Religious apologists have a playbook for scholars who get too close to the truth. That playbook is a dog-eared, reliable little volume passed down through generations of believers who find the disinfectant of sunlight a bit too harsh for their tastes. My first thought after reading
Massimo Introvigne’s scathing review1 of a new book by Stephen Kent,2 whom I should note was my doctoral supervisor many years ago, was that this was just another case of an apologist attacking a skeptic. The pattern is predictable: dismiss challenging scholarship as reductive, invoke the specter of persecution, and wrap methodological objections in the language of intellectual sophistication. Recall how scholarly critics of
Scientology are routinely dismissed. When researchers document the organization’s aggressive litigation tactics or financial practices, apologists don’t engage with the evidence. They instead argue that such reductive approaches miss the authentic spiritual experiences of believers. Academic methodology gets reframed as antireligious bias, and suddenly you’re not debating facts but defending your right to ask uncomfortable questions in the first place.
But this skirmish represents something far more troubling than simply a negative book review. A deeper look reveals the extent to which religious apologetics has gained a foothold in ostensibly secular academic disciplines, creating an intellectual environment where critical inquiry is often treated as a form of bigotry. This cynical inversion turns the tools of social justice into a shield for potential abuse.
Consider a contemporary banker in a bespoke suit standing before his board of directors to announce that a divine being has revealed a new set of infallible investment principles. His claims, delivered with fervent conviction, would likely be met not with reverence but with calls to security and a discreet consultation with the firm’s occupational health department.
Now imagine a young man in 1830s New York making functionally identical proclamations about golden plates and a restored gospel.
Joseph Smith’s functionally identical assertions became the foundation of a major global religion. This divergence highlights society’s powerful tendency to evaluate claims of divine revelation not by their content or evidence but by their historical distance and eventual social acceptance. The passage of time seems to launder the bizarre into the venerable. What is madness in a pinstripe suit in the City of London becomes prophecy in homespun cloth two centuries prior in upstate New York. The logic is, to put it mildly, elusive.
This temporal double standard is not a mere historical curiosity. Rather, it shapes how we evaluate contemporary religious claims and the scholars who study them. When University of Alberta professor Stephen Kent published
Psychobiographies and Godly Visions last year, applying psychological frameworks to understand how extraordinary religious claims emerge from very human minds, Italian scholar Massimo Introvigne responded by dismissing him as an “anti-religion crusader” lacking any “flicker of intellectual generosity.”3 Rather than engaging Kent’s methodology or evidence, Introvigne exemplified the apologetic playbook: attack the scholar’s credibility rather than address their findings.
But this academic skirmish reveals how religious apologetics has colonized parts of academia, creating an environment where the same analytical tools we apply everywhere else (psychological evaluation, financial transparency, historical documentation) suddenly become suspect when directed at religious claims.
The real-world implications of this academic deference may sound like inside baseball, but bear with me; the stakes extend far beyond academic turf wars into matters of public policy and safety. When claims of divine authority lead to medical neglect, financial exploitation, or the psychological abuse of children, the debate ceases to be abstract. The academic reluctance to apply psychological analysis doesn’t protect religious freedom; it protects abusers by making their methods invisible to scrutiny.
Historically, the primary conflict in the scientific study of religion centered on methodology and disciplinary authority. As Kile Jones noted, early scholars such as Sigmund Freud, Emile Durkheim, and James Frazer each championed their own discipline as holding the key to explaining religion’s essence.4 Psychology focused on wish-fulfillment and unconscious drives and sociology emphasized social cohesion and collective representations, while anthropology examined ritual behavior and cultural symbols. The question was not if religion could be explained but how and by which analytical framework.
Today, the central conflict has shifted fundamentally. In many parts of the academy, a struggle now exists over whether scientific methods should be applied at all when they challenge the self-perception of religious groups.5 The old debates assumed that rigorous analysis was not only appropriate but necessary. Scholars simply disagreed about which analytical tools would prove most illuminating. The current controversy questions the legitimacy of such analysis entirely, particularly when it produces conclusions that religious communities find uncomfortable or threatening to their preferred self-understanding.
