Of Space Aliens and Super Catholics
I am reading When Prophecy Fails by Leon Festinger et al. (who coined the term “cognitive dissonance”), a classic in cult studies, which is about a small cult called the Seekers, whose leader was a middle-aged suburban Chicago housewife, who claimed that she was receiving messages and orders from space aliens, and that these aliens told her that the world would end in a giant flood on Dec. 21, 1954, and that she and her followers would be spared the flood by being lifted up by flying saucers to become Mormon-like planetary rulers in the heavens.
I am analyzing the book via a model of cults identified by Daniella Mestyanek Young. Here’s Daniella’s list of characteristics common to cults.
1. The charismatic leader (& their skinny white woman)
2. Worldview shift that brings you under the sacred assumption
3. The transcendent mission
4. Self-sacrifice of members
5. Limits access to outside world
6. Distinguishable vernacular
7. Us versus them mentality
8. Exploits members labor
9. High exit costs
10. Ends justify the means mentality
I’m sure Daniella would be willing to add the "Eight Criteria for Thought Reform" as identified by Robert Jay Lifton in Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism to her own list. Lifton said that totalitarian thought reform (brainwashing) consists of …
Milieu control
Mystical manipulation (or planned spontaneity)
The demand for purity
The cult of confession
Sacred science
Loading of the language
Doctrine over person
Dispensing of existence
Let me take just a few of these identified aspects of totalist thinking / cult characteristics and apply them to the UFO Cult that Festinger and his colleagues studied - as well as to Other Cults I’ve Known.
Worldview shift that brings you under the sacred assumption
Accept that the cult leader is actually communicating with and receiving orders from superior beings from the heavens (“outer space”) and all else follows. That’s the Sacred Assumption: the assumption that the leader is affiliated with what is Sacred and must therefore not be questioned or doubted.
In the case of the cult Daniella Young was raised in, the notorious Children of God, you must accept that the cult leader, David Berg, was speaking with the authority of God; once you bought into that (and you were required to), then all else followed, even when Berg claimed that God demanded the sexual abuse of children, which “God” taught was an expression of love.
For Revivalist Catholics, the Sacred Assumption includes the belief that certain leaders (though, notably, not Pope Francis), including evidently disturbed internet priests and secular non-profit corporations such as EWTN and Catholic Answers, speak with the Voice of God. For instance, a former EWTN employee claims that God told him that COVID was punishment visited upon the world - because too many Catholics were receiving communion in the hand and not on the tongue. Millions dead worldwide, including non-Catholics? Deus vult. God wills it - why? because communion in the hand, that’s why.
The transcendent mission
Your whole life changes once your leader tells you that the goal in life is to become a demigod ruling your own planet, spirited away in a flying saucer right before the world ends in a terrible flood on Dec. 21, 1954. Suddenly, you must quit your job and avoid all the everyday hassles of mundane existence! You’ve got something beyond this world to live for! Hooray!
Daniella M. Young points out that many corporations have “transcendent mission statements” - vague, unattainable, universal goals - which, naturally, tends to pressure employees into working far harder than they should (see Exploits Members’ Labor above; likewise try supporting a family on the salary that “pro-family” EWTN pays its workers; but it’s all good because you have a transcendent mission. You are doing it for God! So shut up about being taken advantage of and get to work!)
When I was running our touring religious drama company, Theater of the Word Incorporated, I honestly thought we were saving the Catholic Church. This was crazy - almost as crazy as thinking that flying saucers were coming to save me. It also made me miserable. No matter what I did, no matter how good the plays were that I wrote and we performed, no matter if I was able to generate enough income to support myself, my family and a few employees … no matter any of that, it was never enough because “saving the Church” is a transcendent mission, not an immanent one. (Also see Self-Sacrifice of Members above.)
The Demand for Purity - “Purity” here means a Substitute for Virtue. It is typically something utterly insignificant, but also something that’s very hard to achieve long-term. This keeps members striving, always depending on the cult for guidance and forgiveness - and most importantly turns members into their own Inner Cops, constantly monitoring themselves, punishing themselves for their failure to attain this arbitrary goal, or congratulating themselves for their occasional attainment of it.
In the UFO Cult, members were required not to smoke or drink, to be vegetarians and not to wear anything metallic.
Among my Super Catholic / Revivalist former friends, praying elaborate and time-consuming devotions or receiving communion on the tongue and not (shudder) in the hand! were similar examples of arbitrary substitutes for virtue that gave you either a Pharisaic pride when you pulled them off; or else a great sense of guilt and shame when you didn’t … though it’s the demand for sexual purity that typically produces guilt, since sexual purity is impossible to achieve for any extended period of time - at least for people with a pulse. I once noted that my son’s young adult friends who were raised Catholic made a Big Deal about Lent. They would never eat meat on Fridays! - while they were more than happy to sleep around or skip Mass throughout the year. One Purity Demand paid for all the others, it seemed.
