We Need the Word “Cult”
The Word Cult
Over my years of growing up in the Church, selling the Gospel on the streets in Russia as a missionary, and then deconstructing Mormonism in my 30s, I have had lots of opportunities to bump into the word “cult.” And I have, at alternate points in my life, dismissed the claim, been offended by it, and Kombucha-ed it.
I went from believing:
“no, no, no–the Church is not a Cult. We’re not Dodos!1 That’s the FLDS and JWs and the weirdos in Scientology…”
to believing:
“Oh, dang. I think I am in a cult. Was it always a cult? But it wasn’t all bad…but this definitely wasn’t good…what even happened to me??”
Combatting Cult Mind Control
For this reason, Steven Hassan’s book Combatting Cult-Mind Control 2 was a game-changer. His work offered me a definition, a method of identification, and the humility to recognize my own psychological vulnerabilities. To paraphrase Hassan: a cult is a “pyramid-shaped authoritarian regime” that “uses deception to recruit new members” and coercive influence to “keep people dependent, obedient, and loyal.” This means that being sucked into a weird or destructive cult is not necessarily a reflection of a person’s goodness, smarts, or intentions. In fact, those things can often make people more vulnerable to the recruiting tactics and make it harder for those people to leave. This also means that recovering from cults is a matter of seeing our human vulnerabilities to “influence” and learning to protect our weak points before they are exploited.
Hassan offers the B.I.T.E. model as a way to recognize cults and high-demand groups. B.I.T.E. is a memorable way to track the patterns of behavioral (B), informational (I), thought (T), and emotional (E) control that a group might be using to influence its members. It’s not an airtight definition, since there are lots of groups that might use some of the techniques of influence without crossing over into being an self-isolating group of violent zealots, but the B.I.T.E. model is far more helpful and precise than any other model I’ve encountered so far.
For a more thorough breakdown read B.I.T.E. Model Basics: Are You in a Cult?
Image generated with A.I. Gemini
It also sounds kind of vampiric, which I think is a perfect way to visualize the life-sucking function of cult groups. I won’t be going into that model here, but this was an excellent diagnostic tool for me. The B.I.T.E. model allowed me to stop wondering if I was just being too judgey. Instead, I tallied up the ways that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was using B.I.T.E control. When they scored high in every area, I could identify it solidly as a high-demand group or a “cult.”
Recognizing the Church as a cult allowed me to take proactive steps in working against the mind-control indoctrination that I had been supping on since birth. I began reclaiming my language, I noticed how the scripts of conformity or compliance were woven into my daily life, I pushed back on the assumptions I had absorbed from the Church about nature being inherently patriarchal, misogynist, racist, Judeo-Christian, or even human-centric. I got better and better at recognizing mental bits of indoctrination versus my native creativity or intuition.
And eventually, I began to break free. I began to claim back the mental space that I had surrendered to the drone of Conference Talks and primary-voice. I could speak without watching everything I said to make sure it was faith-affirming. I began to feel more like myself again.
Cultish
Maybe because I work on untying cult indoctrination through language, YouTube’s algorithms knew to recommend Amanda Montell.3 Montell is a nerdy, sassy, academic daughter of a cult survivor and a linguist specializing in cults. She’s dedicated her skills and stage presence to analyzing the language groups use to insulate themselves.4 I love her book Wordslut and just began another book from her called Cultish. In that book, Montell tackles an important question: why is it so hard to use the word “cult”?
Of course, there are the pop-culture tongue-in-cheek uses, but then there are the fringe groups, political pockets, country club cohorts and others that get a lot weirder and more zealous. They aren’t always religious, but there is usually a spiritual element to them. We see these groups often enough to use the word “cult” casually in derision, but it hasn’t quite entered the academic space, which makes it difficult for educated people to use the word confidently.
In Mormonism and Post-Mormonism this is a huge issue because many of the people going through Faith Transition are educated and want to make a balanced decision. However, with so few scholars figuring out what exactly cults are, and how to recognize where the line is between fun fandom and destructive high-demand group, many people in Faith Transition are stranded. We often worry about unfairly representing things. We fear making a wrong decision. Most of us self-doubt our thoughts obsessively. We need definitions and outlines that are more firm and academically rigorous than pop-culture can provide, but we don’t have them.
