Eileen Vartan Barker is a professor in sociology, an emeritus member of the London School of Economics (LSE), and a consultant to that institution's Centre for the Study of Human Rights. She is the chairperson and founder of the Information Network Focus on Religious Movements (INFORM) and has written studies about cults and new religious movements.
A new religious movement (NRM), also known as alternative spirituality or a new religion, is a religious or spiritual group that has modern origins and is peripheral to its society's dominant religious culture. NRMs can be novel in origin, or they can be part of a wider religion, in which case they are distinct from pre-existing denominations. Some NRMs deal with the challenges that the modernizing world poses to them by embracing individualism, while other NRMs deal with them by embracing tightly knit collective means. Scholars have estimated that NRMs number in the tens of thousands worldwide. Most NRMs only have a few members, some of them have thousands of members, and a few of them have more than a million members.
In the field of sociology, charismatic authority is a concept of organizational leadership wherein the authority of the leader derives from the personal charisma of the leader. In the tripartite classification of authority, the sociologist Max Weber contrasts charismatic authority against two other types of authority: (i) rational-legal authority and (ii) traditional authority.
Marshall Herff Applewhite Jr., also known as Do, among other names, was an American religious leader who founded and led the Heaven's Gate new religious movement, and organized their mass suicide in 1997. The suicide is the largest mass suicide to occur inside the U.S.
Cult is a lay term for a group perceived as requiring unwavering devotion to a set of beliefs and practices which are considered deviant outside the norms of society. Such groups are typically founded or led by a charismatic and self-appointed leader who tightly controls its members. It is in some contexts a pejorative term, also used for new religious movements and other social groups which are defined by their unusual religious, spiritual, or philosophical beliefs and rituals, or their common interest in a particular person, object, or goal. This sense of the term is weakly defined – having divergent definitions both in popular culture and academia – and has also been an ongoing source of contention among scholars across several fields of study.
The Communist Workers' Party (CWP) was a far-left Maoist group in the United States. It had its origin in 1973 as the Asian Study Group established by Jerry Tung, a former member of the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) who had grown disenchanted with the group and disagreed with changes taking place in the party line. The party is mainly remembered as being associated with victims of the Greensboro Massacre of 1979.
The anti-cult movement, abbreviated ACM and also known as the countercult movement, consists of various governmental and non-governmental organizations and individuals that seek to raise awareness of cults, uncover coercive practices used to attract and retain members, and help those who have become involved with harmful cult practices.
Stephen A. Kent is a professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. He researches new religious movements (NRMs), and has published research on several such groups including the Children of God, the Church of Scientology, and other NRMs operating in Canada.
Captive Hearts, Captive Minds: Freedom and Recovery from Cults and Other Abusive Relationships is a study of cults and abusive relationships by Madeleine Landau Tobias, Janja Lalich, and Michael Langone. It was published by Hunter House Publishers in 1994. In 2006, the book was reissued as Take Back Your Life: Recovering from Cults and Abusive Relationships.
Janja Lalich is an American sociologist and writer. Lalich is an expert on cults and coercion, charismatic authority, power relations, ideology and social control. She is a professor emerita of sociology at the California State University, Chico.
Misunderstanding Cults: Searching for Objectivity in a Controversial Field is an edited volume discussing various topics related to cults, including the scholarly field itself, the concept of brainwashing, and the public perception of the groups. The book was edited by Benjamin Zablocki and Thomas Robbins, and was published by University of Toronto Press on December 1, 2001. It includes contributions from 12 religious, sociological, and psychological scholars, in 14 essays.
Deadly Cults: The Crimes of True Believers is a book about cults by Robert L. Snow. It was published November 30, 2003 by Praeger Publishers in hardcover format. Snow, a retired police captain and former commander of the homicide branch of the Indianapolis Police Department, has authored several other books on crime including SWAT Teams and Technology and Law Enforcement.
Heaven's Gate was an American new religious movement known primarily for the mass suicides committed by its members in 1997. Commonly designated a cult, it was founded in 1974 and led by Marshall Applewhite (1931–1997) and Bonnie Nettles (1927–1985), known within the movement as Do and Ti. Nettles and Applewhite first met in 1972 and went on a journey of spiritual discovery, identifying themselves as the two witnesses of Revelation, attracting a following of several hundred people in the mid-1970s. In 1976, a core group of a few dozen members stopped recruiting and instituted a monastic lifestyle.
The Democratic Workers Party was a United States Marxist–Leninist party based in California headed by former professor Marlene Dixon, lasting from 1974–1987. One member, Janja Lalich, later became a widely cited researcher on cults. Lalich characterized the DWP as a political cult with Dixon serving as its charismatic leader. She estimated that the Democratic Workers Party at one point had 125-150 full-time members and 300-1,000 members with various degrees of affiliation.
True-believer syndrome is an informal or rhetorical term coined by M. Lamar Keene in his 1976 book The Psychic Mafia. He began using the term to refer to people who continued to believe in a paranormal phenomenon or event, even after it had successfully been debunked or proven to have been staged. Keene considered it to be a cognitive disorder, and regarded it as being a key factor in the success of many psychic mediums.
The Communist Party (Marxist–Leninist) was a Maoist political party in the United States.
Twin Flames Universe (TFU) is an American cult run by Jeff and Shaleia Divine. The group's practices, based on elements of New Age spiritualism regarding soulmates popularized in the 2000s, have been criticized as a "self-help and wellness cult" by experts such as Janja Lalich. In 2023, the group was the subject of the documentaries Desperately Seeking Soulmate: Escaping Twin Flames Universe and Escaping Twin Flames.
Sacred Suicide is a 2014 edited volume about suicide and religion, particularly as it relates to cults or new religious movements. It was published by Ashgate and edited by James R. Lewis and Carole M. Cusack, part of the Ashgate New Religions series. Other contributors to the book include Nachman Ben-Yehuda, Mattias Gardell, and Thomas Robbins. It is divided into five sections.
Violence and New Religious Movements is a 2011 edited volume. It was edited by sociologist James R. Lewis and published by Oxford University Press. Lewis' previous work had focused on new religious movements, and he had edited several books on the topic. Containing 19 articles by 22 academics, mostly sociologists or scholars in religious studies, it discusses the intersection between new religious movements and violence, both perpetrated by and against the groups. It is divided into five sections.
