuse” to the word “cult” for several reasons.
First, spiritual abuse is less discrete. Either a religion is a cult or it is not; however, the same religion may be spiritually abusive to some people in some contexts while not spiritually abusive to other people in different contexts. For instance, some Alcoholics Anonymous groups isolate their members, tell them not to take psychiatric medication, and pressure them into sex; however, a lot of people find AA an invaluable resource in getting sober. The Catholic hierarchy covered up pedophilia, and a lot of people are faithful Catholics whose lives have been tremendously improved by the church.
To be clear, I don’t think it’s okay to go “well, we’re not literally one hundred percent always spiritually abusive, so there’s no problem here!” Part of one’s religious or spiritual organization being spiritually abusive ought to be an enormous wake-up call to examine what led to the spiritual abuse and how it can be prevented in the future. But I also think that you can say “wow, spiritually abusive AA groups are horrifying, I wonder how we can prevent thirteenth-stepping in our groups” while also saying “my AA group is great”. You can’t say “wow, AA is a horrifying cult” and also say “my AA group is not a horrifying cult.” It does not work that way.
Second, “cult” tends to be applied disproportionately to new religious movements.
Now, there is a good reason to be suspicious of new religious movements. The Catholic Church has been around for a long time and although it has caused quite a bit of harm it is also a known quantity. We know the circumstances in which the Catholic Church directly causes mass murder and have secularism laws in place to prevent this. A new religious movement might unexpectedly lead to mass murder in a way we don’t have laws to prevent.
On the other hand, it is not exactly like the Catholic Church has never been spiritually abusive, between the coverup of the sexual abuse of children, the Magdalene Laundries, churches in which women are pressured into having far more children than they can handle to prove they don’t have a contraceptive mentality, traditional Catholics who teach that it is a sin to refuse sex, and relationships in which Catholic teaching on Hell and sin is used as a tool of abuse. Even if mainstream religions are less likely to be abusive than new religious movements, spiritual abuse in the former affects more people than the latter– after all, they’re bigger! I think “cult” gives a mistaken idea that old religions that aren’t New Agey are safe from spiritual abuse, when in reality every religion has been touched by spiritual abuse.
(I suspect this is historical– “cult” originated from the Christian countercult movement which conflated spiritual abuse and heresy, while “spiritual abuse” originated from survivors of fundamentalist Protestant spiritual abuse. Naturally, the latter is more willing to admit that mainstream religions can be spiritually abusive.)
Third, “cult” is a word which a lot of times gets used against harmless weirdos.
I actually find the broad use of the term ‘cult’ wildly offensive. Like, you do realize that people get PTSD from spiritual abuse, right? “Cult” is not a cool shiny term to use about every group you don’t like. Here are some things that are not, in and of themselves, spiritually abusive:
- Normal groupthink and ingroupy behavior.
- Donating money that you can afford to spend to charities other people in the group approve of.
- Weird but consensual sexual behavior.
- Fervently holding beliefs that outsiders think are weird.
- Having rituals.
- Having group houses.
Here is a list of things that are actually spiritually abusive:
- Isolating people from friends and family who aren’t members of the group.
- Requiring people to make financially unsustainable donations to be part of the group that go solely to finance the group leader’s lavish lifestyle.
- Coercing people into sexual behavior they don’t consent to.
- Not letting people disagree with the orthodoxy.
- Encouraging people to think of themselves as evil, wrong, or shameful.
- Physical assault.
The difference between these two lists is whether it causes harm. A person who thinks they were abducted by aliens who gave them a message of peace and love to share with the Earth: weird but harmless to themselves and others. A person who spends hours screaming insults at people who like the peace and love message but are skeptical of the aliens thing: very damaging to other people! Like, honestly, if you can’t see the difference between “lots of people in this group live in housing situations which are kind of like cult compounds if you squint” and “people who disobey in this group are physically assaulted,” I am kind of worried about you.
A lot of people who sling around the word ‘cult’ have a missing mood. You’d think they’d feel sad that people have been deceived into an ideology that hurts them; after all, the primary people that any spiritually abusive situation hurts are, you know, the people being spiritually abused. Instead, a lot of people’s response is something like this: “Ha ha! I think you’re a victim of psychological and possibly physical abuse! I have so much contempt for you! I’m going to laugh at you for being terrible now!” I am not sure whether these people enjoy laughing at and blaming victims of abuse, or they know perfectly well that the people they’re talking to aren’t spiritual abuse victims but they enjoy making light of the experiences of actual victims in order to insult people they don’t like. Neither one speaks very well of their moral character.
