Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism

by Amanda Montell

Our culture tends to provide pretty flimsy answers to questions of cult influence, mostly having to do with vague talk of “brainwashing.” Why did all those people die in Jonestown? “They drank the Kool-Aid!” Why don’t abused polygamist sister wives get the hell out of Dodge as soon as they can? “They’re mind controlled!” Simple as that. But it’s actually not that simple. In fact, brainwashing is a contested term that some of the psychologists I interviewed avoid altogether. Truer answers to the question of cult influence can only arrive when you ask the right questions: What techniques do charismatic leaders use to exploit people’s fundamental needs for community and meaning? How do they cultivate that kind of power?

The real answer all comes down to words. Delivery. From the crafty redefinition of existing words (and the invention of new ones) to powerful euphemisms, secret codes, renamings, buzzwords, chants and mantras, “speaking in tongues,” forced silence, even hashtags, language is the key means by which all degrees of cultlike influence occur.

Language is a leader’s charisma. It’s what empowers them to create a mini universe—a system of values and truths—and then compel their followers to heed its rules.

“Without language, there are no beliefs, ideology, or religion,” John E. Joseph, a professor of applied linguistics at the University of Edinburgh, wrote to me from Scotland. “These concepts require a language as a condition of their existence.” Without language, there are no cults.

But with a glimmer of willingness, language can do so much to squash independent thinking, obscure truths, encourage confirmation bias, and emotionally charge experiences such that no other way of life seems possible.

One of my best friends works for a cancer nonprofit and brings back amusing stories of the love-bomb-y buzzwords and quasi-religious mantras they repeat on end to keep fund-raisers hyped: “Someday is today”; “This is our Week of Winning”; “Let’s fly above and beyond”; “You are the greatest generation of warriors and heroes in this quest for a cancer cure.” “It reminds me of the way multilevel marketing people talk,” she tells me (referencing culty direct sales companies like Mary Kay and Amway. “It’s cultlike, but for a good cause.

Whether wicked or well-intentioned, language is a way to get members of a community on the same ideological page. To help them feel like they belong to something big. “Language provides a culture of shared understanding,” said Eileen Barker, a sociologist who studies new religious movements at the London School of Economics. But wherever there are fanatically worshipped leaders and belief-bound cliques, some level of psychological pressure is at play.

With groups like SoulCycle, “cult” works to describe members’ fierce fidelity to a cultural coterie that may very well remind us of some aspects of a Manson-level dangerous group—the monetary and time commitment, the conformism, and the exalted leadership (all of which certainly have the potential to turn toxic)—but not the wholesale isolation from outsiders or life-threatening lies and abuse.

cultishness falls on a spectrum.

Hassan says that groups toward the destructive end use three kinds of deception: omission of what you need to know, distortion to make whatever they’re saying more acceptable, and outright lies.

The twenty-first century has produced a climate of sociopolitical unrest and mistrust of long-established institutions, like church, government, Big Pharma, and big business. It’s the perfect societal recipe for making new and unconventional groups—everything

I like Burton’s way of looking at it, which is less about what religions are and more about what religions do, which is to provide the following four things: meaning, purpose, a sense of community, and ritual.

For most of America’s history, there were comparatively few directions a person’s career, hobbies, place of residence, romantic relationships, diet, aesthetic—everything—could easily go in. But the twenty-first century presents folks (those of some privilege, that is) with a Cheesecake Factory–size menu of decisions to make. The sheer quantity can be paralyzing, especially in an era of radical self-creation, when there’s such pressure to craft a strong “personal brand” at the very same time that morale and basic survival feel more precarious for young people than they have in a long time. As our generational lore goes, millennials’ parents told them they could grow up to be whatever they wanted, but then that cereal aisle of endless “what ifs” and “could bes” turned out to be so crushing, all they wanted was a guru to tell them which to pick.

