Archive for the ‘Psychology’ Category

12-Step Coercion — A Victory Against It

Posted: October 21, 2014 in Addictions, Psychology, Religion, United States
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Alcoholics Anonymous: Cult or Cure? front coverby Chaz Bufe, author of Alcoholics Anonymous: Cult or Cure? and co-author, with Stanton Peele and Archie Brodsky, of the now-out-of-print Resisting 12-Step Coercion

Last week, Barry Hazle, a victim of religious coercion received a $1.95 million settlement from the institutions which first coerced him and then imprisoned him:  the WestCare corporation, a contractor which delivers 12-step treatment, and the State of California.

In 2004, Hazle was convicted of possession of methamphetamine and was placed on probation. In 2006, he was imprisoned for violating his probation by using meth, and subsequently spent a year in jail. After his release, he was ordered to attend a WestCare treatment facility in Shasta County. When he told his parole officer he was an atheist and objected to 12-step treatment–and the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation order mandating that inmates and parolees be given the choice of religious (12-step) or nonreligious treamtnet–his parole office ordered him to attend the WestCare facility anyway.

According to the Sacramento Bee, Hazle went, but was subsequently kicked out of the 12-step program for being  “disruptive, though in a congenial way, to the staff as well as other students.”  That almost certainly translates to  being polite but refusing to toe the 12-step line (turning one’s life and will over to God, and praying to God to remove one’s character defects). That was enough for the Westcare facility to kick Hazle out, sending him back to jail for another 100 days.

He subsequently sued, and following a jury trial (which found for him, but which awarded him no damages) and the appeals process, he reached a $1.95 million settlement with WestCare and the State of California. Revealingly, WestCare maintained during the trial and appeals process that it had never received the Department of Corrections order, which is very hard to believe, and that it didn’t understand the meaning of “alternative non-religious program,” which is astounding. WestCare is a national organization active in 17 states and worth, presumably, in the tens of millions of dollars; and it’s supposedly a professional organization.

And professionals providing addictions treatment of any kind in 2006 would certainly have been familiar with the most important academic/professional work on the topic, University of New Mexico researchers Reid Hester’s and William Miller’s encyclopedic Handbook of Alcoholism Treatment Approaches, 3rd edition (2003), which provides very detailed information on the practice and effectiveness of many types of “alternative non-religious program[s].” (It also provides detailed information on the practice and ineffectiveness of 12-step treatment.) As well, the Internet was around in 2006, and even the briefest search for “alternative non-religious addiction treatment program” would have resulted in at least several hundred thousand results. (I just googled that phrase and came up with 3,130,000 results.)

On the other hand, religious zealots masquerading as addictions professionals would feign ignorance, and maintain that they have no idea of the meaning of “alternative non-religious treatment.”

Today, coercion into 12-step groups and treatment is still routine in piecemeal form across the country, and many, many people are punished unjustly for resisting it. Despite three U.S. courts of appeal, four state supreme courts, and nine federal district courts ruling that 12-step groups and treatment are religious, and that mandates to such groups and treatment are unconstitutional because they violate the First Amendment’s “establishment clause,” there’s no national binding precedent forbidding such mandates: the Supreme Court has refused to hear any of the cases.

One can only hope that many other courageous victims of 12-step coercion will step forward and file lawsuits against their coercers.

 

 

 

 

Characteristics of Cults (Part X)

Posted: October 15, 2014 in Cults, Mormonism, Psychology, Religion
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Alcoholics Anonymous: Cult or Cure? front cover(This is a slightly revised version of material from Chapter 9 of Alcoholics Anonymous: Cult or Cure? This is the final installment of this series.)

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23. Violence, Coercion, and Harassment.  Coercion is routine in cults. Many cults, such as the People’s Temple and Synanon maintain(ed) goon squads to control their own members; and many, including Synanon, The Peoples Temple, and the Church of the Blood of the Lamb of God, have employed violence and even killings to intimidate and silence critics.  The most famous example of such violence was the 1978 rattlesnake attack on attorney Paul Morantz by members of Synanon’s goon squad. (They placed a rattler with it’s tail cut off in Morantz’s mailbox; it bit him, but he survived.)

