in Religion & Politics,October 29, 2019
Students are frequently disciplined these days for cut-and-pasting paragraphs from the Internet rather than properly responding to their tutors’ questions. A similar habit is found among academics who speak about “brainwashing” and “cults”. Rather than reading and reviewing Steven Hassan’s new book, Professor Zeller has cut-and-pasted ideas that have been floated repeatedly over the last several decades.
These ideas can be found, for instance, in James T. Richardson’s A Social Psychological Critique of “Brainwashing” Claims About Recruitment to New Religions in 1993 or in the introduction to The Brainwashing Controversy: An Anthology of Essential Documents, by Gordon J Melton, in 2000 (as far as this author can tell, the book itself was not published). The privately funded group CESNUR, established by Massimo Introvigne, has published many such pieces over the years.
Zeller’s review goes no further than the title of Hassan’s book, picking out the words “cult” and “brainwashing”, then adding his own unrelated thoughts on charisma (which is not discussed in Hassan’s book).
Zeller assures us strenuously that “Neither the American Psychiatric Association nor American courts accept brainwashing as a credible scientific concept, and major academic journals no longer publish papers on the concept.” Had he read the book he is supposedly reviewing, he would have found this citation from the current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) published by the American Psychiatric Association:
DSM-5 Dissociative Disorders: Not Otherwise Specified 300.15 (F44.89)
Identity disturbance due to prolonged and intense coercive persuasion: Individuals who have been subjected to intense coercive persuasion (e.g., brainwashing, thought reform, indoctrination while captive, torture, long-term political imprisonment, recruitment by sects/cults or by terror organizations) may present with prolonged changes in, or conscious questioning of, their identity.i [emphasis added]
Zeller goes on to criticize the use of the word “cult”, without accepting that the term also appears in this current definition. Before turning to this term, let us refute the claim that the American courts do not accept “brainwashing” as “a credible scientific concept”. As the Romans used to say, the exception tests the rule. If Zeller had read the book he is reviewing, he would have found the case of divorce attorney Michael Fine, who in 2016 pled guilty “to five counts of kidnapping and one count of attempted kidnapping. Instead of using brute physical force, Fine hypnotized female clients for sexual purposes. The first victim to step forward, Jane Doe 1, contacted police after she realized that she was unable to recall large portions of her meetings with Fine, and that her clothes and bra were out of place. When a second woman stepped forward, the claims against Fine were examined more thoroughly and an investigation was opened. Eventually, the police caught Fine in the act. After news of the case was made public, twenty-five more of Fine’s victims came forward with similar claims. Before entering in a twelve-year plea agreement, he was charged with multiple counts of kidnapping, rape, sexual battery, gross sexual imposition, possessing child pornography, and engaging in a pattern of corrupt activity. It was a precedent-setting case—it showed that a person can be put into a trance, made to do something they would normally not agree to, and develop amnesia about those events. In 2018, Fine was ordered to pay Jane Doe 1 $2.3 million.”
Zeller also seems unaware of the legal tort of undue influence, which has been established for at least four centuries (see this author’s Opening Minds for a discussion of this concept). Undue influence accepts the absolute control of one individual over another. It has been updated in UK law with the introduction of the Coercive Control Act in 2015, which recognizes such control in intimate relationships. There have already been tens of prosecutions under this act.
The concept of undue influence is far from “pseudoscientific” as Zeller asserts. It is a matter for concern to understand the extent to which noetic manipulation, and the induction of awe and fervor can bring about compliance in individuals (see for instance the cutting-edge work of Yuval Laor).
Zeller adds his opinion of “charisma” which does not form part of Hassan’s narrative. He relies upon Max Weber, but does not explain the two other types of authority – legal and traditional – that give shape to Weber’s account. If he is looking for a discussion of charisma to critique, he might try sociologist Janja Lalich’s examination of the concept in Bounded Choice: True Believers and Charismatic Cults. Eileen Barker’s succinct definition is also useful, “The sociologists use of the term implies merely that the leader’s followers believe that he or she possesses a very special (possibly divine) quality and that the followers are, as a consequence, willing to grant him or her a special kind of authority over them.” (New Religious Movements, p.13)
Returning to the theme of “brainwashing”, Zeller accepts that “psychological manipulation” does occur at Trump rallies, but fails to discuss the spectrum of influence. Very few critics of “cults” use the term “brainwashing”, which, as Zeller admits, was introduced by the CIA (the US Intelligence Agencies also gave us the term “mind control”). If we follow the lead of the courts and DSM-5, it is surely evident that “exploitative persuasion” can and does occur. It is really a matter of degree.
