Cults vs. Religions
[Note that there is a description of sexual assault in the second full paragraph below.]
I am listening to The Shoes of a Servant - My Unconditional Devotion to a Lie by Diane Benscoter. It’s all about her years as a Moonie in the cult of Sun Myung Moon.
Benscoter was a vulnerable young woman when recruited by the cult. She was desperately seeking a sense of meaning and purpose in her life, and battling Satan and working for the messiah (Moon) - even when that work involved endless hours of illicitly selling junk to easy marks on the street “for the Church” - this newfound purpose drew from her a deep devotion - albeit (as she says) a “devotion to a lie”. She alienated herself from her family and friends, endured sleep deprivation and periods of starvation and worse. There’s a harrowing chapter that describes how she was gang-raped because of a vulnerable position the cult had put her in. The rape of course is not addressed by the cult, except to blame her, the victim (she was paying an “indemity” or suffering a kind of karma for previous sins she had committed, you see; in other words, she deserved it, according to the cult). They deliberately did not allow her access to medical care or the police after she had survived the assault. You might say, in a sense, the whole book is a story of a kind of rape - a spiritual rape, perpetrated by the leaders and the hierarchy of the Moonies.
Her sense of fulfillment and focus - going from a high school dropout with a serious addiction to weed, to a “purpose driven” and focused young woman - gives the reader an idea of why the lie was so appealing to her. I can certainly relate. My own devotion to the Catholic “Thing” (the Revivalist cult within the Church) was almost as intense as Benscoter's devotion to the Moonies, and, in a similar manner, I was eager to overlook the various lies I was swallowing along the way.
And so I wondered, as anyone would: what is the difference between a cult and a religion? If you Google this, you will get either smart-alec answers or very superficial and rather stupid answers. You’ll certainly get obviously wrong answers.
It seems to me that the difference consists of this.
Cults are social organizations that are set up to attain undue enrichment by means of undue influence, typically by preying on their victims’ desire to be devoted to something or someone. That’s why they exist; that’s what they are.
Cults exploit the labor of their members, and cults do this through lies and deception, through alienation, sleep deprivation and other “brainwashing” techniques: gaining undue enrichment via undue influence. Cults want to get into their victims' heads in order to get into their pants - both for their wallets and for their genitalia: for their free labor and for their physical and spiritual submission.
And, yes, the Catholic Church and all religions can be guilty of victimizing their members in this way, but such victimization is not the raison d’etre of legitimate religious organizations - though there can be territorial and temporal exceptions. For example, the Pennsylvania Diocese Victims Grand Jury Report certainly makes it sound as if the only reason the Catholic Church existed in some dioceses in Pennsylvania was for organized crime: to allow molesters access to children. Period. The sacraments were simply a cover, the way towing companies or casinos are often a cover for the mob. But that, we hope, is the exception and not the rule in religions.
I don’t think focusing on exit costs helps much. You are free to leave a cult and you are free to leave a religion (in most cases), but you might pay a high exit cost either way. Steve Hassan’s BITE model is also not that helpful, as it deals with a spectrum of descriptive characteristics and avoids the more penetrating question of what constitutes the essence of a cult, and how this differs from the essence of a religion.
The essential difference can be seen if you look at whether the abuse of its members is a feature or a bug of an organization. If an organization truly exists for the benefit of its members (and exists not merely to take advantage of them), then it would not abuse them; or if some of its representatives did, the abuse would be addressed and corrected (though, admittedly, this was not the case in the Catholic Church until the media and the lawyers got involved - and even then, the problem persists - and yet such abuse is typically not the purpose of the Church; it’s a bug, not a feature - I hope). But Sun Myung Moon’s cult always abused its members; that was the purpose of its existence. And it abused them by means of undue influence in order to attain undue enrichment. The abuse of its members was a feature, not a bug.
In both cases, religions and cults are dealing with the most intimate and vulnerable parts of who we are, our hopes and longings and our search for meaning and order. This geist liebe, this eros of the soul, must be administered and properly ordered and channeled by each of us - otherwise we will wind up like Diane Benscoter and so many others, mere tools and victims of the unscrupulous among us.
What happens if we avoid these pitfalls, if we are prudent about where to invest our spiritual love? If we exercise the caveat “worshipper beware”? If we become spiritually mature? St. Paul tell us …
Then we will no longer be infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of people in their deceitful scheming. (Eph. 4:14)
Anyway, that’s how it seems to me, but I’m curious about what you readers may think of this. What makes a cult a cult and how does a cult differ from a religion?