In Stephanie Oakes’s excellent young adult novel The Sacred Lies of Minnow Bly, there is a scene in which the main character, the survivor of a violent religious cult, is speaking to a doctor about her situation and background. The conversation turns to the cult leader and his teachings about the nature of the universe, and the doctor says, “He invented a religion. I’m just not sure he did a very good job.”
It’s a small aside in a book full of emotional gut-punches, but the exchange struck me as I was reading. It is such a clean, simple skewering of the concept of an all-powerful cult leader.
I was in high school in 1997, when 39 members of the Heaven’s Gate cult died by suicide. I remember watching the news in awe and horror, the aerial views of the house in Rancho Santa Fe, the breathless conspiracy theories about Hale-Bopp and UFOs, the identical pairs of black-and-white Nikes.
But most of all I remember Marshall Applewhite in the picture shown on every news report: eyes wide, hands raised, with his buzzed white hair and sticking-out ears, his mouth open mid-word. This is the man responsible, the reporters were saying. He is to blame. Of course, the story of Heaven’s Gate is far more complicated than that, but I grew up with this very particular image of what it meant to be part of a cult. It meant brainwashing and mind control, a leader with irresistible and inexplicable charisma, a complete loss of control. Even the term used for prying a person free of a cult—”deprogamming”—suggests a singular, powerful programmer responsible for infiltrating a person’s mind.
It is no wonder that I came out of my teen years with a lifelong fascination with cults. I was born two weeks before the Jonestown massacre in 1978, so by the time I was old enough to pay attention, the world knew exactly what it had to fear in a worst-case scenario. Cults seemed to be everywhere when I was growing up, starting with the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, in which we were promised black masses at every other house in the neighborhood, but certainly not stopping there. 1993: the long siege and horrific fire at the Branch Davidian compound outside Waco, in which more than 70 people died, including many children. 1994: 54 members of the Order of the Solar Temple died by suicide or were murdered in Canada and Switzerland. 1995: Aum Shinrikyo’s sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo subway killed 12 people.
The questions planted in my mind during those formative years have never faded: Why do people join cults? Why do they surrender their free will to leaders who mean them harm? What on earth could convince people to choose that life and, in so many cases, suffer those awful deaths? And what happens to those who survive? Where do they go? How do they live?
Why do people join cults? Why do they surrender their free will to leaders who mean them harm?…And what happens to those who survive? Where do they go? How do they live?The simple story of a charismatic leader and brainwashed followers never quite rang true to me. That’s not to say I don’t love a good fictional tale about cults with eldritch powers and wicked schemes. The false prophet and demonic rituals of Adam Nevill’s Last Days, the brutal body mutilation of Brian Evenson’s (also) Last Days, the ancient society with its horrifying secrets of Kim Liggett’s Blood and Salt, the rival cults of giant squid worshippers of China Mieville’s Kraken, the grotesque cannibals that make a brief but memorable appearance in Iain M. Banks’s Consider Phlebas, all of these tales of the strange, macabre, and horrific feed into my lifelong fascination in the most delightful ways.
The fact that cults find such fertile ground in realms of speculative fiction often goes beyond the titillating appeal of the macabre. It speaks to how difficult the many questions of “Why?” are to address, that so many satisfying and compelling stories answer with situations and phenomena outside of the natural.
At the other end of the genre spectrum, the religious separatists in The Sacred Lies of Minnow Bly are distressingly realistic: devoted to isolation, ignorance, punishment, controlling women, and a mythology so flimsy it doesn’t withstand the slightest scrutiny. While the group in the book is invented and not related to any real religion or splinter group, so many of its methods are similar to those seen in real extremist religious sects (such as the School of Prophets in Jon Krakauer’s book Under the Banner of Heaven, with features men who cite religious “revelations” to justify brutalizing women and children). Oakes spends very little time on why people join the cult; the heart of the narrative is how one young woman survived and escaped that upbringing.
Peter Rock’s quietly lyrical The Shelter Cycle is based on the real-life Church Universal and Triumphant, whose members retreated to underground shelters to withstand a prophesized nuclear war that never materialized in 1980. In this book, however, there is no shocking violence, no murders, no suicides, no coerced marriages or child brides. What this story has instead is a sorrowful, sometimes unsettling, always compassionate look at what becomes of children raised looking forward to a single great test of belief—a specific date on which the world was meant to end—and how they have grown and changed after their belief system failed that test. The world goes on, and so do the believers.
Another book that explores the emotional aftermath of a cult is John Darnielle’s Universal Harvester, but it does so from the outside, from the perspective of having lost a loved one to a cult and having to go on in the world in spite of that. Although it unfolds like a horror novel, with unsettling mysteries promising terrible revelations to come, the core of Universal Harvester is grief: the grief of those left behind when a loved one joins a cult, of not knowing why they left, and never being able to comprehend what drew them away from their families.
There is comfort in the belief that a man who inspires people to do terrible things must have a terrible, uncanny power, one that distorts and perverts the desires and dreams of normal people.In her memoir Seductive Poison, Deborah Layton, a member of the People’s Temple who escaped Jonestown before the 1978 massacre, writes, “People do not knowingly join ‘cults’ that will ultimately destroy and kill them. People join self-help groups, churches, political movements, college campus dinner socials, and the like, in an effort to be a part of something larger than themselves.” The same sentiment is echoed repeatedly by other members in Julia Scheeres’s A Thousand Lives, which pieces together a comprehensive story of the People’s Temple and Jonestown from many sources.
Even in this most infamous of all cult tragedies, the worst-case scenario to define all worst-case scenarios, those who joined the People’s Temple and followed Jim Jones to Guyana did so because they believed they had found a community in which they could belong, one where mixed-raced and black families were welcome, where foster children were loved, where the Cold War and turbulent 1970s could be set aside for the simple work of building a community. That it was all based on a lie, that Jones was a delusional, self-aggrandizing drug addict, with no real insight into the modern world and no real plans for success, who kept himself fed and intoxicated while his followers toiled and starved, does not refute the truth of Layton’s experience.
There is comfort in the belief that a man who inspires people to do terrible things must have a terrible, uncanny power, one that distorts and perverts the desires and dreams of normal people. Psychiatrists have largely debunked the idea of absolute mind-control via brainwashing, but the word is still used to describe the control cult leaders have over their followers. (Over the past few weeks I’ve seen articles about a new book about Charles Manson uncritically state that he brainwashed the Manson Family.) There is something reassuring about ascribing the control exerted by cult leaders to powers beyond the reach of ordinary men. But in the real world, what is truly terrifying is the fact that men who do such things have no hypnotic, preternatural powers. They are only men (and some women): ordinary, petty, cruel, not even particularly smart. The most frightening monsters are the ones who do not look like monsters at all, not until it is too late.
There is room for all types of cult stories in literature, much to the delight of lifelong obsessives like me. The spine-tingling tales of the supernatural, demonic, and outrageous provide the same life-affirming entertainment as fireside ghost stories and horror movies, while portrayals of victims and escapees dig into the very real human trauma that such groups inflict. And all of it, from the wildly speculative to the grittily real, benefits from the testimonies of real-world survivors. This is what literature does at its most powerful: forces us to examine our own mundane reality in a funhouse mirror, where we see things that are terrifying, ugly, and alien, but ultimately true.
