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Cults, Conversion, Science, & Harm
Michael D. Langone, Ph.D.
A Paper Presented to AFF's 2001 Annual Conference,
May 4-5, 2001
Cults and Conversion
In his classic work, The Varieties of
Religious Experience, William James defines religion as "the feelings, acts,
and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend
themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine" (p.
42). James's definition of religion is useful when one focuses on the
experiences of men and women earnestly seeking a deeper personal relationship
with God or the ground of being. His definition is compatible with what Gordon
Allport, a pioneer in the psychology of religion, called "intrinsic religion,"
that is "faith as a supreme value in its own right" (Hood, Spilka, Hunsberger, &
Gorsuch, 1996, p. 11). But James and many others with an interest in religion
often overlook the less compelling kinds of religious experience that Allport
categorized as "extrinsic religion": "religion that is strictly utilitarian;
useful for the self in granting safety, social standing, solace, and endorsement
of one's chosen way of life" (Hood et. Al., 1996, p. 11).
An especially interesting
variety of experience, often though not necessarily religious, is conversion.
The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary defines this kind of
conversion as "the action of converting or fact of being converted to some
opinion, belief, party, etc." (p. 546). This definition makes a useful
distinction between "converting" and "being converted," what I have sometimes
referred to as "inner-generated" and "outer-generated" conversions. The people
about whom James wrote typically had sudden, inner-generated conversions that
were highly personal. Contemporaries of James, however, studied gradual
conversions that had much more prominent social, or outer-generated, aspects.
J. B. Pratt (1920), for example, claimed that the born again experiences in
American fundamentalism were largely a result of social expectations:
adolescents were "born again" because their social world expected them to be
"born again."
We have, then, several
dimensions of religious conversion experience to consider:
These dimensions should be
viewed as continua or even as intersecting dimensions, not as dichotomies.
Extrinsic, social conversions may have profound personal aspects, just as
profoundly personal conversions may have extrinsic, utilitarian aspects.
Perhaps I reveal only my own
bias, but I believe that there is a general tendency to view personal,
inner-generated conversions as more authentic than outer-generated, social
conversions. Suddenness in a conversion can make it especially interesting, as
it did for James, but it may also make the conversion suspect, if there appear
to be psychopathological or utilitarian motivations for the conversion.
Outer-generated conversions may also stimulate skepticism, although the
skepticism is likely to be blunted when the person is converted to a belief
system shared by those judging the conversion.
Cults and other groups,
including large group awareness trainings, have generated controversy in large
part because they are often viewed as "engineering" conversions. The highly
sophisticated programs of the Moonies in the 1970s were for a long time viewed
as the archetypal cult conversion. They were relatively sudden, outer-generated
or "engineered," and, at least to skeptical outside observers, crassly
utilitarian. Similarities to "brainwashing" research from the Korean War were
easy to see.
Cult converts, however, were
not the empty-headed zombies that sensationalized media reports made them out to
be. Despite the powerful social forces shaping their conversion, converts often
did have profound personal experiences of their relationship to a divine,
transcendent reality. The biases I mentioned earlier tended to make most of us
recoil from the possibility that people could be manipulated into having such
highly personal and psychologically deep experiences of conversion. But some
observers, such as Dr. John Clark, one of the pioneering mental health
professionals in this field, saw the depth of the personal change in these
"engineered" conversions as the most striking and fascinating aspect of the
phenomenon. Dr. Clark called cult conversion an "impermissible experiment" on
the reshaping of personality, impermissible because no ethical researcher would
ever do what cults routinely did. He did not see the conversions as superficial
or simplistically extrinsic -- and neither did most of the terrified parents who
consulted him about their children involved in cultic groups, whether religious,
political, psychological, or even commercial in nature. Dr. Clark emphasized
that the engineering of personality change is not limited to religion.
Moreover, he maintained that even when such "engineering" has beneficial
effects, it should be subject and subordinated to ethical evaluations.
