Is That "Scholarship" Actually Cult Propaganda?
Exposing apologists posing as scholars
Some of the pro-cult literature you will find on the internet these days will open onto something that on the surface looks like scholarship. However, don’t be fooled! Somewhere tonight, someone is typing a group’s name into a search bar for the first time. What comes back has been shaped by people with resources, patience, and perhaps financial reasons of their own.
Take for example, a journal with an editorial board and mailing address, publishing an article arguing that many of the groups my clients have recovered and escaped from, are in fact merely “new religious movements” — that should be allowed to operate as-is, and deserve protection despite their documented abuse.
The authors that publish these pro-cult articles can be compared to the “experts” that Big Tobacco hired to say with certainty, that smoking cigarettes does not cause cancer — even though the corporate heads had done their own research and knew for sure it did. Big Oil also uses the same propaganda playbook as cults, investing a fortune into buying politicians and writing legislation.
And so, like Big Tobacco, and like Big Oil, a multitude of authoritarian mind control cults (shall we call them Big Cult?) coordinate and have their propagandists regularly publish journal articles which are positive about their groups.
A few questions crop up. How can we recognize these propagandists? How could sociologists of religion write positive articles about destructive cults? Why?
