Most new religions scholars agree that what is termed "brainwashing" is not an effective technique of mental manipulation. Rather, they argue that brainwashing is an accusation levied to set apart religious movements, their members, and leaders as being illegitimate. This article excavates the affective and emotional history of brainwashing accusations in order to understand better the social control work done by such accusations. Attention to brainwashing accusations' affective and emotional undercurrents reveals that brainwashing accusations do not simply mark movements and individuals negatively at the level of discourse: they create felt hierarchies of social difference that inspire visceral exclusionary or repressive impulses. This analysis suggests that the power brainwashing accusations have to reorganize social space and relations therein precludes analytical usefulness of the term brainwashing in the study of religions.
This article analyzes the development of the brainwashing concept in the 1950s and its weaponization against Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church during the 1970s-1980s through the lens of Orientalism, Yellow Peril fears, and anti-Asian racism. The brainwashing concept developed during the Korean War as the U.S. government and psychologists tried to explain why American prisoners of war supported Maoist propaganda. Twenty years later, media, parents, and anticult groups alleged that "cults" had "brainwashed" youths, with Asian new religions drawing the most ire. The primary target of the anticult movement was the Unification Church, founded in Korea. Psychologists and anticult activists used brainwashing theories to delegitimize new religions as coercive cults rather than freely chosen religions. In both eras, brainwashing rhetoric reflected anti-Asian prejudice, reproduced Yellow Peril imagery of Asiatic despotism infiltrating America, and echoed Orientalist binaries that framed Asians as irrational, submissive, and collectivist.
Despite their best corrective efforts, new religions scholars continue to wrestle with popular assumptions about cult brainwashing. Those attempting to loosen the hold of this media fixture have often traced its evolution from a pseudoscientific theory of political conversion born of Cold War fears of Chinese Communist indoctrination. This article revisits the Cold War-era formulation of brainwashing, highlighting Orientalist tropes and motifs of evil magic, to shed new light on the cultural legacies that inhere in the more contemporary discourse on brainwashing in new religious movements. Through a close examination of both public and classified Cold War-era documents, this article demonstrates that the concept of brainwashing was not merely an issue of secular political concern later appropriated in anticult discourse, but rather a notion conceived in and through the rhetoric and conceptual structures of religion.
At least three times during the latter third of the twentieth century, American television network newscasts took an extended look at communal religions that had grown out of the 1960s hippie-adjacent Jesus Movement. The approaches they took toward the Children of God and the Love Israel Family varied depending on the contexts in which coverage took place, but they aligned with a set of three themes about pioneer life initially identified by historian Lillian Schlissel and applied to new religions by sociologist Susan J. Palmer as the myths of the Garden, the Carnival, and the Gothic. This article argues that rather than embrace a generally secularized suspicion of new religions, newscasters unconsciously relied on this shifting set of frontier myths to uphold a notion of respectable religion based on moderate, White, middle-class Protestantism that was in turn indebted to racialized and gendered notions of civilization.
This special issue explores discourses of "brainwashing" and histories of racialization in relation to new religions in the United States. There is a large body of scholarship about brainwashing and new religions and a robust literature about race and new religions. However, there is no sustained analysis of how mind control rhetoric is embedded in racialized frameworks or how these frames affect new religions. Articles in this special issue of Nova Religio explore the religious and Orientalist valences of brainwashing in the 1950s, Yellow Peril and Orientalist discourses of brainwashing from the Korean War (1950-1953) to attacks on the Unification Church during the 1970s-1980s, affective resonances of anti-Communist and anticult brainwashing accusations from 1950 to 2020, and racialized frontier myths in news broadcasts about Jesus Movement groups in the 1970s-1980s. The authors show that brainwashing rhetoric serves to protect White Protestant America from the perceived threat of racial and religious Others.
New Age spirituality intersects with power relations in complex ways. This exploratory study investigates how practitioners in T & uuml;rkiye navigate these intersections. Employing a Bourdieusian framework and utilizing survey data analyzed through cluster analysis, we ity and their interactions with its media and discourses. This analysis reveals distinct approaches to power relations within both the New Age field and the broader socio- political context. Our findings identify three distinct groups: vigilant adopters, negotiated readers, and devoted practitioners. This paper argues that these diverse engagements demonstrate that New Age spirituality in T & uuml;rkiye functions not as a unified challenge to or acceptance of power relations, but as a complex field needs, and social positioning, often resulting in nuanced or even contradictory stances towards societal structures.
Little has been written specifically about how men frame their experiences of leaving the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS). Using a qualitative coding technique, we analyze the deconversion narratives of twenty American men who left the LDS church. Based on an understanding of the ways the LDS church shapes the male life course, we find that milestones and expectations- obligatory priesthood advancement, mission, marriage, a family, and a focus on career-play a role in men's experiences. This is also seen in how men internalize their experiences and, in some instances, form regrets about having followed the church's gendered expectations. We conclude with a call for more research, specifically of men's experiences leaving the church.