In Cultish, Montell quotes at length from religion professor Rebecca Moore5 about the word “cult” and why it hasn’t caught on in Academic circles. She also talks about the word “brainwashing” and why Moore doesn’t credit either of these words with a solid definition because of her belief in human autonomy. Moore’s perspective is valuable not only as a religion professor but because she had to witness the high-demand group of Jonestown swallow her two sisters, who died in the massacre.
I disagree with Moore, but this passage reflects the reasons that many people don’t like to use the word “cult,” I think, even when they know they are facing down a clearly unethical high-demand group. I am grateful that this passage gave me an opportunity to chew over the reasoning in detail. Here, I address Moore’s argument about the use of these word “cult” and “brainwashing” but I don’t believe these arguments originated or end with her. These look to me like strains of thought that many people share for the same reasons and with similar justifications. Thus, even if Moore’s view in Cultish is not a comprehensive argument, it is at least illustrative and I’d like to examine why I think the word “cult” not only could but should be used in academic and other circles to talk about systems like Mormonism.
Here is the passage from Cultish:
“[Academics don’t use the word ‘cult’] because it’s inherently pejorative. It’s simply used to describe groups we don’t like. As soon as someone says it, we know as readers, listeners, or individuals exactly what we should think about that particular group.” Professor Moore also doesn’t like to use the term “brainwashing” because, as she explains in Cultish, “We don’t say that soldiers are brainwashed to kill other people; that’s basic training. We don’t say that fraternity members are brainwashed to haze their pledges; that’s peer pressure…”
Montell then peels back another layer to reveal that Moore believes these words are inappropriate because they…
“…disregard people’s very real ability to think for themselves. Her belief centers humans’ autonomy, taking the stance that we are not helpless drones whose decision making skills can be wiped clean at any time. If brainwashing were literal, we would ‘expect to see many more dangerous people running around, planning to carry out reprehensible schemes’…Her perspective, simply put is that you cannot force someone to believe something they absolutely do not on any level want to believe by using some set of evil techniques to “wash” their brain.”6
If we reduce Professor Moore’ argument to its essence, it is this: she believes that human behavior cannot be controlled by external forces. She believes people to be invincible to indoctrination unless at some level that they already want to believe that thing. She accepts the mainstream jargon of not calling our treatment of soldiers “brainwashing” but falsely assumes that allowing it to be called “basic training” makes it function differently.
She also defends her a-priori belief in human autonomy with the false dilemma fallacy by assuming that if people could be turned into drones through indoctrination that we would “expect to see many more dangerous people running around planning to carry out reprehensible schemes.”
Now, let’s go deeper and look at her ideas piece by piece
The Word ‘Cult’ tells People What to Think
“[Academics don’t use the word ‘cult’] because it’s inherently pejorative. It’s simply used to describe groups we don’t like. As soon as someone says it, we know as readers, listeners, or individuals exactly what we should think about that particular group.”
Our words communicate about both objects (physical or ideological) and to communicate feelings behind them. We use “breeze” or “gale” to convey not just the idea of “wind” but what kind of wind is present. There is a “glow” of sunshine on the ground or there is a “glare.” You are “walking along” or you are “trudging” or maybe you are “trekking” and they all tell us something different about what it is like to participate in that bipedal activity. Some words are more objective, sure! But to require a word to be sanitized of emotional connotation before academic or respectable use seems impractical in the extreme.
Additionally, academics have been using ‘cult’ for a long time to describe worship traditions of past epochs, which indicates that either the word does not have a clearly pejorative meaning or that academics have been okay with referring to religions of the past pejoratively. Maybe they are hesitant to refer to modern religions with the same dismissiveness? These are worthwhile issues, but they don’t justify Moore’s rejection of “cult.” Academics have been perfectly at ease with using words like “religion,” “faith,” and “community” which have distinctly positive connotations for most people. In America, especially, where the “freedom of religion” reigns supreme in our legal system, to refer to Christianity as a “religion” while referring to ancient fertility or goddess worshipping as a “cult” carries a lot of implicit bias.7 As is evident in Moore’s communications more personally, she clearly does not mind using flashy pejorative language while explaining these concepts. Yet, she has nevertheless quarantined the word “cult” with special reserve.
