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You can help Wikipedia by introducing appropriate citations. This article describes a 1970s sociological phenomenon known as the Cult Debate. Image File history File links Unbalanced_scales. ...
The 1970s decade refers to the years from 1970 to 1979, inclusive. ...
History of debate
As the Vietnam war wound down in the early 1970s, and the US public's preoccupation with the so-called Red Menace declined, a new idée fixe arose in its place: what it saw as the menace of cults. [1] [2] [3] Combatants Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) United States of America South Korea Thailand Australia New Zealand the Philippines Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam) National Liberation Front (Viet Cong) Strength ~1,200,000 (1968) ~420,000 (1968) Casualties South Vietnamese dead: 230,000 South Vietnamese wounded: 300,000 US dead...
Political cartoon of the era depicting an anarchist attempting to destroy the Statue of Liberty. ...
In religion and sociology, a cult is a cohesive group of people (often a relatively small and recently founded religious movement) devoted to beliefs or practices that the surrounding culture or society considers to be far outside the mainstream. ...
Throughout the decade, various organizations both dangerous (Charles Manson's "The Family") and benign (Hare Krishna) came to the forefront of debate over the changing mores of US society. Newspapers and broadcast news, as well as religious leaders and parents who worried over losing their teenaged and college-aged children to the Youth Movement of the 60s and 70s, frequently focused attention on groups they described as "dangerous cults." Charles Manson. ...
Hare Krishna Mantra in Devanagari. ...
A singer dresses in a stereotypical hippie outfit. ...
1960 (MCMLX) was a leap year starting on Friday (the link is to a full 1960 calendar). ...
While some of these groups were, in fact, notoriously criminal, engaging in behavior such as murder (Manson), kidnapping and armed robbery (Symbionese Liberation Army), prostitution and child sexual abuse (Children of God), and enforced separation from family members (various), others were culpable of nothing more "dangerous" than indoctrination of adherents into religious faiths or groups whose doctrines seemed unfamiliar, strange or even heretical to outsiders. Some of the groups that entered the national cult debate in the early and mid 1970s were Erhard Seminars Training (est), Exclusive Brethren, Hare Krishna, the Unification Church, and Transcendental Meditation (TM). The Symbionese Liberation Army was an American paramilitary group that considered itself to be a revolutionary vanguard army and was a proponent of radical ideology. ...
The Children of God (COG), later known as the Family of Love, the Family, and now the Family International, is a new religious movement, widely referred to as a cult[1] by the media and some government organizations, that started in 1968 in Huntington Beach, California, USA. It was part...
The word indoctrination has accumulated negative connotations over the past century. ...
Heresy, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is a theological or religious opinion or doctrine maintained in opposition, or held to be contrary, to the ‘catholic’ or orthodox doctrine of the Christian Church, or, by extension, to that of any church, creed, or religious system, considered as orthodox. ...
Erhard Seminars Training, or est (always in lower-case), was a controversial New Age large group awareness training (LGAT) seminar program, widespread during the 1970s. ...
The Exclusive Brethren are a secretive Christian cult whose current leader is Australian businessman Bruce D. Hales, carrying the title Elect Vessel of God. ...
Hare Krishna Mantra in Devanagari. ...
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To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ...
Connotative change During the period, the word "cult" lost its traditional meaning (a system of religious worship[4]) and came to be associated with notions such as brainwashing, mind control, coersive recruiting tactics and sex abuse. Brainwashing or thought reform is the application of coercive techniques to change the beliefs or behavior of one or more people usually for political or religious purposes. ...
Mind control (or thought control) has the premise that an outside source can control an individuals thinking, behavior or consciousness (either directly or more subtly). ...
Sexual abuse is a relative cultural term used to describe sexual relations and behavior between two or more parties which are considered criminally and/or morally offensive. ...
These nefarious associations were cemented in 1978 with the Reverend Jim Jones and the mass suicide of members of the Peoples Temple. This article is about the religious leader; for the rap artist with this name, see Jim Jones (rapper). ...
This article or section is in need of attention from an expert on the subject. ...
During this period, certain religious clerics and lay members of some evangelical Christian groups took advantage of this wave of publicity, and began using the term "cult" as a pejorative to describe any religious faith group whose doctrines or theology were different from their own. Members of so-called "anti-cult" ministries began publishing and distributing disparaging checklists with titles such as "Checklist of Cult Characteristics"[5], [6], [7], [8] where each entry on the checklist described unique beliefs or doctrines of a target religious faith. By disparaging doctrines such as Mariology or Antitrinitarianism, these groups attempted to calumniate even large, established faiths such as Roman Catholicism and Mormonism with the label "cult." Look up Evangelical in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...
A moral panic is a mass movement based on the false or exaggerated perception that some cultural behavior or group of people, frequently a minority group or a subculture, is dangerously deviant and poses a menace to society. ...
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Mariology is the area of Christian theology concerned with Mary, the Mother of Jesus. ...
Nontrinitarianism or antitrinitarianism is the doctrinal description applied to rejection of the Trinitarian doctrine that God subsists as three distinct persons in the Holy Trinity. ...
The Roman Catholic Church, most often spoken of simply as the Catholic Church, is the largest Christian church, with over one billion members. ...
See also: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Mormonism is a religion, movement, ideology, and subculture that originated in the early 1800s as a product of the Latter Day Saint movement led principally by Joseph Smith, Jr. ...