Thing of Things 
I agree with pretty much all the object-level content here, up through and including “weird non-mainstream groups with weird non-mainstream norms can be excellent institutions that are very good for their members and for humanity-as-a-whole.”
That said…the “cult” concept is (for better or for worse) entirely about heuristic association. Which means that trying to break it down, in the way that you do, is kind of sidestepping the only actual question/controversy at hand.
“Cult,” as far as I can tell, pretty much means “weird-therefore-bad.” This is not an accident or a failure of clarity. It is a term used precisely, and intentionally, to convey the idea that certain kinds of weird groups are especially likely to be certain kinds of bad. When Bob says “I’m worried that this group you’ve joined is a cult,” that doesn’t translate to “I have hard independent reasons to believe that your group is abusive.” It translates to something like “your group visibly engages in certain non-mainstream practices — like maybe where everyone is living in group houses, or where lots of nubile young women are having sex with the charismatic leader — and that itself means that there’s a pretty good possibility of social/spiritual abuse, whether or not you can see it from where you stand.”
[Or, less helpfully, “your group visibly engages in certain non-mainstream practices, which is bad in and of itself, I am a non-consequentialist social-conformist type.” But for now let’s just engage with the steeliest of men.]
There’s an actual empirical claim embedded in here about weirdness correlating with badness. As it happens, taken purely on its own merits, I suspect that claim is probably true. (I say this as someone who is glad to be deeply embedded in relevant forms of weirdness.) Mainstream lifestyles and social forms, for all their problems, provide scripts and expectations that serve as barriers to abuse; weird groups are often devoted to breaking those down, and the fact that they may have independent reasons for breaking them down doesn’t change the fact that the barriers are being lowered. The sorts of people who can be drawn into weirdness are often the sorts of people who make the most tempting abuse victims. And so on.
You can deny that correlation, bringing your own evidence or theory or intuition to bear. You can say that the correlation is real but that people put too much weight on it. You can give in and embrace the cult-hate. You can do lots of things.
But trying to sneak past the correlative claim, so that you can say “what matters is whether there’s actual harm in the specific instance at hand!,” doesn’t help. The correlative claim is the heart of the argument. It’s supposedly a tool for detecting harm that might otherwise be hard to pin down.
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Eh, I think Ozy has the right of it. The word “cult” is never a knockout argument, indeed, it often distorts from the discussion that you want to have.
If you tell someone that their new friends are a cult, you will likely be rounded off to “ignorant hostile outsider”, and get their canned response. If you tell someone that you are concerned about the way that their new friends are treating them (stealing their money, etc.), you will get rounded off to “ignorant well meaning outsider”, and get a different canned response.
The difference is that while it is vaguely possible to climb out of the second pit, but once you are deemed hostile you don’t have arguing privileges anymore.
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Ooh I really like this!
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Imagine your friend joins a small white nationalist group. You don’t know if they’re being harmed, but they seem to be fine (apart from whatever made them join such a group). Would it be fair to loosely call your friend a Nazi or a fascist? Or would you make the same “making light of victims” objection?
While the “cult” accusation sometimes imports the connotation of harming its members (or outsiders), often it just means people with relatively homogeneous and unpopular beliefs associating closely (especially in the ways you described). So “X is a cult” usually doesn’t mean “X’s members are being spiritually abused”, but “X’s beliefs are weird and wrong and some people are centering their lives around being weird and wrong in this way”.
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Scientologists are the primary victims of Scientology, but Nazis are not the primary victims of Nazism.
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That’s true, but my point is that the person making the cult accusation may think that cults may not necessarily harm their members, but even when they don’t, they still have other objectionable aspects.
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What kind of ‘objectionable aspect’ that doesn’t involve harm could a third party have an opinion of that I care about?
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I’m not sure that “spiritual abuse” quite does the job– multi-level martketing can lead to isolating people from the larger society and taking from them without giving back.
Social abuse? Abuse though structured groups? Submissiveness abuse? I’m not finding anything which seems like normal English and covers the groups I want to cover. Charles Manson’s group wasn’t very structured, but I’d want to include it.
Should bad governments count as cults/spiritual abuse?