Other observers, mainly
academicians in sociology or religious studies, saw the personal depth of these
conversions as self-validating. They disdained the sensationalized media
accounts and objected to the simplistic brainwashing models that some activists
used to justify deprogramming, which the academicians passionately opposed. An
ideological antipathy toward the so-called "medical model" seemed to make some
of these academicians oppose in a knee-jerk manner any theories, however
sophisticated, that suggested that the conversions they observed were engineered
or exploitative. The academic cult wars, which continue to this day, had begun.
I don't have time in this
paper to elaborate upon the academic cult wars (see the inaugural issue of AFF's
Internet journal,
www.cultsandsociety.com
for detailed analyses). Suffice it to say that both sides of the debate, cult
critics and sympathizers (or what has less flatteringly been termed
"anti-cultists" and "pro-cultists"), were partly correct.
Conversions can be
engineered, but converts are not the passive pawns they appear to be in some
critics' portrayals. Interactive models are necessary to properly understand
even the most manipulative of conversions. (See "Sex, Lies, and Grand Schemes
of Thought in Closed Groups" by A Collective of Women in the special Cultic
Studies Journal issue, "Women Under the Influence," for an insightful
analysis of how intelligent, thoughtful, and independent adults become "loyal
and dedicated to our own undoing.").
Conversions can be
engineered, but there are also nonmanipulative entries into high-control
environments that are difficult to leave. The Moonie model so influenced people
in this field that for years many professionals and researchers ignored the
growing evidence that the Moonie model of conversion was not typical. Dr.
Benjamin Zablocki (1998), in an important paper, "Exit Cost Analysis: A New
Approach to the Scientific Study of Brainwashing," quotes Dr. Stephen Kent, who
says that brainwashing is a useful "technique for retaining members not
for obtaining members" (p. 218). These sociologists, who have organized
two research programs for this conference, do activists and mental health
professionals in this field a service by drawing our attention to this important
distinction. (The distinction is certainly relevant to the case of people born
into high-control groups, a subject of one of this conference's programs.) Even
when conversions are not engineered, the maintenance of the convert's loyalty
may involve high levels of manipulation and psychological coercion. Conversely,
it may also sometimes be the case that an engineered conversion brings somebody
into a relatively benign and nonmanipulative environment. Given the concern
some mainstream campus ministries have shown for evangelists who, so to speak,
put a notch on their Bible every time they "win" a soul for Christ, I suspect
that some conversions to mainstream Christian denominations may be more
manipulative than many realize.
The powerful social forces in
many controversial groups place them at risk for harming their members,
psychologically, physically, and economically. (Drs. Mayer and Lifton will
inform us about two of the most conspicuous examples of groups that harmed their
members.) Cult sympathizers, to a large extent, appear to have been reluctant
to write about these negative effects of conversion, although there are some
notable exceptions (e.g., Rochford's research on ISKCON -- see
www.cultsandsociety.com).
Barker sheds light on this reluctance in a candid comment she made during her
presidential address to the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion in
1995:
If
we are to be honest and self-critical, we have to admit that several of us have
reacted against the selective negativity of the ACM by, sometimes quite
unconsciously, making our own unbalanced selections. Having been affronted by
what have appeared to be gross violations of human rights perpetrated through
practices such as deprogramming and the medicalization of belief, there have
been occasions when social scientists have withheld information about the
movements because they know that this will be taken, possibly out of context, to
be used as a justification for such actions. The somewhat paradoxical situation
is that the more we feel the NRMs are having untrue bad things said about
them, the less inclined we are to publish true "bad" things about the
movements. (Barker, 1995, p. 305)
Some cult critics have shown
a similar reluctance to acknowledge positive aspects of the groups they
criticize, although mental health professionals have long encouraged families to
acknowledge their loved ones' positive experience, something that families,
quite understandably, often find painful to do.
In literature classes in
college or high school we all heard about two-dimensional and three-dimensional
characters. The latter were preferable because they were more complex, more
nuanced, more interesting -- in short, they were more real. We need
three-dimensional theories of cult conversion, cult experience, and cult
departure and recovery. The landscape is much more varied than we realize.