Across the world, levels of religiosity tend to be lowest in countries with the highest standards of living (strong education levels, long life expectancies), but the US is exceptional in that it’s both highly developed and full of believers—even with all our “Nones” and “Remixed.” This inconsistency can be explained in part because while citizens of other advanced nations, like Japan and Sweden, enjoy a bevy of top-down resources, including universal healthcare and all sorts of social safety nets, the US is more of a free-for-all. “The Japanese and the Europeans know their governments will come to their aid in their hour of need,” wrote Dr. David Ludden, a language psychologist at Georgia Gwinnett College, for Psychology Today. But America’s laissez-faire atmosphere makes people feel all on their own. Generation after generation, this lack of institutional support paves the way for alternative, supernaturally minded groups to surge.

Ultimately, the needs for identity, purpose, and belonging have existed for a very long time, and cultish groups have always sprung up during cultural limbos when these needs have gone sorely unmet. What’s new is that in this internet-ruled age, when a guru can be godless, when the barrier to entry is as low as a double-tap, and when folks who hold alternative beliefs are able to find one another more easily than ever, it only makes sense that secular cults—from obsessed workout studios to start-ups that put the “cult” in “company culture”—would start sprouting like dandelions. For good or for ill, there is now a cult for everyone.

cultural normativity still has so much to do with a religious group’s perceived legitimacy . . . no matter if its teachings are any weirder or more harmful than a better-established group. After all, what major spiritual leader doesn’t have some trace of blood on their hands? As the religion scholar Reza Aslan famously stated, “The biggest joke in religious studies is that cult + time = religion.” In the US, Mormonism and Catholicism have been around long enough that they’ve been given our stamp of approval. Having earned the status of religion, they enjoy a certain amount of common respect and, importantly, protection under the Constitution’s First Amendment. Because of this protection variable, labeling something a “cult” becomes not just a value judgment, but an arbiter of real, life-or-death consequences.

Koresh was absolutely not innocent in all this. He was maniacal and violent (in fact, he may have lit the fatal flame), and his dogmatism was largely what led to so many casualties. But, as some experts including Burton and Goodwin have pointed out, perhaps so was the fear surrounding the word “cult.” Catherine Wessinger, a religion scholar at Loyola University in New Orleans, suggested that if the FBI had used such aggression against a religious group not labeled a cult, even one with similarly harmful leadership, the public may have responded with more alarm. While power abuse can show up in any religion, fringe or mainstream, the “cult” label can have a dehumanizing effect. Once followers are branded as such, it becomes easier to justify brutality towards them. “Religion is a constitutionally protected category . . . and the identification of Waco’s Branch Davidians as a cult places them outside the protections of the state,” Wessinger explained. The FBI may have gone to save the compound, but when seventy-six civilians ended up dead instead, most everyday Americans blamed the Branch Davidians themselves, because they weren’t a church—they were a “cult.”

A Jonestown survivor once told me, “They say that a cult is like pornography. You know it when you see it.” Or, if you’re like me, you know it when you hear it.

A linguistic concept called the theory of performativity says that language does not simply describe or reflect who we are, it creates who we are.

Jones learned how to meet each follower on their linguistic level, which sent an instant signal that he understood them and their backgrounds uniquely.

For some people, this language will instantly sound like a scammy red flag, and others will decide it just doesn’t resonate; but a few will have this transformative experience where all of a sudden, something “clicks.” In a moment, they become filled with the sense that this group is their answer, that they can’t not come back. This tends to happen all at once, and it’s what makes a person “join.” This is called conversion. Then, a different set of language tactics gets people to feel dependent on the leader, such that life outside the group doesn’t feel possible anymore. This is a more gradual operation, and it’s called conditioning—the process of subconsciously learning a behavior in response to a stimulus. It’s what makes people stick by the group far longer than anyone on the outside can understand. And last, language convinces people to act in ways that are completely in conflict with their former reality, ethics, and sense of self. An ends-justify-the-means ethos is embedded, and in the worst cases, it results in devastation. This is called coercion.

When you convince someone that they’re above everyone else, it helps you both distance them from outsiders and also abuse them, because you can paint anything from physical assault to unpaid labor to verbal attacks as “special treatment” reserved only for them.