Dispensing of Existence - This is a product of the “Us vs. Them” mentality. Us deserves to live; them don’t.
In the UFO Cult, all non-believers, those who were not spiritually “ready” to ascend to the planets … would simply die horrible, prolonged painful deaths in the earthquakes, floods and cataclysms that the aliens were to visit upon the earth, beginning on Dec. 21, 1954. But that’s THEM, baby; it ain’t US! (Cf. The thrill displayed by Traditionalist Catholics when talking about the certainty that there are souls in hell. Daniella Young also says that cults provide a sense of superiority to their members. Ya think?)
We certainly see the call to dispense with the existence of liberals and “liberal democracy” among those in the Cult of Trump. Even if liberals are not to be literally taken out of existence, their votes should never be allowed to count. Their voice does not deserve to be heard. Dispense with them, ‘cause they’re THEM, baby, they ain’t US!
… so that when I came out against January 6 among my Revivalist friends, my existence was dispensed with. My former friends have since shunned me, at the orders of one of our cult leaders. I had dared to question the Sacred Assumption that Trump was our savior; that our Transcendent Mission was to save the world and reach heaven by means of a violent uprising based on a Big Lie (see Ends Justify the Means above); and I had rejected the Purity Demand that we must always gaslight inconvenient truths. Thus I was a marked man. Thus I achieved a Divine Dispensation.
So all of this is interesting to me, and perhaps part of a developing Theory of the Spirit that I hope to work towards.
But there’s more.
As I wrote to a friend …
Here's what Daniella doesn't mention, or anybody else that I've read.
This pattern has nothing to do with living a real (and sometimes boring and frustrating) life. It is a Grand Diversion. Cults and Totalitarian groups are, you might say, a kind of Diversion Porn - graphic, intense, exhilarating, abusive and disconnected from real life and real love: a gigantic existential waste, a form of spiritual masturbation, only ongoing, ontologically consuming and self-destructive.
For instance, there are times when the Seekers UFO Cult seems like a huge elaborate game - a game that hurts people and that has real-life consequences, but a game that on some level even people this deluded cannot take seriously.
So why do we play these games? Why do we seek what Pascal would call divertissement?
I think we want a shortcut out of life.
Or, as I said in another message to a friend, comparing cult leaders to cult followers …
If power over others is a thread that ties together cult leaders, then even something as apparently innocuous as EWTN taking advantage of their employees is part of the picture. In so far as EWTN is a cult, its members are vulnerable and at the mercy of their leaders, who are well aware of this and who then prey upon them, since the employees have a Transcendent Mission and are “doing this for God”.
What of the members, then? Are members just seekers? Or do members want a level of community and authority that is not healthy, not the way life works? Do members set themselves up? The members of the cult that was literally called "The Seekers", the members of the UFO cult that I'm reading about, certainly reveled in the idea that the apocalypse was imminent, which took all of the daily anxieties and stresses out of life.
Since it takes two to tango, is the tango ...
CULT LEADER: I will be the defining authority in your life, removing all the anxieties of existence and giving you a complete answer to everything, on the condition that you allow me to abuse you and take advantage of you in various ways - commercially, sexually, spiritually, etc. Deal?
CULT MEMBER: The intensity and unification of existence here is unlike anything I've found anywhere else ... so ... deal!
Is that the power dynamic? Is it that simple (for people who voluntarily join, not for people raised or trafficked into a cult)?
Note that there seems to be a spectrum of cult-like or totalist organizations and groups. The Catholic “apostolates” I was affiliated with for many years were not full-fledged cults, but they had “cultish” characteristics, including some of the things outlined above. The Cult Tango (save me! control me! / follow my footsteps in the dance) , the desire for Diversion Porn, the urge to take a shortcut out of the anxieties and challenges of daily life - all of this was very much in the mix.
So are we spiritual seekers doomed to derail? He who seeks finds, right? Well, then, how do we who are spiritually and intellectually hungry get it so wrong?
I think there’s an answer.
Humility; defeat; accepting the fact that transcendence fully lies only beyond death.
Here’s a telling exchange between Colette Potvin and Eric Voegelin …
COLETTE POTVIN: What do you tell your students when they ask you about the mystery of the process? What kind of pursuit should they have, to clarify or see the luminous event?
ERIC VOEGELIN: It’s not a question of seeing luminous events. There are actually students who will not settle for less than a vision like Saint Paul’s; they are not willing to believe.
One needs to get them out of their idiocy somehow and persuade them that the daily tasks are the things one has to do–to live, to have a useful vocation or occupation, found a family, take care of a wife and children, and so on. That all has to be done; that is life and the meaning of life.
Beyond that, if they have time enough to go into intellectual and spiritual exploits, there is enough literature for them to train on.
… including, I might add, literature on the science of totalist thinking and cults!