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Cults: Dangerous Devotion

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This is, by and large, a pretty good - and certainly interesting - look at the mindset of cults and especially cult leaders, with comparisons drawn among several prominent examples. Robert J. Lifton, Harvard Professor of Psychiatry, and other experts basically lay out the characteristics that define a cult and expound upon the flawed psychological similarities that leaders of fanatical cults seem to share. Then this knowledge is applied to several classic examples of dangerous cults: Warren Jeffs and the FLDS Church, Jim Jones and the People's Temple, Shoko Asahara and Aum Shinrikyo, Charles Manson and his "Family," David Koresh and the Branch Davidians, and Paul Schäfer's Colonia Dignidad in Chile. Warren Jeffs is actually the lightweight in this group, as his sexual exploitation of children never got a chance to crescendo into an apocalyptic act of death and destruction.

Of course, Jim Jones remains the most darkly fascinating cult leader of them all, not only because of the hundreds of lives his madness snuffed out in the jungles of Guyana (including that of Congressman Leo Ryan) but also because we have the audiotapes of that final hour of the People's Temple. Survivors such as Tim Carter are also more than willing to talk about their experiences - so we know quite a bit about Jim Jones' maniacal madness. Most people should also be familiar with the imprisoned Warren Jeffs and his long list of crimes, while the flames of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco also remain fresh in the American psyche. This documentary's discussion of these aforementioned cults is quite good, but I would rather focus my attention on the less familiar cult examples showcased in this video.

Aum Shinrikyo may not sound familiar, but this was the cult responsible for the deadly Sarin gas attack inside the Tokyo subways back in 1995. Shoko Asahara was the group's deranged leader responsible for the attack that killed eleven and injured a good 5000 Japanese commuters. Why did they do it? Asarhara, who claimed to be Jesus Christ, had convinced his followers (using extremely convoluted "logic") that the attack would bring about World War III, which would of course be followed by paradise. This is the same type of thinking that Charles Manson used to his murderous advantage in California. The brutal killings his Family members carried out in his name were intended to start a race war that would pave the way for a new world. It's one thing for a fringe group to predict or hope for the end of the world - cult leaders such as the aforementioned actually go out and try to bring on the apocalypse themselves.

The documentary makes the point that there are many terrible cults out there that are not even on the radar, and Colonia Dignidad (Colony of Righteousness) fits that bill perfectly. Ex-Nazi Paul Schäfer moved his church to the Andean foothills when it became clear that his days of molesting children back in Germany were coming to an end. In the privacy of what became a rather immense, self-supporting concentration camp, Schäfer worked his followers night and day while the orphanage he had built provided him with a steady supply of children. He forbade his followers, including husbands and wives, from having sex, all the while molesting young and vulnerable Chilean children on a regular basis. Anyone who disobeyed his commandments was brutally tortured: forced abortions, electroshock treatments to even the most private of body parts, etc. He even applied electroshocks to the vaginas of little girls and gave them hormones in an attempt to keep their bodies from developing sexually. This guy was so twisted that Chilean dictator Pinochet sent many of his political prisoners his way to be tortured and killed.

The one thing that bothered me about this documentary, though, was the narrator's insistence, on multiple occasions, that the major religions of the world, especially Christianity, started out as cults in their own right. The first attack on Christianity comes right after Robert J. Lifton had lain out the characteristics that define a cult, characteristics that did not apply to Christianity or any of the other major religions of the world at any time. That strong hint of anti-religion bias taints what is otherwise a most informative look at the dark and destructive power of cults.

I was expecting more from this show than I got. I guess I'm not surprised considering it's coming from the History Channel, but this video seems to go for the dramatic and sensational at the expense of truly exploring the cults it documents. What I mean by that, using its coverage of Jonestown as an example, is that the video documents lots of photos and footage and has an exciting narrator and reveals all sorts of events that occurred, but not much about the underlying reasons people followed them. Not much on their doctrines, their actual practices. Not much about how they convinced people to join and stay. Even the former member they interviewed, they only used snippets of him talking about events, and not about how he became involved. I think this is definitely an important, if not THE most important, aspect of understanding cults, if we are to protect ourselves and others against becoming involved in them. If you want the basics of these cults and want to be creeped out by scary footage and photos, get this video. If you want an in-depth exploration of the mentality and methods behind these groups, look elsewhere.