Talking About Cults: Abuse and the Study of New Religious Movements

Talking About Cults explores a series of questions: Why have scholars of minority religion rejected the term “cult” and the wider field of cultic studies? How have they responded to allegations of abuse in minority religion? Why do so many survivors of abuse find cult discourse helpful? What new directions―more attuned to survivors' experience―are emerging and should be encouraged in the study of abuse in new religious movements (NRMs)?

The academic subfield of NRMs developed in reaction to cultic studies and the two fi elds became polarized in the “Cult Wars,” a charged intellectual and legal battle that has raged on since the 1970s. In this context, a disciplinary consensus formed in the study of NRMs that minimized allegations of abuse within NRMs and discredited the reliability of ex-members who made them. While feminist scholars of religion attempted to draw attention to gendered forms of abuse in these groups, they were largely ignored in consensus NRM scholarship. Inspired by a feminist survivor-centered approach, Ann Gleig argues that rather than automatically rejecting cult discourse, scholars need to ask what its function and value is for survivors of abuse. Through interviews with survivors of abuse in Buddhist contexts, she discovered that they drew on cult discourse selectively and critically to identify, understand, and heal from the dynamics that had caused them harm in their former communities as well as to prevent future abuse.

ANN GLEIG is professor of religion and cultural studies at the University of Central Florida. Her research specialties include Buddhism in North America and American spiritualities that draw on Buddhism and Hinduism. She is the author of American Dharma: Buddhism Beyond Modernity. Gleig is also the coeditor, with Scott A. Mitchell, of The Oxford Handbook of American Buddhism and coeditor, with Lola Williamson, of Homegrown Gurus: From Hinduism in America to American Hinduism. She lives and writes in Orlando, Florida.