That is why in this conference we have organized programs on positive and
negative aspects of conversion, including positive descriptions of conversion to
groups typically viewed as controversial. We need to look at the entire
panorama of conversion -- to nonreligious as well as religious groups, to benign
as well as destructive group experiences -- in order to understand the field
well enough to make balanced judgments concerning what to do about the "true
'bad' things" to which Dr. Barker refers in the quote above.
Harm and Science
There is an appropriate
vagueness about the term "bad," which Dr. Barker uses. Different observers will
object to different groups or to different aspects of the same group. What they
have in common is a sense that the group inflicts harm or offense on people,
within or outside the group. In a paper I gave at our annual conference in
Minnesota two years ago, I described four kinds of concern stimulated by cultic
and related groups:
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Psychological concerns (e.g., high stress resulting from members' being
placed in demanding double binds) [A number of research presentations in
this conference address psychological harm. Several programs address issues
of recovery and healing.]
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Ethical concerns (e.g., the use of deceit and manipulation to persuade
people to attend an introductory seminar)
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Social concerns (e.g., breaking laws, medical neglect of children)
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Theological concerns (e.g., whether or not a translation of a sacred text is
accurate, whether or not a group's claim to belong to a particular religious
tradition is valid).
If one is to maintain one's
intellectual integrity as a critic, it is important not to confuse or blend
together these concerns and it is especially important not to presume that the
presence of one concern makes the group "bad" and, by imputation, infected by
the other concerns. I suspect, for example, that some large group awareness
training programs may be vulnerable to ethical critiques, even though there may
not be strong scientific evidence of widespread psychological harm.
Although research is far from
definitive, it does suggest that a sizeable minority, if not a majority, of
former members of cultic groups (those characterized by high levels of
manipulation and exploitation) suffer measurable psychological distress.
Research (e.g., Lottick, 1993) also suggests that about 1% - 2% of the
population has had at least a transient involvement with a cultic group and that
several hundred thousand people in the Western democracies probably enter and
leave cultic groups each year.
This is a significant level
of harm that, however much we may dispute its causes, is likely to motivate some
people to take action and to try to persuade governments to take action.
Several programs in this conference address international dimensions of the cult
phenomenon. Others address counseling and related helping efforts.
Activists and professionals
concerned about cults see their primary obligations as assistance and education,
as helping hurting people and forewarning those who might get entangled with
dubious groups in the future. As with helpers in other fields, these
individuals cannot wait for the kinds of definitive scientific research that
warm the hearts of academicians. They must act with incomplete knowledge
because persons needing help now can't wait for science to advance.
This conflict results in a
competition between action and research, both of which demand more resources
than society is willing to commit to the cult issue. Sometimes action dominates
and research is neglected or ignored. Sometimes research dominates and the
needs of hurting people are ignored or neglected. Sometimes -- and I hope this
is true for AFF -- action and research have a dynamic relationship in which the
latter informs and modifies the former, which in turn provides information that
stimulates the latter. Research under girds action, which reveals new areas of
research.
If research and action needs
are coordinated and balanced, it will be easier for governmental and
institutional authorities to make informed and balanced decisions about
assistance and educational needs of people affected by or at risk of being
affected by harmful cultic entanglements. Good information is vital to these
authorities because, as I expect Dr. Kandel and Mr. Rosedale will argue, their
special challenge is to balance competing rights and responsibilities, not to
pronounce in favor of one over others.
Cult educational
organizations must respect the need for authorities and their own organizations
to continually inform, evaluate, and modify remedial actions so as to take
account of new research findings. All organizations do not have to conduct
research, but all organizations should try to cooperate with and keep abreast of
research studies, especially those that have some practical implications for
helping people. If we neglect study and research, we run the risk of becoming
what many of us accuse cults of being, that is, ideologically rigid -- we will
never change our thinking because we think we know all that is worth knowing.
Instead, let us all
acknowledge that we don't know as much as we think and that we should work
together in order to learn together.
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