2023 is the year of the cult
If you had told me in the 1970s that cults would eventually become a source of casual entertainment, I would have doubted you.
Maybe “entertainment” is not the right word, but it’s very close to being the right word. If you wanted to — I don’t recommend this — you could spend every free minute of January watching streaming docu-series and listening to podcasts about cults and still not have exhausted the supply.
There’s even a cultertainment ecosystem.
For example, while watching the Netflix docu-series about the Twin Flames Universe cult (more about that later), I began to wonder if I was getting the whole picture, so I tracked down an episode of a podcast titled “A Little Bit Culty with Sarah and Nippy,” on which the journalist behind the other Twin Flames Universe docu-series (on Amazon Prime) was interviewed.
As I listened, it became clear that the hosts Sarah and Nippy were survivors of and defectors from NXIUM, a cult notorious for its abusive approach to sex and for such charming practices as holding women down and branding them with a cauterizing pen.
(It gets more intertwined. There are also two competing NXIVM docu-series, one on HBO/Max and one on Hulu.)
The current fascination with cults is truecrime-adjacent. The human race has always had an appetite for colorful misery, but we’ve never had such effective delivery systems. True crime dominates the podcast industry and occupies a huge space in the streaming television world.
The first season of “Serial” — a highly personalized reconsideration of the conviction of a Baltimore man for the murder of his girlfriend while both were high school seniors — took podcasting from a nascent, uncertain new media platform to an engine that could pump out blockbusters.
Using production and storytelling techniques developed on public radio’s “This American Life,” the series was delicious and addictive. One might feel an obligation to remind oneself that a real 19-year-old person named Hae Min Lee had been strangled, but why ruin everyone
else’s good time?
Those good times kept rolling, fueling the growth of a media industry and making murder podcasts so ubiquitous and familiar that they hatched an acclaimed comedy series (about murder podcasters) starring Steve Martin, Martin Short and Selena Gomez.
Over on the streaming TV side, early hits such as “Making a Murderer” and “The Jinx” (on which real estate heir Robert Durst incriminated himself by chattering in a bathroom while wearing a forgotten mic) resulted in a Sutter’s Creek rush for cheap, potent content. No writers or actors. There is no union for murderers. Cha-ching!
Cult documentaries provide a middle ground. The stakes are higher than they are for real housewives and Kardashians, but if stab wounds and severed heads are a little bit too much for you, here’s a genre where the violence is mostly delivered to the heart and soul.
Meanwhile, cults themselves were experiencing a boom, thanks to Facebook and YouTube and even Zoom. It was no longer necessary to sell poppies at the airport or send followers on Dumpster-diving missions for discarded Hawaiian pizzas (although members of another cultertainment option The Garden — imagine if Coachella were more like “Midsommer” — have kept Dumpster-diving going).
The participants in Love Has Won, a smallish cult currently enjoying fame on HBO/Max, were able to raise money on YouTube simply by asking for it or by selling dubious supplements and “etheric surgeries”: repairs of the body and soul conducted through spiritual channels.
Twin Flames Universe — imagine if Phil Spector ran a dating service — appears to be about 90 percent virtual. The leaders, Jeff and Shaleia, rarely meet their adherents in person but manage
their lives remotely, picking their spouses and routinely pressuring followers into gender reassignment, usually female-to-male, to compensate for the preponderance of women members in a cult whose sole purpose is to assemble and then dominate heterosexual couples.
Sidebar: Everything old becomes new. Cult leaders choosing the spouses of their followers is a long-running tradition, raised to rock festival levels by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon who married more than 4,000 of his followers in 1982 at Madison Square Garden. Some of the couples had known each other for only a week or two. Still fact-checking the rumor that Ernie Grunfeld and Bernard King of the New York Knicks were briefly, accidentally wed.
When we talk about cults, humility is appropriate. I covered religion in the 1970s. Moon’s Unification Church was regarded with deep suspicion. A man named Ted Patrick pioneered the practice of — in return for a fee -grabbing “Moonies” or other cult members off the street and taking them to undisclosed locations to be “deprogrammed,” sort of a doctrinal juice cleanse that could take days.
The Unification Church is still controversial in Japan, but here in the United States it did what seemed inevitable even 40 years ago — fade into the wallpaper. They’re still here, but in a society less and less interested in organized religion, they’re just one of the religions you’re not interested in
Mormonism was deeply stigmatized in the 19th century, so much so that its founder Joseph Smith was lynched by a mob in Carthage, Ill. The lynchers were acquitted at trial by a jury that had been purged of Mormon jurors.
Once a cult, today Mormonism is a leading exporter of non-crazy Republicans, an endangered species.
One challenge of cults is that a lot of them calm down and become boring, but some of them go in the other direction, through Heaven’s Gate and on the road to Jonestown.
In 2023, one occasionally feels as though everybody is in a cult: Burning Man, Gordon Ramsey, reddit, Taylor Swift, SoulCycle, life coaches, Subaru, conspiracy theories, pickleball, steampunk, public radio, credit card rewards points, Elon Musk. (Musk inverts the old cult leader paradigm: use your followers to get rich. Musk got rich first. Now he wants to be a cult leader.)
There’s a podcast which explores exactly that blurring of lines. It’s called Sounds Like a Cult, and one of its episodes is about podcasting.
QAnon, which ticks every imaginable cult box, is braided into the current American political discourse in a toxic, unnerving way. Love Has Won, a cult that made the slow, agonizing, unnecessary death of its founder its central narrative, is a spiritual labradoodle, fusing the ideas and terminology of Qanon with its florid theology.
QAnon places Donald Trump at the center of its mythology. Trump meanwhile kicked off his 2024 campaign in Waco, Texas, site of the Branch Davidian disaster. He didn’t throw a dart at a map. Trump’s language in Waco was more than a little bit culty. “I am your warrior. I am your justice. And I took a lot of heat for this one, but I only mean it in the proper way — for those who have been wronged and betrayed … I am your retribution,” he added.
This is what worries me about cultertainment. Cults seem funny and divertingly lurid until you realize that these are real people who lose all their money or have their hearts broken, their spirits crushed, their lives foreshortened. Intimacy and trust — those precious metals of human existence — are exploited and weaponized, for our viewing pleasure.
The lesson of Trump’ first term was that all the things we found so amusing on a reality show were genuinely terrifying when transferred to the Oval Office. Trump 2 will be about a cultertainment figure trying to do the same thing.
Colin McEnroe’s column appears every Sunday, his newsletter comes out every Tuesday and you can hear his radio show every weekday on WNPR 90.5 or podcast any time at ctpublic.org/colin. Email him at colin@ctpublic.org. Sign up for his free newsletter at http://bit.ly/colinmcenroe.