“Brainwashing” is something of a red herring. A deeper study leads to Mao Zedong’s introduction of ssu-hsiang tou-cheng (in Wade-Giles) or “thought struggle” 20 years before the “re-education” camps opened in China in 1949. The success of this method of indoctrination can be measured in the compliance of the Chinese since the Communist (or more properly fascist) take-over of China. The terrible events of the Cultural Revolution, where children murdered their own parents are a testament to the ruthless efficacy of the approach. Using thought-struggle, Mao was able to unify a country that had been at war for thirty years. Mao is the greatest mass murderer of all time with as many as 70 million victims, yet he was never charged with a single crime.
The re-education (or “brainwashing”) program continues to this day, as Massimo Introvigne points out in his 2019 piece China Plays no Favourites: It Persecutes all Religions there may be three million prisoners in these camps, including a million Uighur (ten per cent of the Uighur population). Even official state videos of these prisoners shows both abuse and compliance.
The term “cult” took on its pejorative meaning in the twentieth century, after two millennia of use as cultus, meaning “worship”. The Oxford English Dictionary records no pejorative use in the 1977 edition, adding only the use from 1711 of “Devotion to a particular person or thing, now especially as paid by a body of professed adherents”. It is unfortunate that the imprecise term “new religious movement” is substituted for “cult”. “New” meaning since the eighteenth century millennarian movements according to the Enclyclopedia Britannica, or “since the 1950s” according to Barker [op.cit.] – or, as Zeller says, new “is a slippery concept”; “religious” meaning commitment to any belief system, whether religious or not; and “movement” meaning two people or more. I would strongly suggest the more accurate “alternative belief systems”, so that multi-level marketing, large group awareness training, psychotherapy and commercial groups can be better included.
Zeller tells us about Professor Barker’s study of the Unification Church and his own work on Heaven’s Gate. At this point, Professor Barker’s own caveat is pertinent: “NRMs cannot be ‘lumped together’; they differ from one another in numerous respects.” (op.cit., p.xiii) and further, “It cannot be stressed enough that almost any generalisation about NRMs is bound to be untrue if it is applied to all the movements.” (ibid, p.10).
Writing in 1989, Barker said, “Claims have been made that there are up to 5,000 ‘cults’ in North America, but no one has produced a list … a figure somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 might be more realistic.” (op.cit., p.148). Hassan is very specific about both the groups and the traits that he is considering in his evaluation of President Trump.
However, before moving on, it is worth questioning the notion that we should not be concerned when only ten per cent of recruits remain, if the NRM is potentially harmful. Zeller tells us, “the UFO religion Heaven’s Gate that ended in the 1997 mass suicides, suffered from a 75 percent loss rate of its initial members over its two decades of existence, and its overall success rate from the point of attempted recruitment at public meetings to the eventual suicides was about one percent.” He does not give a comparison to the 14 per 100,000 suicide rate in the US (in 2017), which shows just how alarming the one in a hundred rate in Heaven’s Gate recruits is.
My concern for more than three decades has not been for New Religious Movements – the majority of which pose little threat to either their own members or society at large – but with authoritarian groups that wreak havoc on their own members and/or on society. The People’s Temple, Aum Shinrikyo, the Children of God, the Unification Church, Scientology, the Watchtower Society (with perhaps eight million members, and hundreds of deaths each year through failure to permit blood transfusions), the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments (far more victims than Heaven’s Gate’s one per cent!), the Order of the Solar Temple, Heaven’s Gate, followers of Vissarion – there are surely enough of these groups active today for even the most sedate and conciliatory academic to realize that we have a problem. Such groups have existed throughout history, and all too often become dominant. The perverse forms of Christianity that murdered tens of thousands of “heretics” or “witches”, the Thuggee murderers in India, the Nahua death cults of Meso-America – right up to the Nazis, the Bolsheviks and the Chinese Communists – give us plentiful examples of authoritarian groups that are tremendously harmful, so we should be eternally vigilant. We should also be cautious in labelling groups “dangerous” or “deviant”, which is exactly what authoritarian groups label their critics (or even disbelievers in general).
