CULTS ARE NOT AS ABNORMAL AS YOU THINK

If there’s something the nonsecular world has always had a firmer grasp on than the secular world, it’s the understanding of the impact of faith in our everyday lives.

It is easy to disregard blind devotion as some kind of madness, and hard to understand what blind devotion truly feels like, for someone distant from the concept. It’s a concept so foreign to many of us that the phrase “blind devotion” itself often brings with it a scoff or an eyebrow raise.

When witnessing or reading of mass movements lead by something seemingly so uncertain, it is hard to understand. Cultism and cultish behaviors are often seen as belonging to a radically far edge of a faith-organized spectrum, with pure denial of spirituality at the very opposite end. But that assumption may just be as arbitrary as any other arrangement. Perhaps sect-based belief is in fact the bridge between the two sides, secular and nonsecular.

Should this, in fact, be the case, then examining these movements may just give an insight that could bring us that much closer to answering that grand, enigmatic question: Why would anyone do such a thing?

Two of the most iconic cults in recent history, reigning over all others in current pop culture, are Jim Jones’s Peoples Temple and Ti and Do’s Heaven’s Gate.

Both are infamous for their movement’s grisly end by means of mass suicide.

Jones amassed his following through the preaching of a new-aged branch of traditional Christian thought. Founded in Indianapolis and later moved to San Francisco, the organization, bringing together more than several thousand members at its peak, was known for its melding of leftist political thought of racial and class equality with typically right-wing evangelism.

But after moving once more onto a property (newly named “Jonestown) in Guyana, South America, and a culmination of events after reports of abuse from within Peoples Temple (and after the murder of journalists and attempted defectors and a U.S. congressman), Jones gave the ultimate command to his followers: to have one final, poisonous drink

The result was the death of 918 people, the most American civilians to die in a deliberate act until the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

Heaven’s Gate, founded in Los Angeles, hit several quite similar beats: enthusiastic and ambitious leadership (in this case the likes of “Do” and “Ti,” born Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles, respectively), far-reaching travel, distinctive beliefs, etc.

After the death of co-founder Ti, Do found himself overwhelmed by the sudden sole responsibility of the leadership of so many passionate people. Complications that would arise from his own inner power struggle and numerous outside forces (such as increased media coverage) would lead him to give his own last command to his loyal admirers to take their own lives, by poison and asphyxiation.

The death count was far less than that of People’s Temple, but no less shocking. The members of Heaven’s Gate died over several days, their bodies carefully posed by other followers.

The key difference in terms of belief between the two groups, however, comes from Heaven’s Gate’s fascination with another phenomenon: space travel and scientific advancement.

Many observers will commonly pit science and religion against each other in a debate over “true revelation,” but maybe this is an uninformed conclusion. It’s true that Heaven’s Gate initially spawned from an interpretation of biblical text, but as more time passed from its inception the less important this initial spawning point became. When the cult died, it died in a deliberate faith that scientifically observed “reality,” like the cyclical passing of the Hale-Bopp Comet, brought with it a sure-fire result – a result of its own kind of scientific method.

Its followers found great comfort in the speculation of just what a new horizon of technological continuity would bring for both themselves and the outside society. They had no doubts about this wonderment, just as People’s Temple found no doubts in their long-held Christian beliefs.

The larger point here is that it is clearly ignorant to simply chock up cultist thinking to either“delusional religious sentiment” or “far-fetched scientific quackery.” Cults, whether by an exploitation of their people or not, draw their influence from a powerful value within us all. Clearly, faith has no boundaries, at least from a totally neutral definition. It has no morals itself. No higher goals. No preferred conduit. No binary split, such as “religious” or “non-religious.”

After all, what greater gray area than a concept that can lead to so many lives being enriched and given meaning, and also so many lives taken, in swift and unfeeling condemnation.