Within Moore’s argument, all of this adds up to mean that it is not the fact that there is emotional connotation that is a problem for Moore. She uses emotionally spicy language freely and intentionally. Rather, it seems she objects specifically to words with negative connotation towards a modern belief system and modern believers.
Moore’s examples of soldiers and frat bros dodges this issue in a different way. She doesn’t want to challenge the mainstream interpretation of these initiations, but recognizes that they share similarities with destructive non-mainstream groups like Jonestown. However, instead of completing the dot-connection that all of these groups are destructive to the human psyche, unethical, and could all be labeled as “brainwashing cults,” she diverts instead into a bizarre semantic backflip in which she dismisses the words “brainwashing” and “cult” in order to avoid labeling Basic Training or fraternities pejoratively.
This is not Moore’s only justification though. When she has finished attempting to redraw the semantic lines to preserve the frat bros, she pivots into another fallacy.
Blaming the Victim
“…you cannot force someone to believe something they absolutely do not on any level want to believe…”
We start to hear here the echoes of Moore’s devotion to human autonomy and we will look at that more deeply in a moment, but before we do, notice how she blames the victim.
Commonly, high-demand groups get cultural grace for the same reasons and in the same way that rapists too often get pardoned: they plead that their victim was dressed in a way that was “asking for it” and repeatedly, this grotesque excuse is allowed in court. Blaming the victim doesn’t end with the walls of the courthouse, though, nor even with sexism. High-demand groups do it all the time to people who leave by saying “they wanted to believe this,” “if you didn’t want to be here, why didn’t you just leave?” or “Why can’t people who leave the Church just leave the Church alone?”
When Moore says that people “cannot be forced to believe in something they don’t want to believe at some level,” what she is saying is that people who are sucked into conformity with an abusive, psychologically-manipulative, extractive high-demand group were actually wanting to be abused, betrayed, and abandoned. Besides being cruel and dismissive towards victims of abuse, including her own sisters, this statement leaps over obvious psychological realities that show us the opposite: that people are far more influence-able, programmable, and herd-like than we in our individualistic idealism have believed. Facebook sways elections. Twitter or X or whatever-it-is incites riots, insurrections, and pizza-gate. People can be roused to a frenzy or soothed with a droning lecture in consistent, predictable ways.
This view also skips completely how children and young adults are indoctrinated all the time in high-demand environments to believe contradictory, false, and deeply damaging things–none of which were chosen or sought out by those children. One has only to read a few FLDS or ex-muslim novels to see all of the B.I.T.E. model dynamics laid out in putrid detail: social pressure, threats, physical violence, entrapment, extremity, repetition, magical thinking, censorship, and on and on.
In addition to this, the claim itself of what someone “wants to believe at some level” is a totally un-academic claim. It is unverifiable, unprovable, unmeasurable. It sounds pretty darn similar to the bogus claims that high-demands groups are always using to explain why members should keep believing in their crappy system, even when it doesn’t deliver the rewards or blessings the acolyte was promised. In MLMs, they say, “you get out what you put in.” In new age cults, it sounds something like “you just have to raise your vibration higher.” In more Judeo-Christian cults it sounds like “you just didn’t have enough faith.” In all of them, the person is left to doubt themselves and to wonder if they “at some level” just have not committed hard enough to receive the desired outcome–whether that’s enlightenment or a six-figure salary.
There’s nothing helpful or kind about Moore or anyone else displacing the responsibility for figuring out cults on the individual member. And for someone experiencing Faith Crisis (or any crisis of ideology), hearing someone say that they must have “wanted at some level” to believe the damaging cult scripts that have derailed or consumed their life can be a death-blow. They may give up, hollow themselves out, stop trying. They may admit defeat and surrender to lifelong depression within the group they apparently “wanted” or even attempt to end their life as a last-resort to escape the trap of their mind. This is not an exaggeration. It is not uncommon. Victims of manipulation from high-demand groups, just like victims of rape or other domestic abuse are under extreme pressure and social judgment. And when they can’t find the support they need to understand their own life, they often imagine how much easier it would be not to be alive.