Religious conversion is not the rote copying of information from a communicator to a recipient. Rather, it is a complex and multifaceted process located within neophytes and abstracted from and dissipated through their social networks. This paper explores a group of Chinese international students who had converted or were converting to Christianity. Our aim is to show that the conversions observed among the participants revealed a complex set of intertwined processes marked by explicit and tacit discourses where Christian tenets were appropriated, negotiated, adapted, contested, or rejected. The conversions were acts of creation where no two neophytes seemed to espouse exactly the same version of Christianity.
This article investigates the formation, belief system, activities, and dissolution of the Legion of Christian Reformers, an unconventional religious group in early postwar England focused on Hitler as the reincarnated Christ. Being a case study of the radicalization and mobilization of British fascist detainees in the early 1940s, this article demonstrates that their detention was experienced as persecution, moving their thought more decisively towards apocalypticism and the divinization of Hitler. The study argues that the group constructed its belief system within the frame of premillennialist thought manifested as "catastrophic millennialism." Despite the group's marginality, this article stresses that its experience reflects trajectories in the post-World War II radical right, and that endeavors of small, often ephemeral political and/or religious movements must be taken seriously and not be dismissed as mere delusions.
The World Mission Society Church of God (WMSCOG) is a transnational Sabbatarian religion that emerged in South Korea after the 1985 death of its founding messianic figure, Ahn Sahng-hong. With a strong emphasis on proselytization, the organization has achieved widespread adoption in diverse national settings, despite having received relatively little attention in anglophone scholarly literature. Drawing on ethnographic encounters with this movement and its preachers in an urban South African context, I describe tenets of their theology and the parallels between their form of directed scriptural study and techniques found in related groups, based on a principle of hidden knowledge revealed through prophecy and typological interpretation. The epistemology of its core theological methods is similar to that of evangelical Christianity, which commands a dominant presence in the region. The WMSCOG's heterodox Christology and Korean cultural roots, while perceived as counterintuitive for potential South African converts, bolster the group's authority as a restoration of holiness, signs of which are taught to be analogically discernible in adherents' everyday environments.
Religious appropriation, associated with idealization and romanticization, has a bad reputation in anthropology and is often portrayed as an obstacle to mutually meaningful interreligious engagement. Drawing on my ethnography of a particular indigenous visit from the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Colombia, to the Czech Republic, I reexamine this issue using the concept of equivocation as an ontological understanding-in-misunderstanding that occurs when different worlds meet and are translated. Mutual idealization is difficult to avoid in these encounters, but both sides can still find them meaningful and rewarding precisely because they take place within their own perspectives, through which they expose themselves to otherness and possibilities of transformation. Finally, I suggest that in assessing the engagement of indigenous cosmologies and rituals with the Western alternative spiritual ("New Age") milieu, an irreducible diversity of voices, approaches, and agency should be considered.
In the early twentieth century, a new religious movement from Argentina called the Escuela Magn & eacute;tico Espiritual de la Comuna Universal (EMECU) spread throughout the Americas. Scholars have taken a passing interest in the group because Nicaragua's revolutionary leader Augusto Sandino was a member. However, the organization has remained poorly understood, and its internal records largely inaccessible. A major recent acquisition of EMECU documents by the University of Texas at Austin's Benson Library has allowed me to reconstruct the members' beliefs and practices. I argue that Magnetic Spiritualists' concepts of immortality and spirit communications were inspired by international Spiritualism and popular science, and that the movement sought to create a pan-Hispanic society based on communist ethics, gender complementarity, and transnational citizenship. Documents from congregations in the U.S.- Mexico borderlands show that EMECU beliefs about necromancy, traditional healing, indigeneity, and borderless civic communities spoke to the distinct concerns of Hispanic North America.
Much of the literature on the Nation of Islam focuses heavily on what is interpreted as the Black nationalist disposition of the group. This essay, focused on lived religion, uses ethnographic data collected over an eight-month period-highlighting the annual Saviours' Day-to uncover a material spirituality in the Nation of Islam through which believers exhibit a performance wherein their Black spirituality is more salient than their Black nationalist politic. Believers ground their reversion to the Nation in its potential to provide a moral and social compass. Spiritual practices such as prayer, bodily discipline, and communal gathering aid believers in their pursuit to develop a stronger relationship with Allah, other humans, and their bodies. Such practices offer an opportunity to interrogate the religious lives of NOI believers in their quest to shape their Black identity through a lens of their Islamic spirituality.
