The best books about cults and “high demand” groups

Going Clear is the best account of the bizarre phenomenon that is Scientology.

Thoroughly reported, researched, and written, Wright works hard to be fair to L. Ron Hubbard and the movement he spawned – he always refers to it as a church – and yet the accumulation of facts reveals Hubbard to be a pathological liar, a sociopath, and a brilliant, visionary huckster. Wright also details the brutal tactics that Scientology adopted to win itself tax-exempt status as a church and to discourage and punish those who dissent or defect, labelled “suppressive persons” by the group.

Wright uses the term “prison of belief” in his subtitle which reflects his interest in the way that cult-like group create closed systems of belief, which, however outlandish they may seem to outsiders, are internally consistent and all-encompassing.

The Road to Jonestown is a solid, comprehensive account of the long road that led Jim Jones and more than 900 of his followers to take their lives in Jonestown, Guyana in 1978, by literally drinking the Kool-Aid.

What Guinn does well is show the early appeal of Jones’s church, its message of inter-racial harmony and social justice which attracted many idealistic young people as well as a substantial number of African-American followers. The book explains Jones’ repeated contacts with Father Divine and his Peace Mission movement.

Jones was a complex mix of charismatic preacher and flim-flam man – both deeply insecure and wildly grandiose with a pronounced tendency toward victimhood and paranoia which became increasingly pronounced as he led his group to its apocalypse. 

For a theoretical and psychological understanding of the workings of cults, I would strongly recommend the work of Robert Jay Lifton, in particular, his most recent book Losing Reality: On Cults, Cultism, and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealoutry, which brings together many of his writings over the years on the subject of cults and what he called “totalizing” groups, ones which demand absolute commitment.

Lifton, who wrote about “Nazi Doctors," the Chinese cultural revolution, and the Aum Shinrikyo cult in Japan, which carried out a deadly sarin attack on a Tokyo subway in 1987, grasped that the mechanism of belief and allegiance that bind both political and religious movements are essentially the same.

Lifton worked out eight criteria for thought control that groups commonly used that went from “Milieu Control,” (isolating members and control the information they are exposed to) and “Demand for Purity” (in which the good group is seen in opposition to an impure or evil world) to “Sacred Science,” the idea that the group’s doctrine or ideology is  “considered to be the ultimate Truth, beyond all questioning or dispute. Truth is not to be found outside the group.”

The “perfectionist” community at Oneida, NY was, perhaps, the closest analogue to the polygamous group I wrote about in my book.

In reaction to the strict Calvinist faith of his Puritan forefathers, with their deep conviction in original sin, John Humphrey Noyes believed that it was possible to be without sin in this world.

He believed that in heaven people would be paired with their true “spiritual” wife or husband, different from the imperfect matches that people made on earth. This evolved in Noyes’ idea of “complex marriage,” in which everyone in his community was free to have sex with anyone else, in order to get beyond the jealous, possessive, and exclusive nature of traditional marriage.

In 1848, Noyes founded his own community in Oneida, which eventually grew to include about 300 people before it fell apart in 1879. In order to avoid a plethora of children, Noyes preached the idea of “male continence,” in which men trained themselves to avoid achieving orgasm inside the woman, focusing on the pleasure of the female and keeping birth rates down.

In some ways, it appears to have been a fairly successful experiment based on some degree of gender equality and the sexual satisfaction of women. Post-menopausal women initiated the younger men in the art of coitus riservatus while older men did the same with young women. Children were raised communally.

At the same time, the group showed some weaknesses typical of groups of this kind: members who had trouble adhering to the group’s principles were subject to public criticism sessions. The leader often chose himself to be the one who would impregnate women when it was decided a woman should bear a child.

The experiment foundered in 1878 when Noyes attempted to pass the leadership of the group to his son, who did not enjoy the same degree of authority with the group. Moreover, many members decided they wanted to pair off in more traditional marriages. Noyes, himself, was forced to flee the country after he was threatened with criminal prosecution on charges of statutory rape.

The community ended the practice of complex marriage in 1879 but some of its members reorganized the group as a joint-stock company as Oneida already operated a number of successful businesses, including a silverware company that produced what is still called Oneidaware.

Wayland-Smith, who is a descendant of early Oneida members, tells this fascinating story with writerly verve and perspicacity. 

This biography of Joseph Smith although first published nearly eighty years ago is still the best account of the founder of Mormonism. It caused a sensation when it came out in 1945.

Its author, the 30-year-old Fawn Brodie, member of a prominent Mormon family, was excommunicated by the Church of Latter Day Saints. Despite being nearly eighty years old – it was revised and reissued in 1971 – and the subject of controversy in the Mormon church, this is a brilliant work of biography. Brodie writes extremely well and she knows the Mormon world and its belief system from within.

Her sin – if you can call it that – was to treat Joseph Smith as a mortal, historical figure. Unless you believe that the Angel Moroni really revealed a set of golden tablets to Joseph Smith that contained a set of divine truths and the amazing story he tells in The Book of Mormon – how the native American inhabitants of North American were really descendants of the ancient Hebrews who travelled to this continent by boat then you have to believe – then the only possibility is that Smith was a brilliant huckster and salesman.

As she reveals, Smith dabbled in magic and before discovering the golden tablets claimed to have the ability to find hidden treasure that may lie buried on people’s properties. Farmers digging up and cultivating land that had recently been occupied by Native American tribes stumbled on arrowheads and other Indian artifacts and so the notion that their land might contain buried treasure and had been inhabited by a now-vanished people did not appear as outlandish to them is it may to most people today.

She places Smith in his time and shows how he borrowed from a range of contemporary sources – freemasonry, religious debates, contemporary archeological theories – to cobble together the belief system that became the basis for Mormonism. In some ways, like L. Ron Hubbard, he was a talented science-fiction writer who turned his narrative into a religion.