Over time, the memorable nicknames and insider-y terminology acquire a strong emotional charge. When a word or phrase takes on such baggage that its mere mention can spark fear, grief, dread, jubilation, reverence (anything), a leader can exploit it to steer followers’ behavior. This lingo is what some psychologists call loaded language.

There’s a companion tool to loaded language that can be found in every cultish leader’s repertoire: It’s called the thought-terminating cliché. Coined in 1961 by the psychiatrist Robert J. Lifton, this term refers to catchphrases aimed at halting an argument from moving forward by discouraging critical thought.

Cultish leaders often call on thought-terminating clichés, also known as semantic stop signs, to hastily dismiss dissent or rationalize flawed reasoning. In

language doesn’t work to manipulate people into believing things they don’t want to believe; instead, it gives them license to believe ideas they’re already open to. Language—both literal and figurative, well-intentioned and ill-intentioned, politically correct and politically incorrect—reshapes a person’s reality only if they are in an ideological place where that reshaping is welcome.

According to multiple ex-Scientologists, there’s a whole course on how to lie to wogs. It’s called TR-L, which stands for Training Routine Lie. Purportedly, in TR-L, Scientologists learn the skill of lying with unwavering confidence, even under extreme stress. In her affidavit, Margery Wakefield details an incident from her time in the OSA when she was forced to make false allegations of sexual misconduct against a judge. The judge was slated to preside over a case dealing with Scientology, but allegedly, the church didn’t like him and wanted him removed, so they assigned Margery to claim he’d sexually harassed her. Before testifying, Margery remembers asking one of her superiors about lying under oath and was answered with a quote from a Hubbard policy called “the greatest good for the greatest number of dynamics.”* It meant that whatever it took to ensure Scientology’s survival must be done. It meant to call on her TR-L and obey. It meant the ends justified the means.

There’s a reason most religions encourage prayer: Language strengthens beliefs. In her studies of contemporary witches and “charismatic Christians” (if they do say so themselves*), psychological anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann found that if one wants to know their higher power—if they want that deity to seem real—they have to open their mouths and speak to them. The theological vocabulary between the Christians and witches Luhrmann observed was quite different, but for both, repeatedly engaging in prayers or spells “sharpened their mental imagery” of the figure on the receiving end. Practice talking to a spiritual authority over and over again, and in time, you’ll conjure the experience that Yahweh or the alien overlords or whoever you’re chatting with is talking back. Eventually, when certain spontaneous thoughts pop into your mind during the conversation (or what Luhrmann calls an “imaginal dialogue”)—say, a certain person’s face or a scene that seems to answer a question you’ve been pondering—these thoughts will seem not self-authored but instead as though they are coming straight from your higher power. People need something to help make the supernatural feel real, Luhrmann told me, and language does precisely that.

When you’re experimenting with faith and belief, there has to be room to ask questions, express your misgivings, and seek outside information, both early on and deep into your membership. “The most important thing to remember is that if something is legitimate, it will stand up to scrutiny,” Steven Hassan told me.

During WWII, women entered the workforce in unprecedented droves while men fought abroad. But after the fighting ended, those women were sent back into the home to care for their children and veteran husbands. In the 1950s, twenty million Americans migrated to suburbia, where there were few job opportunities for women, many of whom missed the excitement, independence, fulfillment, and cash that came with professional life. It was around this time when a businessman named Earl Tupper invented a type of sturdy polyethylene food storage container. He named it Tupperware. The product hadn’t exactly been flying off shelves until a single mother from Detroit with a knack for direct sales named Brownie Wise (real name) got ahold of Tupper’s wares and decided not only would suburban moms make the perfect consumers for this stuff, they could make a powerful sales force, too. Wise and Tupper joined forces, and the at-home “Tupperware party” was born.

