Hi! I'm John Green. Welcome to Crash Course Religions.

So, picture this: you’re in a cozy room, surrounded by people welcoming you with good food and kindness. They’re showing interest in your questions, your anxieties—in you. Hold on a second. Is this a cult?

We’ve all read the headlines, watched the documentaries, and worried about the MLM our cousin joined. But without the stereotypes of white robes, wilderness compounds, and tinfoil hats, can we really tell the difference between a religion and a cult?

[THEME MUSIC]
When we think about cults, we often think about groups that are bizarre, or outlandish, or dangerous. Like Heaven’s Gate—a doomsday group whose members died by mass suicide in 1997, or Aum Shinrikyo—a group that piped deadly gas into the Tokyo subway system in 1995. Stories like these gain notoriety, capture our imagination and of course make lots of money for Netflix.

But the word hasn’t always been so loaded. Historically, cults were a little eccentric, sure, but for the most part accepted by society. In ancient Rome, the word “cultus” was used for small, elite groups devoted to worshiping particular deities. They were more like fan clubs for obscure gods, whose temples were closer to frat houses than doomsday compounds. The rites of Dionysus got pretty wild.
Even what we know as Christianity began as a cult, and was viewed as a pretty weird one in its early days. In fact, many belief systems and traditions that today we consider religions were called cults when they first emerged. Let’s head to the Thought Bubble.

In the 1820s, a man named Joseph Smith said he was visited by an angel. The angel led him to unearth a golden book written in a language Smith called “Reformed Egyptian.” In ninety days, he translated it using special stones, gave the gold book back to the angel, and published all 588 pages. He called it the Book of Mormon. And with it, he started the Latter-Day Saints movement. Smith argued that Christianity needed a total makeover, and the Book of Mormon, which recounts Jesus’ visit to the Americas, was the start of that makeover. Smith’s movement drew tens of thousands of followers, but also countless haters. Fleeing persecution, Smith led his flock—who had picked up the nickname "Mormons"—west from New York to Ohio, then on to Missouri, and eventually Illinois, where—after the locals got wind of his teachings—he was killed by an angry mob. But the Latter Day Saints movement didn’t die with Smith. It spread and grew, at first on the margins, and then more mainstream.

By 1972, historian Sydney Ahlstrom wrote, "One cannot even be sure, whether [it] is a sect, a mystery cult, a new religion, a church, a people, a nation, or an American subculture; indeed, at different times and places it is all of these.” Whatever it’s called, two hundred years and millions of believers later, the Latter-Day Saints church isn’t the fringe movement it was when it started. Thanks, Thought Bubble.

So the way we think of the word “cult” today started in the 1950s, when fears of brainwashing took hold during the Korean War. To the American public, brainwashing was a scary but convincing answer to the question, “Why would anyone become a communist?” Before long, brainwashing became a way to explain people’s interests in other movements that society deemed abnormal, like new religions. That’s what happened with the Unification Church, which was founded in South Korea in 1954. The church itself was influenced by traditional Christian ideas, but became known for holding mass wedding ceremonies and recruiting new members by showering them with attention. Fears of brainwashing swirled around the Church, even though research showed very few people recruited actually joined. Like other small religions before it, the movement got slapped with the “cult” label, only this time, the word picked up association with scientifically unfounded ideas—like mind control—that continue today.

So where’s the line? Can we really separate cults from religions?
[Cell phone vibrates]
Oh no... I forgot that rhetorical questions summon my old friend the Devil's Advocate. Hello.
DEVIL’S ADVOCATE: Hey Johnny boy! Yeah, the answer's pretty simple on this one. Cults have obvious tells. For one: charismatic leaders like L. Ron Hubbard, of the secretive and famously litigious Church of Scientology.

JOHN: Please don’t sue us. But religions have Jesus, Muhammad, and Siddhartha Gautama, who I’d argue were a lot more influential than L. Ron Hubbard. And better writers. Even the ones who didn’t write. Again, please don’t sue us.

DEVIL’S ADVOCATE: Alright, but what about the rigid social norms that cults enforce? Like how The Family International forces its members to “forsake all”: school, voting, doctors visits, even having a job. That seems pretty sus, bro.

JOHN: Yeah. No, wait until you find out about Catholic priests and nuns, though.

