By: Tehila Strulowitz
On March 26th, 1997, police entered a mansion in the exclusive Rancho Santa Fe, a suburb of San Diego, California, where they found 39 bodies in matching dark clothes and Nike sneakers, all having died from mass suicide. These people were members of a religious cult called “Heaven’s Gate,” where the leaders taught that suicide would release them from their physical “bodily containers” and arrive on an alien spacecraft that was concealed behind the rare Hale-Bopp comet. The cult was led by Bonnie Lu “Ti” Nettles, who was the nurse of a man named Marshall “Do” Applewhite after he survived a nearly fatal experience. Together, Nettles and Applewhite convinced 20 people from Oregon to join their cult in 1975, coaxing them to leave their lives (family, money, possessions), and move to Colorado. In 1985 Nettles died, and the spacecraft still hadn’t appeared to take the cult followers to the “kingdom of heaven.” However, at the beginning of the 1990s, Applewhite restarted the cult, engaging new followers. After the comet Hale-Bopp was discovered in 1995, the members of Heaven’s Gate were confident that an extraterrestrial spacecraft was on its way, hidden from sight behind the comet. In October 1996, Applewhite began renting a mansion for the cult (telling the owner that they were all angels with Christian faith – Marshall Applewhite preached sexual abstinence, with some of the male members of the group copying him and having castration operations). In March of 1997, Hale-Bopp was the closest to Earth it could ever be, and so Applewhite and 38 cult members drank a mix of vodka and phenobarbital and laid down on beds to die, waiting for their bodies to leave Earth and enter the extraterrestrial spacecraft so they could go through Heaven’s Gate and experience a new, elevated existence.
History is marked with a considerable amount of cults, with several receiving a celebrity level of notoriety and fame, like the Manson Family of hippie youth turned barbaric killers, Good News International Ministries who successfully convinced their followers that they must starve to death to meet Jesus, the Branch Davidians that had the infamous 51-day siege, NXIVM which convinced women to join their exclusive and abusive group hidden within a self-help organization, and sadly, many more. Steven A. Hassan PhD, a psychologist specializing in cults following his own cult experience, explains that the main motivations of cult leaders, which results in them successfully (or hopefully unsuccessfully) recruiting followers, are factors such as “due and undue influence,” narcissistic personalities that thrive on submissiveness, and “systematic social influence processes.” Hassan vitally points out that there are some cults that are okay, but this article focuses more on the dangerous, extreme cults. The main areas of potential followers that cult leaders exploit are the person’s weakness and susceptibility (Hassan), the theory of cognitive dissonance, and obedience (Discovery Magazine). The common thread is social influence, whether it be from the cult leaders themselves or claims of what society does and/or thinks.
It is important to differentiate between cults and religions. While some cults are based on religions or consider themselves religions, they are vastly removed from the functions, definitions, and purposes of religion and what is required to be a part of one. Religions tend to be larger in size and more positively received and accepted, while cults tend to be smaller and shunned by society. Additionally, usually religions are based on faith in the existence of a god and have moral rules to prompt their followers to live a good life, while cults tend to be more focused on extreme loyalty towards the egocentric cult leader. Cult leaders will use devices such as manipulation, deception, and obedience to make their prospective followers and their pledged fundamentalists remain in their loop.
Reactions and susceptibility to cults involve feelings of anxiety, identity confusion, depression, paranoia, and so on. Disorders related to cults include acute stress disorder, depression, generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder, paranoia, post-traumatic stress disorder, and substance use disorder.
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