This reluctance to apply critical tools often stems from well-intentioned impulses to respect religious claims generally, particularly those from marginalized traditions, which can morph into a defense of religious claims regardless of the evidence against them.6 The pattern is predictable: when researchers document financial irregularities in a religious organization, accommodationist scholars (those who prioritize protecting religious groups from critical analysis) might argue that focusing on money misses the authentic spiritual meaning that members derive from their donations. When psychologists examine a leader’s grandiose claims, the response is that Western clinical categories cannot capture non-Western spiritual experiences. The admirable goal of cultural sensitivity becomes an intellectual straitjacket that renders entire domains of inquiry off limits. This approach also fosters an environment where inconvenient data, particularly the testimony of those who have left a religious group, is dismissed out of hand. Indeed, a norm has developed among some researchers that holds that former members, or “apostates” (often used pejoratively by believers), are inherently untrustworthy sources.
Renowned sociologist of sectarianism
Bryan R. Wilson went so far as to pronounce in a 1994 piece (written for the Church of Scientology, no less) that “neither the objective sociological researcher nor the court of law can readily regard the apostate as a credible or reliable source of evidence.”7 This creates an impossible research environment. Imagine if criminologists were told that testimony from robbery victims was inherently unreliable, or if historians dismissed all refugee accounts as biased. The effect is to make the group immune to criticism from the very people with the most direct experience of its practices. Here was a scholar simultaneously claiming objectivity while accepting payment from the very organization whose critics he was systematically discrediting. The message was clear: former members were to be dismissed as inherently unreliable sources. This creates a scholarly world in which the only permissible voice is that of the group itself, a methodological approach that would be considered laughably compromised in any other field of study.
Kent’s psychobiographical approach is what makes his work so threatening to the academic establishment. Critics immediately label such work as reductive pathologizing, but this is a deliberate misreading. Psychobiography avoids just retrofitting modern diagnoses onto historical figures. Instead, the scholarly goal is to build a richer comprehension of a complex life by identifying the deep-seated personality patterns that shaped how a person made sense of the world, reacted emotionally, and behaved. This method is about using psychological science as one analytical tool among many to understand how extraordinary claims emerge from very human minds.
This approach has clear ethical backing. The APA Ethics Committee explicitly stated that “the psychobiographical and academically rigorous ‘profiling of historical figures’ … does not violate the American Psychiatric Association’s ethical guidelines for research.”8 This distinction allows for the scholarly analysis of historical figures while forbidding unethical public diagnoses of living individuals. The irony is striking: a field that readily accepts autoethnographies analyzing the sociopolitical implications of personal experiences suddenly discovers methodological scruples when psychological analysis is applied to religious founders.
Far from being reductive, Kent’s work employs a multi-layered
biopsychosocial model examining four distinct domains. This is not a simplistic, one-size-fits-all explanation but a framework for exploring the intricate dance of biology, psychology, and social forces. The intrapsychic domain focuses on a leader’s mental health, early life experiences, and potential substance abuse, exploring how these factors shape their sense of self. One might examine, for instance, how childhood trauma manifests in later life as an insatiable need for absolute validation, a psychological void that a devoted religious following is uniquely positioned to fill.
Kent’s analysis then moves outward to the interpersonal domain, examining how a leader’s psychological needs interact with those of their inner circle, creating a feedback loop of devotion and demand. A narcissistic leader will inevitably attract enablers who mirror his grandiose self-image back to him, while a paranoid leader draws followers who validate his sense of persecution, each relationship reinforcing the other’s distorted worldview in a closed, mutually affirming system.
The intragroup domain analyzes how a leader’s psychological profile translates into specific control mechanisms that affect ordinary members: shunning (complete social isolation of critics), love-bombing (overwhelming new recruits with attention and affection), and information control (restricting access to outside news or dissenting views). Here the focus shifts to the lived experience of rank-and-file members, exploring how techniques of social influence can bind individuals to a group and make dissent seem not only wrong but unthinkable. Finally, the intergroup domain explores how a group’s internal dynamics, shaped by its leader’s psychology, affect its interactions with broader society, from media relations to legal strategies to recruitment methods. This comprehensive framework demonstrates a commitment to understanding complexity rather than applying simplistic labels. It represents the very antithesis of reductionism.