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I share your offense at casual use of the word “cult.” Cults-in-the-strict-sense are horrifying, and I think many people tend not to appreciate that on a visceral level even if they do on an abstract one. Everyone who’s casually heard of (say) Scientology knows that it harms its followers, but you have actually do some background reading to appreciate just how extreme and perverse that harm is.
But “cult” is a narrower category from “spiritually abusive group,” and I think it’s a useful category. The concept bakes together two elements. First: “group which doesn’t practice non-abusive spirituality.” And second, a bunch of traits that tend to be correlated with the first part.
The first part is useful on its own because it lets us make an important practical distinction. If a friend of mine converts to Catholicism, I may or may not be concerned, depending on them and their situation. If they become a Scientologist, I will definitely be concerned. There’s a vast difference there, and we lose something important if we forget about that difference. So we need to have the concept of that kind of difference, and it then seems natural enough to have a word for it.
The second part is useful in combination with the first, because it lets us spot these groups — seeing smoke and inferring fire. These correlations can lead to some false positives, and it is indeed very frustrating when people forget that “looks cultish” is supposed to be a proxy for “basically always spiritually abusive,” and that the latter is the bad part, not the former. But still, it’s useful to have predictors, especially in a lopsided case like this where we want to be on guard, where false negatives are a lot scarier than false positives.
So, for instance, I suspect it’s simply true that new religious movements should put us especially on guard. There is plenty of spiritual abuse in existing religions, but for someone actively looking to spiritually abuse others, there are a lot of advantages to starting or joining a new movement (no oversight from a broader community, no tradition to potentially violate, easier to claim you’re a messiah/prophet/etc. without ruffling too many feathers, built-in appeal to suggestible lost souls looking for a “new answer” they’ve never heard of).
I should also add that there are cults out there which are associated with traditional religions, but that they tend to be splinter groups and their founders have clearly benefitted from the split. The Children of God / Family International describe themselves as Christians, but they’re able to pull a lot of the abusive shit they pull specifically because they’re a group unto themselves that most of Christianity wants nothing to do with. (That’s not to say that spiritual abuse doesn’t happen in mainstream Christianity, since it clearly does quite often. It’s just not quite as easy to pull off there.)
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I know it’s not what you talked about and if this detracts from the main discussion then I apologize but I am fascinated by how the term “cult” works. By my (potentially flawed knowledge) it derives from the term “cultus” which designated the specific veneration of individuals within a broader religion: individual deities in ancient Roman religion or individual Saints in Catholicism are examples. I doubt most of my countrymen (residents of the USA) would, say, understand it in this sense if referred to celebrating the cult of St. Valentine.
I don’t know the history of the word to know how it changed but I am fascinated by the differences in denotative and connotative meaning of words. This one is one that I think about whenever I hear the word (in either context).
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Either a religion is a cult or it is not;
aaaaaaaa
OK this really bugs me. There is here, I take it, an implicit “If we take the notion of ‘cult’ seriously…” or “Going by the popular notion of ‘cult’…”. That is to say, you do not mean to assert it as a fact about the real world that “either a religion is a cult or it is not”, a statement that relies on “cult” being a sensible notion in the first place. What you’re actually doing is making an assumption for the purpose of argument and considering its consequences. Such things need to be explicitly bracketed! If you don’t consider “cult” to be a sensible notion in the first place, you shouldn’t be performing unbracketed, real-world reasoning about it!
Obviously, in this case, the context makes it clear what was meant once you’ve read a few more sentences. But this did throw me for a loop at first — I thought you were going to be arguing against the notion of “cult”, and then you start off with a sentence that assumes its legitimacy? Huh?
Really, at the beginning, when you say “spiritual abuse is less discrete”, what you mean is “the notion of spiritual abuse is less discrete”. Pretty different! You’re contrasting the notions of “spiritual abuse” and “cults”, not the real-world phenomena of spiritual abuse and cults, because you’re claiming that one of these notions doesn’t make sense as referring to a real phenomenon in the first place.
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Ok. Telling someone about objective morality is spiritually abusive. I used to utterly detest the word ‘cult’, but it is SUPPOSED to be offensive! People who call your religious group a ‘cult’ KNOW they are insulting you. Just someone telling someone they have a mental disorder/illness. They know they are being condescending. The goal is to maximize everyone’s well-being. Not just the well-being of fundamentalists.
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Can’t edit for typos? Anyways, if someone is willfully stupid to the point of using deities to justify cruelty then they don’t deserve your respect.
