Study Resources	cult general information
psychological manipulation, cult groups, sects, and new religious movements

Cultic Studies Cult general Cults Questions & Answers Michael D. Langone, Ph.D. Full Text File 85K

How Do Cults Harm Society?

The report, "Cultism: A Conference for Scholars and Policy," outlines some direct ways in which cults have harmed society:

Government/Law

1. Infiltration of government agencies, political parties, community groups, and military organizations for the purpose of obtaining classified or private information, gaining economic advantage, or influencing the infiltrated organization to serve the ends of the cult.
2. Tax evasion.
3. Fraudulent acquisition and illegal disposition of public assistance and social security funds.
4. Violation of immigration laws.
5. Abuse of the legal system through spurious lawsuits, groundless complaints to licensing and regulatory bodies, or extravagant demands for services (such as those provided by the "Freedom of Information Act") as part of "fishing expeditions" against their enemies.
6. Pursuit of political goals while operating under the rubric of a nonpolitical, charitable, or religious organization.

Business

1. Deceptive fund-raising and selling practices.
2. Organizational and individual stress resulting from pressuring employees to participate in cultic management training and growth seminars.
3. Misuse of charitable status in order to secure money for business and other noncharitable purposes.
4. Unfair competition through the use of underpaid labor or "recycled salaries."

Education

1. Denial of, or interference with, legally required education of children in cults.
2. Misuse of school or college facilities or misrepresentation of the cult’s purposes, in order to gain respectability.
3. Recruitment of college students through violation of their privacy and/or deception.

Religion

1. Attempts to gain the support of established religions by presenting a deceptive picture of the cult’s goals, beliefs, and practices, and seeking to make "common cause" on various issues.
2. Infiltration of established religious groups in order to recruit members into the cult.

Cults also harm society in important indirect ways. Cults violate five interrelated values that sustain free, pluralistic cultures: human dignity, freedom, ethics, critical thinking, and accountability. Because they "cheat," cults are able to gain power far beyond their numbers. Furthermore, the majority seek the protection guaranteed by the Bill of Rights, even thought their ultimate goal is to eliminate the very freedom they claim for themselves. They thus pose a serious challenge:

How does a free, constitutionally-based society protect itself against the totalistic impulses and practices of cults and other groups of zealots without becoming closed and repressive? Simply put, how does the constitutional center hold together?

This question is especially important today because the American cultural identity has fragmented. The once-dominant Judeo-Christian tradition has been challenged, some say supplanted, by a secularism which, although consistent with the American Constitutional heritage, rejects many major tenets of traditional Judeo-Christian morality.

While these two camps have been battling, a third value system or world view, rooted in eastern mysticism and issuing from the humanistic psychology movement, has worked itself into the American consciousness. Commonly called the New Age movement, this world view’s fundamental tenet is that men are blind to the fact that they are all one, that they are all God, and that they are all capable of developing superhuman capacities.

Most proponents of these three world views tolerate disagreement and respect their opponents, even as they compete - knowingly or not- for dominance within the changing American identity. But on the fringes of each world view, zealots, many of whom belong to well-organized cults, seek to remake the culture in their own image.

If cultic zealotry is not ethically restrained, American culture will lose its ethical moorings and the values that have for so long undergirded constitutional guarantees. The hundreds of thousands of families whom cults have torn apart and the millions of individuals whose rights and integrity they have violated testify to the gravity of this threat.