Vol. 7, No. 4, 1990

Articles on Cults and New Religions

Christian leadership and cult ministries should be much more involved in working with the American Family Foundation.

This organization consists of mental health professionals, legal professionals, parents, ex-cultists, clergy and educators.

They are primarily secular in that their emphasis is not on beliefs but primarily on practice.

Christians agree that the operative words in describing destructive cultism (thought reform, coercive persuasion) is manipulation, exploitation, control, and deception.

The Bible describes these cult leaders and their practices in 2 Peter 2:1-3, as Peter warns about a false teachers drawing away many with devious methodology, greed, exploitation, and sensuality.

Dr. Michael Langone, director of the American Family Foundation describes the process that many unethical and manipulative cults employ:

(1) extensive control of information in order to limit alternatives from which one can make a choice;

(2) deception;

(3) group pressure;

(4) intense indoctrination into a belief system that denigrates independent critical thinking;

(5) isolation from family and friends or other support groups and an insistence that the outside world is threatening and evil;

(6) an insistence that a member's distress (usually anxiety or guilt produced by the group) can be relieved only by conforming to the group;

(7) the induction of dissociative or trance-like states in which attention is narrowed, suggestibility heightened, and critical thinking weakened;

(8) alternation of harshness/threats and leniency/love in order to effect compliance with the leadership wishes;

(9) pressured public or pri¬vate confessions which induces a surrendering of self (Cults: Questions and Answers, p. 3).

Of course different groups use different combinations of these, but the more of these methods that are in place and their degree of intensity will produce destructive cultism.

The publics general impression is that only weak people with serious psychological problems will join a destructive cult. This impression is false.

The Bible reminds us that we are all weak with sin. Everyone is vulnerable.

There are times in everyone's life, some more so than others, that the consequences of sin leaves one susceptible to the clever, subtle and yet powerful influences of mind control.

There are many pseudo-Christian, New Age, Occultic, pseudo-psychotherapy, and human potential cults which are recognized by both Christian and secular authorities as destructive.

Some of them are Scientology, Silva Mind Control, The Way, Unification Church (Moonies), Church Universal and Triumphant, Eckankar, witchcraft, Satanism, transcendental meditation, Jehovah's Witnesses, Armstrongism, Spiritism (channeling) Boston Church of Christ and its associated churches, Hare Krishna and the Divine Light Mission.

Of course there are many, many more.

It should also be noted that there are several aberrant Christian groups that have a high incident of problems of destructive cultic methods. They may profess orthodox views of Jesus and the gospel but they also utilize many of the practices of mind control.