Take, for example, the case of
Rajneesh, the guru who built communes in India and Oregon before fleeing criminal charges in 1985. The intrapsychic analysis reveals a pattern of grandiose self-regard: he claimed divine selection as a teenager and later proclaimed himself humanity’s savior. The interpersonal domain shows how his psychological needs created cycles of devotion and cruelty. He would elevate followers as special therapists, then publicly humiliate them as incompetent exploiters when they gained independent status. The intragroup mechanisms included mandatory red clothing (heightening group identity), electronic surveillance of disciples’ private conversations, and traumatic abandonment. He told devoted followers “unless I am damaged, nothing is damaged” when their commune collapsed and they lost everything.9 Finally, the intergroup domain reveals how internal paranoia translated into external aggression: salmonella attacks on local restaurants that hospitalized 751 people, assassination plots against officials, and the largest illegal surveillance operation in American history.10
One might expect a response focused on evidence, methodology, and substantive critique. True to form, Introvigne’s review was swift and personally vitriolic, dismissing Kent’s methodology as lacking “nuance, subtlety, or even a flicker of intellectual generosity” while branding him an “anti-religion crusader.”11 This was a personal attack rather than substantive academic critique, a performance of outrage designed not to engage with evidence but to poison the well before any substantive discussion could begin. This same playbook (attack the messenger, ignore the evidence) emerges whenever serious scrutiny threatens to penetrate religious immunity.
Kent’s methodological rigor becomes essential when examining contemporary cases that should trigger immediate skepticism. The Ahmadi Religion of Peace and Light (AROPL) serves as an ideal case study because the claims are so extreme that they should trigger universal skepticism, yet watch how apologetic rhetoric transforms even this into a religious freedom issue. The group is led by Abdullah Hashem, who claims to be “the Mahdi,” the “new pope,” and the successor to both Muhammad and Jesus.12 His pronouncements extend far beyond traditional spiritual matters: he has proclaimed that a “flood of blood” is “hours” away13 and taught that giant, clothes-wearing rabbits control a distant planet where they keep humans as pets. One struggles to imagine a more perfect, almost comically absurd, example of a belief system that ought to invite serious scrutiny. Yet the claims become far more troubling when examined alongside serious allegations of exploitation.
The group faces serious allegations of exploitation. Followers are urged to donate their entire salaries, rendering them completely dependent on the group for survival. Children are isolated in a compound in Crewe, England,14 a situation that should trigger immediate concern from any responsible observer. In a particularly disturbing twist, new members must provide blood for a loyalty oath that, according to investigative journalist
Be Scofield, Hashem mixes in a jar stored in a replica of the Ark of the Covenant.15
How did Introvigne’s network respond to these detailed and credible allegations? Bitter Winter, Introvigne’s publication, immediately reframed the Guardian investigation as persecution driven by “New Age anti-cultism.”16 Rather than addressing the evidence of financial exploitation, child isolation, or bizarre rituals, the response was to discredit Scofield by claiming her sources included “revelations from angels, extraterrestrials, Tarot cards, and the Akashic records.”17 This represents a textbook smear tactic: ignore the substance entirely and make the serious investigative reporter appear to be an unreliable crank.
This response pattern illustrates “
cult greenwashing.”18 Just as corporate greenwashing uses environmental language to mask harmful practices, cult greenwashing appropriates the language of human rights and religious freedom to deflect from credible allegations of abuse. This tactic functions like an ideological martial art, using the opponent’s own weight against them. A journalist raises a concern about child welfare, a principle of social justice, and the apologist immediately flips the argument, claiming the journalist’s scrutiny is an attack on the “religious freedom” of a minority group, another principle of social justice. The original concern is lost in the maneuver, and the defender is now positioned as the noble champion of the underdog.
Introvigne’s support for AROPL represents a sustained, international legitimation campaign. In June 2024, he participated in a session devoted to AROPL at a conference in North Macedonia. By April 2025, he was sharing a conference platform with an AROPL leader at the University of Exeter. Then, in May 2025, at the Turin International Book Fair, a committee represented by Introvigne awarded AROPL’s sacred scripture, The Goal of the Wise, a literary prize.19 This represents a coordinated international effort to reframe a group facing credible allegations of exploitation as a persecuted religious minority.
