When I first heard the word “cult,” there was a basic line I got about it: a cult is an organization that brainwashes people, takes away their ability to think, and cuts them off from their friends and family. Something radically different than religion, radically /evil/. After several years hanging out on the atheist interwebs, I’ve gotten used to another line: a religion is just a cult with more members (alternatively, a cult with more weapons).

The latter line makes a fair amount of sense. Test one: silliness of beliefs. Step back, make yourself temporarily forget you’ve been hearing Christianity’s claims all your life: is attributing all the problems in the world to a woman who ate a piece of fruit any objectively less silly than attributing all the problems in the world to a galactic overlord who decided to solve his empire’s population problem by taking the excess to earth and slaughtering them, letting their spirits cause us troubles ever after? No. On the silliness-of-belief test, Christianity comes out just as bad as Scientology.

Test two, perhaps a little less obvious: the three characteristics of a cult I was taught growing up. Brainwashing? Not sure–what is that even? Taking away people’s ability to think? Check: Evangelical Christians are threatened with eternal damnation if they dare think to themselves “no, as far as I can tell, this stuff isn’t true.” This doesn’t necessarily mean they’re not allowed to doubt, many strains of Evangelicalism take the approach Eliezer Yudkowsky attributes to the Orthodox Judaism he was raised in: “You’re allowed to doubt. You’re just not allowed to successfully doubt.” (Go read Eliezer’s comments on this point–there’s a fair amount of depth to it I won’t rehash here.)

And cutting people off from family? Mostly you don’t see this today, though heaven forbid you convert when you have an openly gay family member. But there are hints in the Bible that this was how Christianity started out: the Gospels feature Jesus telling people to abandon and hate their families.

I’ve been prompted to reflect these issues because of a post at Ambivablog titled “‘Breaking Babies’ — by Waterboarding??” (whose permalink doesn’t work, apparently because of how Typepad converts titles into URLs). It talks about the Mormon polygamist compound that was busted recently, and throws in mention of sometimes forcible “cult deprogrammings” that happened from the 1970s through the 1990s, complete with link to a “deprogrammer” defending himself.

There’s some rhetoric about mind control, but when you follow that link, you’re treated this quote:

“Destructive cults, groups, movements and/or leaders “maintain intense allegiance through the arguments of their ideology, and through social and psychological pressures and practices that, intentionally or not, amount to conditioning techniques that constrict attention, limit personal relationships, and devalue reasoning.”
– Margaret Singer, Ph.D.

Yet it’s not fears of an ideology with arguments that make the “mind control” anti-cult rhetoric effective, it’s images of The Manchurian Candidate, wildly exaggerated ideas about the power of hypnosis, tropes wired into our brains by stories of evil wizards and cyborgs that force silicon mind-control chips on people.

I suspect all this anti-cult imagery misses something about how cults-slash-religions really operate: they operate not through access to some mysterious, evil control powers, but by tapping into a deep and fundamentally rational human need: the need for community.

If your immediate thought on reading this is, “how sad, since they can get community elsewhere,” you’re missing the point. I’m sure you get a community of sorts from your sports team, your gaming group, your dance club, your activist buddies, your drinking buddies–but how strong are those bonds? How much can you rely on them? A fair amount, perhaps, but there are limits. The bonds aren’t as strong as they could be–as they could be if, for example, all your drinking buddies were completely dependent on each other for survival.

A bit of economics/sociology: Why would a religion, any group, have rules requiring members to engage in specific wasteful, pointless activities? Even from the groups perspective regardless of cost to the individual, it seems inefficient. Yet here’s a benefit: it’s a way of weeding out the freeloaders who would try to benefit from group membership without giving anything back. It allows group members to more confidently support those who are willing to pay the price, confident they aren’t being had. Better still if the rule is only a restriction on how group members can use resources for themselves: that can be viewed as simply a way to keep resources available for everyone’s benefit, no less inherently rational than submitting to a tax. Best of all if the cost is something like food taboos or body modification that sets group members apart from the outside world, forcing them to rely on each other and not outsiders.

I once heard an Orthodox Rabbi say that the point of kosher rules was their arbitrariness, and heard him mocked for it. I think he got something that his critics didn’t.

This is not to say there’s no distinction between mainstream religions and Heaven’s Gate, or that there’s a distinction between groups that use these techniques and those that don’t. Just within the world of religion, you’ve got the liberal churches that act as glorified potluck clubs, some of whose members admit to being agnostics who see the community as a chief benefit of the group. This is community-based appeal, though it’s a relatively lose community. Closer to the middle you’ve got megachurches, that set themselves up to provide every conceivable sort of need for social activity, who expect members to join small groups where they bear their deep, dark secrets to whoever they happen to wind up in a group with, yet which model themselves on mainstream culture and whose members have normal jobs and such. Finally, far at the other end, you’ve got the groups that are so tightly bound that their members don’t learn, or forget, how to be part of normal society.

I’m not defending religion, much less Heaven’s Gate. For one, the more you rely on a group, the greater risk you have of being trapped in one where you’re being exploited rather than getting the reciprocal benefits of community. And a strong community isn’t worth my sanity. Still, before you sit marveling at religious brainwashing, it’s worth pausing to think what’s really going on.