Zeller rounds up his argument by saying, “Scholars of new religious movements have shown that the mythology of cultic mind-control is more rhetoric than reality. It is easy to understand why critics of the president dismiss him as a cult leader, and his political followers as brainwashed. But it says a lot more about the power of the language than it does the president himself.”
Of course, with this statement Zeller dismisses the work of scholars inlcuding but far from limited to Stephen Kent, Janja Lalich, Philip Zimbardo, Robert Cialdini, Anthony Pratkanis, Margaret Singer, Louis Jolyon West, Benjamin Zablocki, Michael Langone and Alexandra Stein, but his last sentence can be refashioned to describe his own paper: it says a lot more about the power of language than it does about the book it purports to review, or the concepts he so eagerly – and erroneously – dismisses.
ends
The Cult of Trump? What “Cult Rhetoric” Actually Reveals
Religion & Politics
By Benjamin E. Zeller | October 29, 2019
In August, Anthony Scaramucci—the former White House director of communications turned Trump critic—called for the political left to approach the Trump administration the way that concerned individuals would approach a cult. “When you’re trying to deprogram people from a cult, one of the first things you have to do is allow them to change their mind,” he explained on Fox News. He amplified this rhetorical move a few days later, tweeting a comparison of Trump to Jim Jones, infamous leader of the Peoples Temple and Jonestown, a religious cult that famously ended with mass suicide and murder. He also compared White House staffers to hostages suffering from Stockholm Syndrome, an alleged psychological condition wherein captives come to support their captors. Scaramucci implied that Trump acts like a cult leader and that those supporting him are brainwashed and in need of rescue.
As the current impeachment proceedings ramp up, both proponents and opponents of President Trump have hardened their positions. It would not be surprising to find such cult language becoming more frequent in the coming months. Just this week, in order to rebuke the Republican response to the impeachment inquiry, Norman Ornstein, of the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, tweeted one word: “Cult.”
Other public commentators have made similar accusations. In February, the Rev. John Pavlovitz, a progressive Christian leader, wrote a blog entry entitled “The Cult of Trump.” He argued that “America is in a cultic crisis, and Trumpism is the cult. There is no other way to approach these days.” He peppered his essay with a heart-wrenching anecdote of a friend’s attempt to rescue his brainwashed mother, who has been reduced to posting bigoted memes on her social media account.
The number of commentators, news outlets, and public figures who have compared Trump to a cult leader and his political movement to a cult is ever-growing. The Utne Reader wrote of the “Cult of Trump,” while the National Journal warned of “Trump’s Cult” overwhelming the Republican party. References to Trumpism as a cult or Trump as a cult leader litter the pages of The Washington Post, The Economist, Los Angeles Times, GQ, and Vanity Fair, not to mention online media such as Salon and The Daily Kos. Many of these are liberal or politically moderate publications, but conservatives have gotten in on the act too. Tennessee Republican Senator Bob Corker called Trump’s leadership a “cultish thing,” and the GOP in a “cult-like situation.” Even Donald Trump, Jr., responding to Corker’s criticism, seemed to accept the comparison of his father’s leadership to a cult. “You know what? If it’s a cult, it’s because they like what my father’s doing,” he told Fox & Friends.
Often these comparisons go unexplained. But not always. Frequently, commentators lean on the work of professional anti-cultists, such as Chris Hedges’s use of the late anti-cultist Margaret Singer’s work or Rebecca Nelson’s interviews with Rick Alan Ross, currently one of the leading voices in the anti-cult movement. Reza Aslan, who positions himself as a religious studies expert, summarized the anti-cult position by simply declaring that Trumpism fits the bill. And most notably, professional anti-cultist Steven Hassan, known for his support for deprogramming and career built around combatting groups he considers destructive cults, will shortly be releasing a new book, The Cult of Trump: A Leading Cult Expert Explains How the President Uses Mind Control. The publisher’s blurbs and advertising copy emphasize concepts like indoctrination, blind devotion, authoritarianism, and of course—in the subtitle—mind control.
