Nov 12, 2024

November 18th is recognized as International Cult Awareness Day

2004 - Cultic Studies Review: Scientific Evaluation of the Dangers Posed by Religious Groups: A Partial Model (Stephen A. Kent, Ph.D.)
 
" … Religiously driven violence fills the pages of history with battles, crusades, martyrs, and persecution. Yet similar themes recur in our era, as religion continues to motivate contemporaries around the world to perform heroic acts of courage and dramatic gestures of rage. Certainly, more religions exist now than ever before in history, as secular tolerance allows—and some say catalyzes—people’s claims to have been moved by the word of God. Consequently, in addition to the world’s major religions, which themselves often have violent legacies, we now also face threats from some smaller, newer, but occasionally dangerous new faiths.
 
High-profile events involving a few new religions drew attention to the reality of violence by and, often, against those religions. If we limit our understanding of violence to “multiple homicide or suicide,” then we can identify (according to the religious scholars Gordon Melton and David Bromley) some twenty newer religions implicated in violence in the last years of the twentieth century (Melton and Bromley 2002:44). Although they do not tell us which ones they identified, and their restricted definition overlooks failed attempts at killing (including shoot-outs and non-lethal bombings, poisoning, arson, assaults, etc.), certainly this list includes ones (such as People’s Temple and Aum Shinrikyo) that we all know (see Appendix). If, however, we use a broader, more comprehensive definition of violence—the use of force or its threat, causing harm or abuse—then the list of violent, newer religions is uncountable. Now we must identify groups that allow or at least facilitate the following: corporal punishment; medical neglect or assault (Asser and Swan 1998; Swan 1998); spousal violence; punitive dietary restrictions; exhausting work regimes; private, demanding re-education and punishment programs (Kent 2001); sexual assaults; emotional battering; and socio-political terrorism. Significant about the more widely drawn lists of violence in these religions is how many of the acts of religious aggression resemble, in varying degrees, what we know goes on within violent family settings.
 
Several reasons suggest why an examination of family violence literature might provide key insights into predicting violence among some religions. Both types of organizations—violent families and abusive religions—tend to be “somewhat detached from a society with which they are at tension ... and charismatically led. Intense relations, intimate face-to-face interaction, social isolation, and a dynamic of powerful leaders and dependent followers all provide the context for familial styles of coercion” (Cartwright and Kent 1992:351) and violence associated with radicalized religions. Indeed, a leading expert on family violence, David Finkelhor, used language to describe domestic violence that closely resembles what ‘cult-critics’ say about abusive religions:
'All forms of family abuse seem to occur in the context of psychological abuse and exploitation, a process victims sometimes describe as ‘brainwashing.’ Victims are not merely exploited or physically injured: their abusers use their power and family connection to control and manipulate victims’ perceptions of reality as well (Finkelhor 1983:20).'"

#CultAwarenessDay #jonestown #AumShinrikyo #violence #exploitation #terrorism
#igotout #indoctriNation #religioustrauma #religiousabuse #manipulators #cultexpert #psychology #cultrecovery #cultsurvivors #cult #cultspecialist #suicide

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