"Energy" is a central concept among spirit mediums in the United Kingdom. This article investigates how energy is understood by spirit mediums and the practices by which energy comes to be experienced and accepted as real. Interviews with forty such mediums revealed a shared understanding of energy that participants used reasonably consistently. We argue that the concept of energy is learned both conceptually, through metaphors, and practically, through specific trainings and practices. Drawing on cognitive anthropology, we argue that energy metaphors provide the basis for a cultural model of mediumship that both explains and forms the medium's experiences within contexts of practice. Further, this cultural model is central to their worldview, their understandings of how mediumship works, and their experiences of communicating with spirits.
The Ahmadi Religion of Peace and Light (AROPL) is a millennial Islamic new religious movement with roots in Imami ("Twelver") Shia Islam. This article details a 2024 research visit by scholars of new religious movements and human rights professionals to learn about the group. Based on their presentations, conversations with members, and analysis of their sacred text, The Goal of the Wise, I identify four major themes in the movement's theology: messianism, dispensationalism and covenantal theology, social teachings regarding the Divine Just State, and transmigration of the soul. I argue that the movement's millennialism functions as aform of progressive restorationism, and I conclude with a brief comparison of AROPL to the rise of the Bah & aacute;'& iacute; Faith.
This article investigates the workings of a conspiritual community focused on the "Tartarian Empire," which members see as a lost, utopian realm erased from memory by a conspiracy. They claim that it was home to a highly spiritual, peaceful society based on the use of free energy. To study the dynamics of this community, we analyzed the content of a subreddit linked to it and employed an interdisciplinary theoretical framework to study key narratives and findings. Following the trail of the community's media usage, a deeper contextualization is proposed: the view of history found here can be analyzed as a symptom of a general crisis of social historical consciousness. Accordingly, this study is a step in reorienting the study of esotericism from elite discourse to popular movements, and bringing it into conversation with other fields in cultural studies.
With the present-day American legal system, an important phenomenon has coalesced: Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) laws have begun regularly surfacing in prosecutions and civil suits against new religious movements and groups popularly identified as "cults." As an aid to future research, this article enumerates and details all known cases as of April 2025. These include scattered predecessors, but most importantly the article addresses the major burst of contemporary activity that began in 2016, involving groups such as NXIVM and the R. Kelly "sex cult." Contextually, this trend forms an expanded application of RICO. It also forms a distinct historic episode wherein this specific law impacts new religious movements. In general, these cases qualify as social control efforts, and RICO requirements emphasize practices and beliefs in a way that might raise religious freedom concerns. Such groups also encourage scholars to consider the value of the recently-proposed category of "criminal religious movements."
This special issue on new religions and second-generation members brings together three articles, two Field Notes essays, and one Perspective essay. The authors draw on a variety of methodologies and disciplines, including history, religious studies, sociology, and psychoanalysis. Particular attention is paid to Unificationism and the Church of Scientology, but also to larger historiographical, methodological, and ethical concerns germane to the study of both children and second-generation adults (SGAs). Many groups classified as "new religions," even those originating in the early or mid-twentieth century, now have third, fourth, or more generational bases of membership, underscoring the contested and nebulous nature of "newer" versus "older" forms of religiosity. After situating the state of scholarship and summarizing the issue's articles, this introduction concludes with an interdisciplinary call for further research into second-generation members, arguing that this line of research should include current and former members as well as both adults and, when possible, children.
ABSTRACT: This article employs an autoethnographic methodology and psychoanalytic theory to examine a child’s perception of and experience with the E-Meter, an electronic device used by Scientologists to aid in spiritual counseling and course examinations. The author, a former second-generation member of the Church of Scientology, examines her childhood conceptualization of the E-Meter as being omniscient and agentic. This perception, rooted in the teachings of L. Ron Hubbard, frames the E-Meter as an instrument capable of validating or invalidating the author’s spiritual identity and sense of belonging in the group. Drawing on psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott’s theory of True and False Selves, the author explores the relational distribution of agency and the effects of the E-Meter’s abilities. Her analysis reveals that in an effort to maintain the appearance of belonging, her evasion of the E-Meter’s omniscience ultimately resulted in a loss of connection with her self.
ABSTRACT: This perspective essay draws on the author’s previous research and data recently collected during a five-year research project (2018–2023) on children in minority religions. Its purpose is to address l’etat de la question regarding the academic study of children in new religious movements. Issues that are fiercely debated by scholars and members of the public include whether children are cherished in alternative spiritual communities or abused in “cults,” and whether they are indoctrinated, held captive, or free to choose to stay or leave (when they are old enough). Despite the paucity of research data on childrearing in new religious movements, strong negative opinions are expressed in the mass media, family courts, and anticult literature. Value-free fieldwork on children in new religious movements is important to finding out what is actually going on in relation to children in groups, and learning about group characteristics likely to affect child-rearing practices, in order to convey research conclusions to social workers, law enforcement agents, and members of the media so they can make informed and unbiased decisions about constructive actions to protect the welfare and rights of children, as needed, while respecting the rights of parents.