UNITING ALL THESE positions is the claim that the category of “cult” can be distinguished from other social or religious movements, that cults are united by sharing charismatic leaders, and that followers have been manipulated, psychologically coerced, or simply brainwashed into their adherence to the cult’s ideology. This brainwashing or mind-control claim seems to underlie most if not all of the “Trump cult” rhetoric, often explicitly.
The problem is that scholars like myself who study new religious movements (NRMs)—the groups generally called cults—have concluded that such groups often share very little in common besides being new, small, or otherwise socially stigmatized. Importantly, religious studies scholars, sociologists, and social psychologists have over the past three decades nearly unanimously rejected the cultic brainwashing model, which has been shown to be both circular and inherently subjective. Repeated empirical studies have disproven brainwashing as an explanation for recruitment and membership in NRMs, though it lingers among those associated with anti-cult groups. Neither the American Psychiatric Association nor American courts accept brainwashing as a credible scientific concept, and major academic journals no longer publish papers on the concept. (This isn’t to say that all such new religious groups are harmless—many are not—but brainwashing does not explain why people join.) Given that most researchers consider brainwashing and mind-control to be pseudoscientific at best, what is the appeal of comparing Donald Trump to a cult leader, and those who support him to brainwashed cultists?
The answer to this question requires delving into both the specific reasons why such commentators have employed the “cult rhetoric,” as well as the nearly 50 years of collected academic research on cults produced by sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, historians, and scholars of comparative religion.
Behind these claims lurks the assumption that Donald Trump possesses charisma, or the unique ability to lead and manipulate followers. The history of the modern concept of charisma can be traced to German social theorist Max Weber, who in the early twentieth century explained that charisma is the ability to lead based not on rational persuasion or technocratic skill, but based on power of personality and a claim to possess uncanny and remarkable personal characteristics.
Yet several generations of scholars researching NRMs have found that charisma is very much a relative concept, and that rather than envision charisma as an inborn quality of a leader, charisma is produced by the interplay of the leader and his or her followers. Followers invest their leader with charisma, and the leader in turn builds off his or her (usually his) followers. The interplay between President Trump and his supporters at his political rallies shows the manner in which this occurs. This process certainly involves psychological manipulation, but it isn’t magic, and it isn’t mind-control. Trump tells his followers at the rallies that they face crises (immigration, globalization, etc.) and only he can resolve these crises, that they therefore need him, and that in turn, he needs them.
Because charisma requires constant support and maintenance, Lorne L. Dawson, a sociologist of NRMs, has called charisma “intrinsically precarious” and noted that it often results in a feedback loop, or cycle of amplification, by which the leaders and followers increasingly draw distinctions between their leader’s specialness and—by extension—the followers’ specialness, and those outside their orbit. This sort of dualistic thinking characterizes many so-called cults, and also the politics of Trumpism. Trump declares himself special, convinces his supporters that he is special, and makes these supporters feel special themselves, often by contrasting them with a demonized out-group (liberals, immigrants, Muslims, Latinxs).
Thus far, the political rhetoric of cultism as applied to the president makes a certain amount of sense, though one must caution that the same claims might be made about any charismatic figure. Former President Barack Obama was also considered to have mastered charismatic leadership, and though he channeled his charisma into the more optimistic concepts of hope and change, he accomplished the same goal of coalescing a political following, making his political followers feel special and part of something bigger.
Rather than position charisma and cult-like leadership as intrinsic to specific leaders, it is better understood as a classification technique and rhetorical strategy to explain the behavior of a leader and especially his or her followers—either political supporters or religious adherents depending on the type of leader. Yet although rhetorically useful, claims of a leader’s charismatic ability obscure more than they illuminate when they lead to accusations of brainwashing and mind-control.
The best empirical studies of cultic brainwashing show that NRMs possess abysmal recruitment and retention rates, as low as .05 percent in the best longitudinal study, conducted by British sociologist Eileen Barker on the Unification Church (Moonies) during the heart of the 1970s and 1980s cult scare. The new religion that I know best from my personal research, the UFO religion Heaven’s Gate that ended in the 1997 mass suicides, suffered from a 75 percent loss rate of its initial members over its two decades of existence, and its overall success rate from the point of attempted recruitment at public meetings to the eventual suicides was about one percent.