Brainwashing
“…you cannot force someone to believe something…by using some set of evil techniques to “wash” their brain.”
Even if we move beyond blaming the victims of mind-control, though, there are other problems with Moore’s judgment. In order to justify her rejection of the word “brainwashing” she simplifies the concept to mean some kind of magical instantaneous change that can be inflicted on a person in a similar way to washing their hair. She then defeats this straw man argument by saying that of course, we as humans have more power to direct our thinking than someone with an evil brain shower.
Image generated with A.I. Gemini
We haven’t mentioned long-term cult researcher Robert J. Lifton yet, but this seems like a good time. In 1961 he published a tome of analysis on the “Brainwashing” phenomena in China called Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism. It’s worth reading but it is long and dense and not written for a casual reader, so without going into too much detail, the point he proved was this: yes, there are sets of techniques that cold-hearted (you could say “evil“) leaders have employed to confuse, exploit, and control huge numbers of people.
It has been done country-wide in place like China, Russia, Germany, and other places. It is being done in religious and fanatical sub-groups all the time. It destabilizes the individual’s grasp on reality and fractures a person’s ability to even know who they are or what they believe. These techniques “assault reality” by attempting to “control [and] own…truth along with any part of history that feeds such truth.”8
There’s more: experiments like the Milgram Shock Experiment,9 the Stanford Prison Experiment10 and others, show that humans are extremely susceptible to “authority” influences, even when those authorities are requiring behaviors that would be called out as inhumane, offensive, or repellent in other circumstances. These experiments also show that many people will reformat their logic to survive beneath an influential authority figure rather than disobey and risk punishment or social rejection from said authority. Their mammalian sensibilities know without words, often without conscious thought, that they are safer going along with the bad-but-powerful leader instead of standing up for their conscience.
In addition to this, when we as humans are coerced or forced to perform actions that don’t align with our logic or beliefs, we experience the extremely uncomfortable phenomenon of cognitive dissonance. To resolve our discomfort, we attempt to either change what we are doing to align with what we believe or to change what we believe to match what we are doing. We don’t do it on purpose. We don’t do it because we want to. It happens when our desires, thoughts, minds are preoccupied with some other mental puzzle or words or concepts. While we are mentally tied up with a fear of damnation, the belief that our salvation comes through obedience to a supreme leader slips in the back door. When this vulnerability is combined with youth, social rewards, the subconscious pressure to conform to authority, and other cognitive phenomena like the frequency illusion,11 the conformity bias,12 and our mammalian fight-flight-freeze-fawn responses, it is easy to see how easily we can be coerced or even forced to believe things that we may not “at any level” want to believe in.
A False Dilemma
If brainwashing were literal, we would ‘expect to see many more dangerous people running around, planning to carry out reprehensible schemes’
Moore sets up a false dilemma at the end of the passage that dovetails with the beginning. She assumes that if brainwashing were literal, we would see “more dangerous people running around trying to carry out their reprehensible schemes.” This statement is extremely emotionally charged. It is also extremely vague.
What exactly counts as “dangerous”? Does Moore not consider the astronomical rates of gun violence in her country of residence to show that there are lots of “dangerous people running around”? What about the rates of police brutality, the bulging prisons, the rates or domestic violence, or the war rhetoric used towards peaceful protestors even by mainstream politicians? If we drop the American-centric view, does not the graphic bloodlust of Israel or Russia or a dozen other places indicate that there are quite a few “dangerous people running around”?
And what would count as a “reprehensible scheme”? Is she counting the hundreds of smarmy millionaires running Mega Churches? What about the creepy pedophilia-infested fundamentalisms of Utah, Colorado, Texas, and Arizona? Is she considering affinity frauds, monopolies, and the thousands of MLMs? Or do only political conspiracies the Freemasons, the Young Conservatives, and “the Family” count? Even if we only considered one of those clusters, it seems that there are plenty of “reprehensible schemes” being carried out.