This legitimation process reached its apex in August 2025 when Introvigne took his advocacy directly to AROPL’s doorstep. He announced his attendance at a “Supremacy of God conference” held at the University of Buckingham’s campus in Crewe, the very town where Hashem’s compound is located. His social media post was revealingly titled: “The Usual Suspects Gather … .” The attendee list, including noted scholars Susan Palmer and Gordon Melton, read like a who’s who of accommodationist religious studies. According to AROPL’s own promotion, the event drew over 100 attendees, including international members, BBC and ITV reporters, and, most troublingly, the mayor of Crewe and local council members.20 Introvigne’s own social media documentation of the event reveals the extent of this legitimization effort, describing presentations on AROPL’s “doctrine” and “inclusivity” while celebrating the group’s ability to convert “professional rappers” and framing critics as representatives of “world anti-cultism.”21 Here was the apologetic playbook’s success: transforming a group facing serious allegations into legitimate participants in academic discourse, complete with political endorsement.
One must pause to consider how utterly bizarre this would be in any other academic discipline. Imagine criminologists hosting a conference on a university campus, attended by local officials, to legitimize an alleged mafia family facing credible extortion charges. Imagine political scientists awarding prizes to a dictator’s writings while celebrating him as a victim of persecution. Such actions would be career-ending scandals in any other field, rightly so. Yet in the academic study of religion, this behavior is not only tolerated but celebrated as defending “religious freedom.”
How did we arrive at a situation where such obvious manipulation passes for scholarship? The answer lies in the sophisticated rhetorical strategies that religious apologists have perfected. One key tactic is “poisoning the well,” an argument that seeks to delegitimize an opponent’s claims in advance by attacking their credibility or good faith.22 By framing Kent as an anti-religion crusader and journalists as unreliable mystics, critics ensure that everything they say can be ignored and deemed false or irrelevant by the public without ever having to engage the evidence. Kent himself has experienced this directly, recalling how operatives of one group followed him in at least two countries and another distributed a news magazine that falsely equated him with a Holocaust denier, all because he dared to write critically about the group’s founder.23
A related tactic is the strategic use of straw man arguments. Once critics have been discredited personally, apologists can then misrepresent their actual arguments. The standard move is to dismiss all research on psychological manipulation by invoking the grotesque imagery of
The Manchurian Candidate, the 1959 book about a brainwashed assassin, which was later twice adapted into film in 1962 and 2004. This tactic attributes a ridiculous and easily refutable argument to opponents, one they never actually made, to sidestep their real points.24 Researchers are not talking about fictional mind control; they are referring to well-documented processes of social influence, such as control of information, manipulation of guilt, and isolation from outside contacts.25 By consistently invoking this ridiculous caricature, apologists can discredit legitimate research without engaging its actual content.
The conflict between Kent’s rigorous analysis and Introvigne’s apologetic rhetoric is more than just an academic feud. On one side stands a commitment to applying consistent analytical standards across all domains of human experience. On the other stands a powerful impulse to create a protected category for religion, shielding it from critical inquiry and defending its institutions even when credible concerns arise. This accommodationist impulse, however well-intentioned, has turned parts of the academy into a safe harbor for apologetics, where defending faith takes precedence over seeking truth.
Returning to the banker and the prophet, the core issue is one of intellectual consistency. If we are willing to consider psychological and neurological explanations for extraordinary claims made by a banker, we must be equally willing to consider them for claims made by a prophet. To do otherwise is to abandon the principles of scholarly inquiry and embrace a double standard that serves no one, least of all the vulnerable individuals who bear the consequences. Kent’s book is not an attack on religion. It is a plea for an honest day’s work.
Notes
1. Massimo Introvigne, “Stephen Kent Unmasks Himself: From Anti-Cult Scholar to Anti-Religion Crusader.” Bitter Winter, August 15, 2025.
2.
Stephen A. Kent, Psychobiographies and Godly Visions: Disordered Minds and the Origins of Religiosity. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2025.
3. Introvigne, “Stephen Kent Unmasks Himself: From Anti-Cult Scholar to Anti-Religion Crusader.”
4. Kile Jones, “Scientific Understanding in Theories of Religion: Which Science Ought We Emphasize?” Free Inquiry 45, no. 3 (April/May 2025).
5. Rodney Stark and Roger Finke, Acts of Faith: Explaining the Human Side of Religion. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000.
6. Russell T. McCutcheon, Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1997.
7. Bryan R. Wilson, “Apostates and New Religious Movements.” Scientology Religion, December 3, 1994. Available online at https://www.scientologyreligion.org/religious-expertises/apostates-and-new-religious-movements/page1.html.