Yet Donald Trump has amassed a colossal political movement, capturing nearly 63 million votes. Granted that many individuals voted for Trump while holding their noses, or out of shrewd political calculation, yet still millions are committed followers. How to explain that? The reason cannot be brainwashing or mind-control, disputed pseudoscientific concepts that lack any empirical support. His success rates are actually vastly higher than any cult or NRM. The actual reasons for his political success require careful analysis by political scientists, not pseudoscientific concepts such as mind-control. Personally, I think Trump’s rise must be assessed by the way he appeals to the power of tribalism, and with it the fears of others benefiting at America’s expense. It’s a simultaneous appeal to the communal solidarity of patriotism and American exceptionalism, and the resultant desire for isolationism and retrenchment of Us against the menacing Them. Others view Trump’s appeal differently, but the fact is, it’s not mind-control or brainwashing. However, it does parallel the sort of dualistic worldview of us/them, good/evil, insider/outsider seen in many new religions.
While not useful from a causal perspective, the claim of brainwashing holds vast rhetorical power, especially for flabbergasted liberals or establishment conservatives wanting to explain the rise of Trump. First, it absolves individuals of personal responsibility and casts a monstrous manipulator as the root cause of a person’s choices (which, under the brainwashing claim, are not choices at all!). Hence when the mother of Rev. Pavlovitz’s friend posts racist material to her social media account and uncritically accepts the claims of political commentators, Pavlovitz and his friend can conveniently blame Trump rather than the mother herself. Sen. Corker does not need to blame his Republican constituents, but rather a “cultish” phenomenon. This is an easier pill to swallow.
Second, and more broadly, brainwashing and related cult language allow us to dismiss the actual claims and experiences of those who we simply reduce to mind-controlled victims. To call something a cult is to reject its validity. The category is inherently pejorative, which is why scholars use alternative terms like “new religious movement.” Members of NRMs never use this term to describe themselves, and the very word “cult” is generally used as an easy way to mark a religious group as illegitimate. As a former mentor of mine once said, “A cult is just someone else’s religion that you don’t like.” Such groups tend to be small and powerless, and as they assume greater cultural legitimacy lose the “cult” label. Witness the slow transformation of Mormonism—not yet complete—from being consider a cult/NRM to simply another Christian denomination.
Cults (to use the popular term) are closely associated with the idea of brainwashing, since no one in their right mind would join a deviant and illegitimate group. This approach has come into our modern lexicon as “drinking the Kool-Aid,” a reference to the poison-laced Flavor-Aid used in the Jonestown murder-suicides, but one that has taken on a life of its own. Those who have drunk the Kool-Aid are outside the realms of rational conversation or conversion. Only extreme action, like the “deprogramming” alluded to by Scaramucci and which often involves kidnapping a NRM’s adherents, can rescue the brainwashed victim.
The usefulness of this cultic brainwashing rhetoric therefore extends beyond Trump. Conservative activists have deployed the same language to criticize social justice movements, dismissing them as part of the “cult of wokeness,” a position which assumes the same sort of brainwashing model as those critical of the cult of Trump. It is rhetorically useful to label one’s opponents as manipulated victims, which negates the need to either explain their choices or empathize with them.
Scholars of new religious movements have shown that the mythology of cultic mind-control is more rhetoric than reality. It is easy to understand why critics of the president dismiss him as a cult leader, and his political followers as brainwashed. But it says a lot more about the power of the language than it does the president himself.
Benjamin E. Zeller is associate professor of religion at Lake Forest College. He is the author of Heaven’s Gate: America’s UFO Religion, and he serves as co-general editor of Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions. His website is nrms.net.
https://religionandpolitics.org/2019/10/29/the-cult-of-trump-what-cult-rhetoric-actually-reveals/
Ends
“In some ways it’s almost better than reality.” Zeller about his virtual tour of three Chicago churches, Lakeview College trailer
“Science as Social Identity Marker: The Case of Early Unificationism in America,” Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions, vol. 14, no. 4, May 2011.
i Oxford University neuroscientist Kathleen Taylor examines the scientific evidence in her book Brainwashing: The science of thought control. Zeller can also find discussion in the work of Benjamin Zablocki and Alexandra Stein.