Whatever her definitions for these words, though, they are contrasted with the other side of her false dilemma, which is humans with “the ability to think for themselves.” To me, this appears to be the central issue at stake for Moore. She seems unwilling to tolerate the idea that humans are programmable or vulnerable to the mind-control that high-demand groups exert. Maybe she has resolved her cognitive dissonance with a worldview in which the only alternatives are streets overrun with “dangerous people” (I still think this is an accurate description of current events, but that’s a separate issue…) or a world in which people are invincible, autonomous self-determinists.
She leaves behind a lot of middle ground with this dilemma, though. There is very real evidence that humans can think for themselves and that they can develop autonomy to free themselves from high-demand groups. However, there is also immense evidence that we, as humans, are products of our layers of indoctrination. Most of us have many high-demand propagandistic groups in which we are nested. We are embedded in a country, a religion, a family, a company, a sports allegiance, a University allegiance, our favorite product or media brands, and many other groups. This isn’t to say that all religions, families, countries, companies, universities, etc. are bad, but we clearly need to delineate between groups that support, nurture, and empower human autonomy as compared to those that attempt to limit it through authoritative demands, social rejection, false representations of reality, physical violence, and/or spiritual damnation.
We Need the Word “Cult”
To circle back to where we started, we already have the word to describe these high-demand coercive groups that limit human autonomy and attempt to control through authoritative, social, and violent demands. The word is “Cult.” It is short, snappy, we already use it, and most importantly–it packs that pejorative punch. The pejorative nature of the word isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. It’s a red card to call foul on organizations or leaders abusing their power. It is a boundary line marking the decent from the indecent ways of proposing beliefs to other people. It just needs better defining.
There are good reasons to preserve objectivity and neutrality in academia, but preserving a respectful distance around high-demand groups is not a neutral or benign choice. It also does not preserve human autonomy. Cults aggressively exploit this pocket of respect in order to pressure people to beliefs they would not objectively have chosen. Cults limit the ability to think or reason objectively. They create systems of objectification and oppression. They create mind traps that last for generations and are perpetuated through coercive language. More often than not, they also manage to use the courts and legal system to protect their own private interests. They profit off of average people but they do not circulate the benefits of power or wealth back into community. They also quickly become too big and too complex for an average person or family can change (even a person who might end up in leadership).
Cults are not the types of groups that we as a society can afford to be objective about. High-demand groups like Mormonism, the FLDS, Scientology, Jehovah’s Witnesses, MAGA and every other cult you can think of are making no efforts to be rational, balanced, and objective in how they recruit, propagandize or subjugate their members. They slurp people in, especially from vulnerable groups like children, teens, students, young parents, the elderly and they mobilize those people to propel ideas that actively detract from democracy, ethics, spirituality, authentic community, personal well-being, and especially academics. Science, history, social sciences, and critical thinking are the first things to hit the dump in places like Southern Utah and Jonestown. Those who do manage to leave such groups face extreme difficulties both from their communities of origin and from the indoctrination that has been planted to grow within them. Often, it requires years or decades of time to feel fully recovered, if ever.
One of the primary ways that cults ensnare and manipulate victims is through language. By forbidding certain words and enshrining others, tsk-ing at some words, and tearing up at others, the ideology marks its territory within the minds of its members. It shows how to signal conformity and thus, how to secure safety, social acceptance, and the likelihood of praise or reward. Cult language also signals how believing in-group members are to recognize dissidents or outsiders, whom the members are expected to either indoctrinate or to ostracize.
Individuals leaving groups like this need academic assistance in defining and mapping their experience. They need education to recalibrate their understanding of the world. They need social encouragement not to carry forward the habits of narcissism, abuse, oversimplification, magical thinking, and bias that they learned from the high-demand groups. They need permission not to blame themselves for caving to social or authoritative pressure when they were psychologically vulnerable (often as children). And most of all, they need words. They needs words like “brainwashing” to understand the soup of propaganda they were made to believe. They need words like “criminal” to describe the behaviors of these leaders. They need words like “cult” to put some distance between themselves and the abusive system they came from.