8. American Psychiatric Association Ethics Committee, The Principles of Medical Ethics with Annotations Especially Applicable to Psychiatry. Arlington, VA: American Psychiatric Association, 2017.
9. Kent, Psychobiographies and Godly Visions: Disordered Minds and the Origins of Religiosity, p. 17.
10. Ibid., pp. 12–21.
11. Introvigne, “Stephen Kent Unmasks Himself: From Anti-Cult Scholar to Anti-Religion Crusader.”
12. Rachel Gessat, “‘Dad, Imam, God’: Children Living with Self-Declared Pope in Former UK Orphanage.”
The Guardian, June 12, 2025.
13. Be Scofield, “Meet the Doomsday Cult Taking Over the World.” GuruMag, April 21, 2025.
14. Mattha Busby, “In England, Parents Are Moving Their Children Into a Doomsday Cult—With a Man Calling Himself ‘the New Pope’.” VICE News, July 2, 2025.
15. Ibid.
16. Rosita Šorytė, “AROPL and the Rise of New Age Anti-Cultism.” Bitter Winter, June 20, 2025.
17. Ibid.
18. Luigi Corvaglia, “Greenwashing Cults: How Cult Apologists Poison the Wells.” SSRN Electronic Journal, January 12, 2023. Available online at https://ssrn.com/abstract=4323801.
19. Massimo Introvigne, “Castellion v. Calvin: Freedom vs. Theocracy, from Geneva to Iran and the Case of the Ahmadi Religion of Peace and Light.” Bitter Winter, May 21, 2025.
20. Ahmadi Religion of Peace and Light, “Today was the opening day of our two day event titled ‘The Supremacy of God conference.’” X, August 20, 2025. Available online at https://x.com/ahmadireligion/status/1958319257587994962.
21. Massimo Introvigne, “The Ahmadi Religion of Peace and Light (a Shia-derivative new religion not to be confused with the Sunni-derivative Ahmadiyya Community persecuted in Pakistan) converted at least two professional rappers: here is one.” Facebook, August 20, 2025. Available online at https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1GebnjJpFw/; Massimo Introvigne, “Second day of the conference on the Ahmadi Religion of Peace and Light (a Shia-derivative NRM not to be confused with the Sunni-derivative Ahmadiyya community) with more details on its doctrine and opponents and on the present state of world anti-cultism.” Facebook, August 21, 2025. Available online at https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1A5cUpDZXC/.
22. Corvaglia, “Greenwashing Cults: How Cult Apologists Poison the Wells.”
23. Kent, Psychobiographies and Godly Visions: Disordered Minds and the Origins of Religiosity, p. 251.
24. Corvaglia, “Greenwashing Cults: How Cult Apologists Poison the Wells.”
25. Steven Hassan, Freedom of Mind: Helping Loved Ones Leave Controlling People, Cults, and Beliefs. Newton, MA: Freedom of Mind Resource Center, 2013.
Jonathan Simmons
Jonathan Simmons, PhD, is an independent scholar and higher education professional whose research examines nonreligion and social movements in North America. His doctoral work analyzed moral identity and activism in Canadian atheist communities, and his current research focuses on Indigenous religious change and nonreligion. His scholarly articles have appeared in Secular Studies, Religion and Gender, and Social Movement Studies, examining topics ranging from feminist atheist activism to the intersections of nonreligion with social justice movements.
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![Yun Young-ho, former head of the Unification Church's global headquarters, left, meets then-Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen in Cambodia in December 2022. Yun is believed to have obtained Cambodian citizenship and a passport from senior government officials around that time. [SCREEN CAPTURE]](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLfvRXUN9RimAXcm8VMbIbFDcvU6vqXbBdKNKmmX2v7uz4pFXW2tmzdrAlWLxirsUu53MjfetbOwAVG0i4BMxvlpSrVG6dARu5gBruCH9iITLwVhn-1J6cuYij6BLbAIsnvfy7kfcCv1sZLJ4WCTGBjQgJnmeI0z6shAGXYxfs7NSV80Kq1XwPhpuOj44/s994/1000018984.jpg "Yun Young-ho, former head of the Unification Church's global headquarters, left, meets then-Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen in Cambodia in December 2022. Yun is believed to have obtained Cambodian citizenship and a passport from senior government officials around that time. [SCREEN CAPTURE]")