It’s why the state of Utah is home to more MLM headquarters than anywhere else in the world—Mormons, as direct sales leaders have discovered, are an ideal sales force. “Latter-day Saints are born and bred to be missionaries . . . so preaching the gospel to friends often naturally flows with selling MLM products to their friends,”

most “cult fitness” rhetoric I came across wasn’t camouflaging evil motives, and importantly, there tended to be boundaries separating it from the rest of members’ lives. By and large, it obeyed the rules of ritual time. At the end of a “cult workout” class, you’re allowed to clock out and start talking like yourself again. And most people do, because when participants engage with the language of “cult fitness,” it’s usually with open eyes. Unlike in Amway or Heaven’s Gate, most followers know they’re participating in a fantasy—that they’re not really “entrepreneurs” or “in craft” (or “champions” and “warriors,” as it were). Whether instructors are using the language of ancient monks, motivational speakers, Olympic coaches, the army, or some mishmash, it’s all a means of creating an illusion. The words and intonation put exercisers in a transcendent headspace, but just for the length of a class. If it gets to be too much, followers are free to tap out at any time without life-ruining exit costs.

Upon finding yourself in a cultish fitness community that may or may not be entirely healthy, here are a few questions worth asking: Is this group genuinely welcoming of all different people? Or do you feel excessive pressure to dress and talk like everyone else (even outside of class)? Are you allowed to participate casually, to dabble in this activity? Or do you find yourself putting all your time and faith in this group alone, basing all your decisions on theirs? Do you trust the instructor to tell you to slow down, maybe even take a few weeks off or try a whole different exercise, if your body needs it? Or will they only tell you harder, faster, more? If you miss a class or quit, what is the exit cost? Pride? Money? Relationships? Your whole world? Is it a price you’re willing to pay?

Painfully, they came to the realization that their guru was just a man, poisoned by his own addiction to a cult much larger than his own—the cult of social media attention. While they once admired their “spiritual rock star” for using Instagram and YouTube to make infinite consciousness available to everyone, it became clear that Massaro’s movement only existed to satisfy his own desire for adoration, which, thanks to the alternate universe he created for himself online, became more bottomless every day.

Less than a decade after Instagram’s launch, thousands of astrologers, self-help sages, and holistic wellness guides like Bentinho Massaro and Teal Swan, who might have never even developed an interest in metaphysics before the internet (much less monetized it), use apps and algorithms to spread their gospel. These digital gurus fulfill modern America’s renewed demand for New Age ideas with images of tarot readings, updates on the cosmos, and abstract talk of frequency fields and galactic perspectives. Their high-octane feeds provide just as much eye candy as a beauty or “lifestyle” influencer, but the promises are far greater. The Instagram mystic doesn’t operate on a business model but a spiritual mission; they aren’t just selling spon con and merch, but transcendent wisdom. Double-tap and subscribe, and you’ll obtain access to higher vibrations, alternate dimensions, even life beyond death.

With contemporary cults, the barrier to entry is the simple frisson of tapping Follow.

To put it crudely, with QAnon, there are cults inside cults inside cults inside cults; it’s the ultimate cult-ception, and social media made it possible.

QAnon’s immersive experience generates a kind of compulsive behavior similar to addiction. In a cognitive analysis of QAnon for Psychology Today, Pierre noted that with QAnon, “the conflation of fantasy and reality isn’t so much a risk as a built-in feature.” Some of the psychological quirks thought to drive conspiracy theory belief in general, Pierre writes, include a craving for uniqueness, plus the needs for certainty, control, and closure that feel especially urgent during crisis-ridden times.

No “cult leader” takes advantage of our psychological drives quite like The Algorithm, which thrives on sending us down rabbit holes, so we never even come across rhetoric we don’t agree with unless we actively search for it. The way we make choices—from our clothes all the way to our spiritual and political beliefs—is a direct consequence of these uncanny digital versions of ourselves.

In a social media–centered society, we’ve all been rendered at once cult leader and follower.

Some say people who join cults are “lost.” But all human beings are lost to some degree. Life is disorderly and confusing for absolutely everyone. A more thoughtful way to think about how people find themselves in precariously cultish scenarios is that these folks are actively searching to be found, and—because of variations in genes and life experiences and all the complicated factors that make up human personalities—they’re more open than the average person to finding themselves in unusual places.