I believe that Professor Moore and those who argue similar things about the academic use of the word “cult” genuinely value human autonomy. I believe they are trying to empower people. I believe they think they can do this through rejecting a label that they consider simplistic or pejorative. I don’t think it’s out of the question that Moore and others are working against some mildly-culty academic prejudices that prevent them from addressing this reality frankly. But, I think it is perfectly respectable to say that without a firm definition from a broad group of academics, the word ‘cult’ cannot yet be used in academic settings to describe modern groups. However, I also believe that we desperately need more academics to jump in the fray and figure out a working definition. We need academics to wrestle with this in religious studies, in legal studies, in group dynamics, in psychology, in politics, and in every study of human wellness.
“Cult” is an important word for people like me. It is a ladder. It is a map. It is a boundary. It is a reminder of what to watch out for, it is a flashlight by which to recognize the demons in this haunted world. I still use Stephen Hassan’s definition of cult, though I wish there were a more generally-accepted definition that I could use too.
Learning to Know Ourselves
We know how important groups are for our modern world. We know healthy leaders are rare (at least right now). We know we all take different paths of growth. We know we should support that diversity of belief. We know we need each other as humans. Now, we need to learn how to know each other as human, too. We need to admit that our minds are not simple or invincible–they might not even be ours in an isolated way. We need to admit that we have some autonomy but it is interwoven with our communities. We are connected to each other, to our environments, to our leaders in profound and dynamic ways.
I believe maximizing human autonomy is one way of creating health in our system. Maybe Professor Moore and I could agree on that. But to do that we need to recognize where our individual “selves” intersect with our larger collective “self” and where our uniqueness is being inappropriately stifled by our group(s). We also need to guard each other from the influences that would squelch or extract that uniqueness to serve a narcissistic, violent, or extractive force.
In other words: we need you Rebecca Moore. And Amanda Montell. And Steven Hassan. And Robert J. Lifton. And every other pioneering researcher in this arena. We need you. We need help figuring out what happened to us. We need help learning how to think again. We need help calling our experiences what they were: coercive, manipulative, abusive, alienating, traumatic, overwhelming.
We need academics, we need people, and we need words: words like “brainwashing,” words like “it’s not your fault,” and words like “cult.”
- LDS Church apostle Jeffrey R. Holland famously defended his own logic and ethics by saying, “We’re not a cult. I’m not an idiot, you know. I’ve read a couple of books and I’ve been to a pretty good school, and I have chosen to be in this church because of the faith that I feel and the inspiration that comes. I’ve met people, and if people want to call us a cult, they can call us a cult and you can call us a cult, but we are 14-million and growing, and I’d like to think that your respect for me would be enough to know that this man doesn’t seem like a dodo.” ↩︎
- I recommend Combatting Cult Mind-Control to everyone, even if they’ve never been Mormon or religious at all. In general, I think we need better and broader dialogue happening about high-demand groups and the unethical ways they solicit or demand belief. ↩︎
- Amanda Montell ↩︎
- I found her through this brilliant and entertaining Crash Course video on cult language. ↩︎
- Professor Rebecca Moore, religion professor at San Diego State University studies religious movements and lost two sisters to Dan Jones’ Jonestown massacre. ↩︎
- This passage was adapted to contain as much of the original wording as possible without having to quote all relevant pages.
Montell, Amanda. Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism. New York, NY: Harper Wave, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, 2021. ↩︎ - In fairness to Moore, I don’t know how she would refer to ancient religions. She publishes extensively about Christianity as a religion. Other scholars that I have read refer to “fertility cults” of the past, so I am lumping them all together for the sake of this article. ↩︎
- Robert Jay Lifton, “The Assault on Reality,” Dissent, September 18, 2017, accessed December 27, 2025, https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/assault-on-reality-robert-lifton-trump/. ↩︎
- Milgram Shock Experiment ↩︎
- Stanford Prison Experiment ↩︎
- The Frequency illusion: when we hear something over and over and over again to the point that we think it is true merely because we have heard it many times. ↩︎
- Conformity bias: our tendency to change beliefs or behavior to fit in with others, taking cues from the group rather than using personal judgment. ↩︎
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