Religion or Cult?

Editor’s Note: This is the second installment in a two-part column. The first column is available here. 

Jonestown. Waco. Heaven’s Gate. 

Since the 1978 murder-suicide of 900 Peoples Temple members in Guyana, the word “cult” has evoked memories of sensational mass deaths—and complicated the efforts to fairly and accurately understand new and unusual religions that reject the American status quo. 

For historians of modern religions who rely on contemporary accounts, changes in the media landscape have an impact. Axerevan/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 4.0

News media have both driven and reflected this tendency to create what the scholar of religion Richard Kent Evans has called a “cult typology,” in which religious groups tarred with the label are assumed by media, law enforcement, and the public to be not just exotic or curious but dangerous and violent. 

This wasn’t always the case. In the early 1970s, as adult children from white middle-class homes began rejecting the moderate religion of their parents for a bevy of new groups that included the Unification Church, the Hare Krishnas, and the Children of God, news media generally defended these groups’ right to exist and looked skeptically at efforts by so-called “deprogrammers” to abduct them and coerce their deconversion. Instead, they directed their suspicion elsewhere: at Black religious groups considered unacceptably political and revolutionary. 

As Sean McCloud has shown in Making the American Religious Fringe, news media failed to see Black-led groups such as MOVE and the Nation of Islam as true religions. Neither did law enforcement, which persecuted and prosecuted these groups, even bombing MOVE’s West Philadelphia residence in a shocking act of domestic warfare that ultimately burned down two blocks of homes in 1985. 

News media often look askance at these groups and report more sympathetically on the actions of the powerful state actors arrayed against them. 

Journalists often embrace the aphorism that their job is to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable,” but when the afflicted are members of the religious fringe, news media often look askance at these groups and report more sympathetically on the actions of the powerful state actors arrayed against them. McCloud, Evans, and other historians of religion point out that this is part of a longstanding American tradition that defines “religion” as anything that looks like mainstream Protestant Christianity and marginalizes almost everything else, including at various times Catholicism, Judaism, Islam, East and South Asian religions, and religious innovations of all kinds, especially Mormonism and its fundamentalist offshoots. 

That poses a problem. Historians and journalists tend to share a common demographic and ideological disposition—white, male, middle class, and relatively moderate. Thus when historians examine the work of journalists, they are often doing so through the same lenses the reporters themselves used to cover the story, making critical examination more difficult. Yet identifying and accounting for the biases that influence reporting is crucial for assessing the strengths and weaknesses of “the first draft of history,” as journalism is so often called. 

Reporting is a vital resource for historians seeking to understand not only new religions but the cultural reaction to them. Interviews with current and former members, descriptions of sites now long gone, and references to important documents are invaluable as historians seek to reconstruct the origins and inner workings of these groups. Yet this reporting often comes tinged with the assumption that these groups—having rejected mainstream American norms of “proper” religion—are exotic at best and fundamentally dangerous at worst. 

The consequences of such unexamined assumptions have been tragic, as in the 1993 federal raid of the Branch Davidians, which scholars have shown was spurred in part by sensationalistic and inaccurate coverage in the Waco Tribune-Herald. Even in less extreme cases, the choices of reporters cannot help but have downstream effects on the information available to historians—whether explicitly, in the words they print or broadcast, or implicitly, in the cultural mood they both reflect and shape. 

This latter effect is certainly ephemeral, but no less real—especially in the context of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS) raid in 2008, an event I covered as a journalist and now study as a historian. As events from the early 2000s move from current events to history, the changing media environment of that era adds greater challenges to the historian’s task. 

When the state of Texas entered the Yearning for Zion Ranch on April 3, 2008, newspapers and television stations from Dallas, Fort Worth, Austin, San Antonio, Houston, and Salt Lake City all sent reporters. In many ways, the first two weeks felt like a classic media circus. Satellite trucks ringed the Tom Green County Courthouse and print and television journalists alike jockeyed to get scoops, interviews, and questions answered at rowdy press conferences held by state officials. Their work appeared on newscasts that evening and in print newspapers the next morning. 

As websites migrated servers, blogging declined, and social media became increasingly important, the historical record of these online interactions largely disappeared.

But the media ecosystem was changing rapidly. Breaking news was posted within minutes to websites, causing rapid changes to the news environment, as I detailed in my first column. More than that, however, newspaper websites’ comment sections, blogs run by knowledgeable observers, and social media were all newly prominent contributors to the public discussion. These perspectives—from knowledgeable experts, interested observers, or even some of the people at the center of the story—rarely appeared in traditional media, and as websites migrated servers, blogging declined, and social media became increasingly important, the historical record of these online interactions largely disappeared. 

By the time a grand jury began indicting FLDS leaders on charges relating to marrying underage girls in the summer of 2008, the journalism industry was in freefall as the American economy teetered into the Great Recession. Reporters lost their travel budgets and had to return home, reducing the number of independent voices reporting on the largest child-custody raid in history. The corresponding material available to historians likewise shrank and access to what remained became spottier. 

The dilemma for historians of new and marginalized religions, then, is twofold. We rely deeply on the contemporary accounts of journalists who are indebted to a notion of religion—indeed, a notion of America—that disadvantages religious groups deemed too political, extreme, emotional, or weird and sometimes labels them with a word, “cult,” that implies danger and disorder. Yet these accounts are often crucial for the real-time information they provide, as well as understanding how society at large viewed these groups. The loss of such media accounts over the last two decades has left a hole that impoverishes our work. 

As both the media and religious landscapes continue to fragment, future historians of American religion may find filling that hole to be an increasingly difficult challenge. The next Jonestown, Waco, or Heaven’s Gate may reveal that if reflexively suspicious or hostile news media coverage of new religions has been bad, its absence is worse.