DEVIL'S ADVOCATE: But think about it, man. Cults exploit people! Members get manipulated into forking over all this cash in the hopes of enlightenment, salvation, or belonging. And there’s abuse. We’ve seen it with the Branch Davidians, The Family International—

JOHN: —and with Catholic, Evangelical, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, and Hindu communities. Lots of religious leaders gain wealth from their followers, including millionaire pastors of evangelical megachurches. And sadly, abuse and suppression of victims’ stories happen in many religious traditions.

DEVIL'S ADVOCATE: Dude, but what about—

JOHN: No, see, you’re just going to do this for literally ever. That’s how these arguments work. I’ve been on Twitter.

DEVIL'S ADVOCATE: Bro, it's called X now.

JOHN: Okay, yeah that's it, I’m done. The harms we associate with “cults” aren’t unique to them. Listen, I have to go. I have a dental procedure I would prefer to this conversation.

So, uh, as I was about to say, many scholars of religion today think that we should ditch the word “cult” altogether because it implies that things like abuse, and exploitation, and violence only happen within those communities, when the truth is they occur across religions. Communities labeled “cults” are often viewed as doing religion “wrong,” even if their beliefs aren’t that different from accepted religions. Like, devotees of Santa Muerte follow many Catholic traditions, like praying with rosaries and placing offerings on altars. But they do it in honor of “Saint Death,” who often appears as a skeletal woman in a white dress. And, because “Saint Death” isn’t recognized by the Catholic Church, her followers get labeled as cultists. So, some scholars argue that the “cult” label reveals less about the group itself, and more about who's using the label.

Again, I’m not trying to say that religions—including religions with few followers that demand total obedience and have charismatic founders—can’t cause harm; they cause harm all the time. Any system that has both secular and spiritual power over its believers is always going to be at risk of causing terrible, terrible harm. I’m saying that this harm is always a threat, and always something to pay attention to in the context of religion, regardless of the novelty of belief and practice.

Most experts today prefer less charged terms—like "new religious movement" or "minority religion"—words that don’t label a religion as necessarily “bad,” just “recent” and “practiced by fewer people.” By that definition, many movements qualify: Shakers and Jehovah’s Witnesses, crystal enthusiasts, and the “spiritual but not religious.”

Because here’s the thing: maybe we want to call an unfamiliar group a "cult" because we’re worried about its members and we want to highlight that they may be in danger. But the problem is that sometimes calling something a cult brings on new types of danger. And in groups already disproportionately targeted by the police, further marginalization can be especially dangerous. Take what happened in 1985 between the Philadelphia police and a primarily Black new religious movement called MOVE. MOVE’s members were dedicated to resisting racist systems through what they saw as a “natural” lifestyle, with practices like composting and communal living. But law enforcement repeatedly misunderstood MOVE’s beliefs and labeled them a cult. Ultimately, when neighbors complained about members shouting on bullhorns and children living in reportedly filthy conditions, police bombed a home where members lived. The bombing killed eleven people and destroyed the homes of 250 neighbors. A report one year later condemned the police’s actions as “unconscionable,” but no one associated with the bombing was ever criminally charged.

So, while we tend to associate the word “cult” with violence, we have to also account for how the label itself can escalate violence. Calling a community a “cult” can change how it’s policed, sometimes bringing more harm to vulnerable people.

At the end of the day, the word “cult” is complicated. It’s changed over time and stretched to include everything from “drinking the Kool-Aid” to being a little too obsessed with Disney World. Though the word tries to draw a hard line between traditional and non-traditional religions, time tends to blur that line as new religions gain following and acceptance, and old religions participate in some of the abusive practices we associate with cults. That line eventually gets so fuzzy that many scholars argue it doesn’t exist.

So, what is a cult, really? Well, many contemporary scholars argue it’s often a way of saying, “This group is too weird or threatening or dangerous to count as a religion.” And of course, some of those groups are weird and threatening and dangerous. But that label doesn’t necessarily bring us closer to addressing harms within or beyond them. The members of these movements seek the same things followers of any other religion seek: belonging, meaning, acceptance. And when we look at it that way, the line isn’t just fuzzy, it’s practically invisible.

Next time, we’re going to examine some more fuzzy lines, specifically, the ones between magic and religion. I’ll see you then.

Thanks for watching this episode of Crash Course Religions which was filmed at our studio here in Indianapolis, Indiana, and was made with the help of all these nice people. If you want to help keep Crash Course free for everyone, forever, you can join our community on Patreon.