Post-debate change Acknowledging the now-disparaging connotation of the once-useful term "cult," scholars of religion and sociology began in the 1980s to use the term "New Religious Movement" to describe smaller and newer religious faith groups. Whilst not in common use -- due in some measure to its unwieldy name -- the newer term has wide currency both in the academic community and amongst religious scholars. A new religious movement or NRM is a religious, ethical, or spiritual grouping of fairly recent origin which is not part of an established religion and has not yet become recognised as a standard denomination, church, or religious body. ...
References and footnotes - ^ Hofstadter, Richard, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, where Hofstadter argues that the anti-Catholic hysteria of the 1800s, the anti-immmigrant movement that lead to the Palmer raids in the 1920s, and the Red Scare that began in the 1950s are all examples of the thesis that in times of economic, social or political crisis, small conspiracy-minded groups suddenly gain a mass following.[1],
- ^ See also, Victor, Jeffrey S. (Professor of Sociology), The Institute for Psychological Therapies Journal, The Satanic Cult Scare and Allegations of Ritual Child Abuse, which reads in part: "The satanic cult scare is in many ways similar to the "Red Scare" of the 1950s, in the sense that it is a witch hunt for moral "subversives" and supposed criminals engaged in a highly secretive conspiratorial network. It is a collective overreaction to claims about crimes, which are supposedly committed by well-organized groups following a religious ideology involving worship of the Devil." [2]
- ^ Anti-Cult Movement: Media [3]
The 1918 to 1921 Palmer Raids were a series of controversial raids on American citizens and resident and non-resident aliens in the United States, based on their assumed political beliefs. ...
Further reading - Edge, Peter W. – Legal Responses to Religious Difference pp.393-4. Martinus Nijhoff Publishers (2001). ISBN 9-0411-1678-8
- Arweck, Elisabeth – Researching New Religious Movements: Responses and Redefinitions, Routledge (UK) (2005). ISBN 0-4152-7755-8
See also Deprogramming refers to actions to force a person to abandon allegiance to a religious group. ...
In religion and sociology, a cult is a cohesive group of people (often a relatively small and recently founded religious movement) devoted to beliefs or practices that the surrounding culture or society considers to be far outside the mainstream. ...
To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ...
A destructive cult is a group (often called cult) with strange beliefs (especially religious ones) and which exploits or destroys its own members or others. ...
This list indexes a number of groups that have been referred to: as a cult directly by specific listed sources; as a sect directly by specific listed French-language or United Kingdom sources; as such within the last 50 years; as the group has existed within the last 150 years. ...
External links The Cult Controversy:Spiritual Quest or Mind Control?
Maryland Cult Task Force
Cult In religion and sociology, a cult is a cohesive group of people (often a relatively small and recently founded religious movement) devoted to beliefs or practices that the surrounding culture or society considers to be far outside the mainstream. ...
Opposition to cults and NRMs | Christian countercult movement | Cult apologists | Cult debate | Political cult Opposition to cults and new religious movements (NRMs) comes from several sources with diverse concerns. ...
The Christian countercult movement, also known as discernment ministries is the collective designation for many mostly unrelated ministries and individual Christians who oppose non-mainstream Christian and non-Christian religious groups, which they often call cults. ...
A cult apologist is a term to describe a scholar of cults and/or new religious movements perceived as responding to the movements they study with advocacy instead of with neutral scholarship. ...
The word cult is almost never used in regard to political parties, even if they were to share many or most other characteristics associated with religious cults. ...
Charismatic authority | Mind control | Brainwashing | Exit counseling | Deprogramming | Post-cult trauma The sociologist Max Weber defined charismatic authority, also called charismatic domination, or charismatic leadership, as resting on devotion to the exceptional sanctity, heroism or exemplary character of an individual person, and of the normative patterns or order revealed or ordained by him. Charismatic authority is one of three forms of...
Mind control (or thought control) has the premise that an outside source can control an individuals thinking, behavior or consciousness (either directly or more subtly). ...
Brainwashing or thought reform is the application of coercive techniques to change the beliefs or behavior of one or more people usually for political or religious purposes. ...
Exit counseling, also termed strategic intervention therapy, cult intervention or thought reform consultation is an intervention designed to persuade an individual to leave a cult. ...
Deprogramming refers to actions to force a person to abandon allegiance to a religious group. ...
This article is in need of attention. ...
Religious intolerance | Apostasy | Witch hunt | Bigotry Religious intolerance is intolerance motivated by ones own religious beliefs, generally against anothers religious beliefs. ...
Apostasy (from Greek αποστασία, a defection or revolt from a military commander, from απο, apo, away, apart, στασις, stasis, standing) is a term generally employed to describe the formal renunciation of ones religion, especially if the motive is deemed unworthy. ...
A witch-hunt was traditionally a search for witches or evidence of witchcraft, which could lead to a witchcraft trial involving the accused person. ...
A bigot is a prejudiced person who is intolerant of opinions differing from his own. ...
Cult of personality | Cult checklists | List of groups referred to as cults | Cult suicide This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ...
A cult checklist is a group of factors proposed to identify objectively which groups, cults, or new religious movements are spurious, or likely to abuse or exploit or otherwise harm its members. ...
This list indexes a number of groups that have been referred to: as a cult directly by specific listed sources; as a sect directly by specific listed French-language or United Kingdom sources; as such within the last 50 years; as the group has existed within the last 150 years. ...
Cult suicide is that phenomenon by which some religious groups, in this context often referred to as cults, have led to their membership committing suicide. ...
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