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Even then, it is questionable that you can achieve anything useful by insulting them. Listing the ways in which they are spiritually abusive is probably more effective in warning outsiders, and has at least a tiny chance of reaching insiders.
On the other hand, insulting sufficiently awful people is it’s own reward – you just shouldn’t trick yourself into believing it would serve any purpose (other than mind-killing everyone in the discussion).
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I am a cult survivor.
I use the word “cult” by design. When I say, “I am a cult survivor” people have a mental picture of something serious and bad. When I say, “I was part of a high-demand, fringe Catholic group and it was really awful,” they don’t really take me seriously. Because Catholicism isn’t *weird,* you know? You are very correct to point out that conflating weirdness with abusiveness is bad. There was very little about my group that would have been immediately off-putting to the average Catholic; that’s why they recruited so amazingly well. When I got out, I might have used some strange vocabulary, dressed more formally than most people my age did, and used an oddly singsong voice, but nothing that twigged any “cult” vibes in people. The result being that when, YEARS later, I realized just how messed up it was and started telling people, everyone said I was making the whole thing up, because hello! Catholicism isn’t weird!
So, it’s a useful term in the sense of trying to twig people’s sense of what an abusive group is. I can say “this multilevel marketing scheme is kind of like a cult,” and people realize that they aren’t worshipping the Life Force or waiting for aliens to take them away, but they do immediately thing “oh, she is saying it’s Seriously Bad.” Somehow no other word (abusive group, high-demand group, spiritual abuse) really gets people thinking “Seriously Bad.”
I’ve written a lot about this on my blog, trying to hash out the difference between religions that are a little bit manipulative and those that make it virtually impossible to leave, or to reconstruct your life after you have. My conclusion has been that a cult is a group that takes more from its members than it gives back: http://agiftuniverse.blogspot.com/2016/04/i-can-finally-define-cult.html But you could really define it any number of ways, because it IS a spectrum. Some groups are groupier than others, and some kinds of groupishness are more harmful than others. And even kinds of groupthink that aren’t harmful can distort rational thought in some ways, which makes me REALLY cagey because then you aren’t able to see your group objectively to work out whether it’s a good deal for you or not. Then again, people do get a lot out of these groups so they feel it is worth it to them. Hard for me to understand that, given my own baggage, but I try to accept it.
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I am also a cult survivor.
Some people are abusive to certain people but not abusive to others. This does not make them non-abusers, nor does the discomfort of the word ‘abuse’ or ‘abuser’ by other people who know the abuser. Some people rape certain people but not others, and that does not make them non-rapists, nor does our discomfort around the word ‘rape’ or ‘rapist’ by those who know the rapist.
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Additionally, because it cut off my reply, I reserve the right to name my abuse regardless of the comfort of (1) the people who abused me, (2) the people who know the people who abused me, and (3) the people who were not involved in any way in the abuse.
In my experience there is little that enrages and irritates people more than naming and calling out bad behavior that has actually happened, except for telling people know. I reserve the right to use the language that describes my experiences regardless of the comfort or agreement of anyone who did not bear the consequences of those experiences. I think a lot of people are a little too quick to police, restrict, and rationalize away the language rights of survivors not because the language is inappropriate but because of personal discomfort with that language and a stance of ‘not ALL [fill-in-the-blank].’
It doesn’t matter if a serial abuser abused only one person, we still need to talk about it in language that doesn’t protect the feelings of the abuser at the expense of justice for the target. Cults exist, and cult abuse exists, and cult abuse survivors exist, even in cults where not everyone else experiences it as abusive. Just as domestic abuse exists when no one but the target experiences that abuse. It’s understandable to be uncomfortable with the language as well as the reality. But reality is reality, and I was abused in a cult that few (if any) of the other brainwashed members would call a ‘cult’ — because I was the only child, my body was community property, and I was the bottom of the totem pole and scapegoat throughout. I was also born into the cult and had no choice or escape.
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Very true. One of the sneaky things about cults is that they *never* abuse everyone. They couldn’t recruit if they did. They have to be really great and fun on the outer levels, and only abuse you once you’re too attached to them to leave. That’s how the entire scam works. And yet I constantly hear people say, “But X group isn’t abusive, because I was slightly involved and no one ever abused ME!” I want to answer, well, congratulations to you. You were cover for my abusers; that’s the only reason they kept you around.
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