Other cults, such as Scientology, utilize legal and (wtihin the law) physical harassment.  The within-the-law physical harassment the Church of Scientology employs involves sending private investigators to follow high profile critics, and members with video cameras to film them. Such harassment is sometimes a 24-hours-a-day affair. But in at least one case, that church has gone beyond lawsuits and within-the-law harassment.  In that case, Church of Scientology members, including very high ranking memvers of the church’s hierarchy, attempted to frame a critic, journalist Paulette Cooper, on felony bomb charges and very nearly succeeded. According to L. Ron Hubbard, Jr. and Bent Corydon (in L. Ron Hubbard: Messiah or Madman?), a Scientology agent who “befriended” Cooper during her ordeal reported to his superiors: “She can’t sleep again . . . she’s talking suicide. Wouldn’t this be great for Scientology!” (p. 170) Fortunately, Cooper escaped the Scientologists’ plot–after years of torment–and several of those responsible for the conspiracy against her were eventually sentenced to prison terms.

But the use of violence against nonbelievers is hardly a new phenomenon. Well over 100 years ago, John Doyle Lee, the Mormon elder who was scapegoated in 1877 for the 1857 massacre of 120 settlers (including many women and children) at Mountain Meadows, Utah, stated, in “Being the Confession of John Doyle Lee,” shortly before his execution:

[T]he people in Utah who professed the Mormon religion were at and for some time before the Mountain Meadows massacre full of wildfire and zeal, anxious to do something to build up the Kingdom of God on earth and waste the enemies of the Mormon religion . . . The killing of Gentiles [non-Mormons] was means of grace and a virtuous deed . . .

The Mormons believed in blood atonement. It is taught by the leaders, and believed by the people, that the Priesthood are inspired and cannot give a wrong order. It is the belief of all that I ever heard talk of these things . . . that the authority that orders is the only responsible party and the Danite [member of the Sons of Dan, the Mormon equivalent of the KGB] who does the killing only an instrument, and commits no wrong . . .

An even older example of the bloodthirstiness of some cults was provided by theologian and papal agent at the Beziers massacre of Albigensian heretics in 1209: “Kill them all. God will easily recognize his own.”

 

 

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Characteristics of Cults (Part IX)

Posted: October 14, 2014 in Cults, Mormonism, Psychology, Religion
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Alcoholics Anonymous: Cult or Cure? front cover(This is a slightly revised version of material from Chapter 9 of Alcoholics Anonymous: Cult or Cure? We’ll post the rest of the chapter’s material on cult characteristics tomorrow.)

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20. Possessiveness. For financial and other reasons, cults will often go to great, sometimes illegal, lengths to retain members. The most extreme example of this tendency was provided by the People’s Temple Jonestown gulag, where members were physically prevented from leaving by Jim Jones’ heavily armed good squad.

Less sinister examples are provided by the Mormons and Scientologists. When a Mormon leaves the fold, the LDS Church never gives up its attempts to recover its lost sheep. It will trakc the apostate for decades, and it’s not unusual for LDS representatives to contact former members 30  or 40 years after they left the church in an effort to talk them into rejoining.

Similarly, the Church of Scientology apparently tracks its former members for decades and barrages them with promotional/recruitment materials. One former administrator at the Celebrity Center (who has never gone public) told me that more than three decades and moving ten times after she “blew,”  the Scientologists still inundate her mailbox with glossy church promo materials.

21. A Closed, All-Encompassing Environment. Again, the classic example of this is Jonestown. A more current example are the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (FLDS) settlements in the geographically very isolated cities of Colorado City, Arizona and Hildale, Utah. These nearly 100% FLDS settlements, whose “prophet” is imprisoned child rapist Warren Jeffs,  sit across the Arizona/Utah border from each other, and church elders routinely follow any “gentiles” driving through the towns and  go to lengths to “shield” members from the “corrupting” influence of television and the Internet.

But there’s nothing unusual in all this. Almost  all cults attempt to provide a closed environment for at least some of their key members, and some attempt to provide it for all of their members. The less contact that members have with external reality, the more natural the hothouse atmosphere of the cult seems, the more natural the the very peculiar beliefs of the cult seem, and the more natural it seems that everyone should follow the orders of the charismatic leader or the controlling hierarchy. A closed all-encompassing environment also makes members totally dependent upon the cult for social support, economic support, and a sense of identity; and this tends to make leaving the cult a terrifying prospect. To put it another way, cults are like anaerobic bacteria–they thrive in the absence of cleansing breezes.

22. Millenarianism. Many cults, especially Christian fundamentalist cults, prophesy that the world is coming to an end. One of the most prominent millenarian cults, the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), is, however, secular in nature. Rather than prophesying a biblical Armageddon, the RCP in the 1980s and 1990s prophesied a nuclear Armageddon unless, of course, it achieved power. And at least they had the good sense, unlike the Jehovah’s Witnesses, not to  announce a doomsday date. (Of late, they seem to have toned down their rhetoric a bit; a brief perusal of their web site revealed no apocalyptic predictions, just an exhortation to readers to join the RCP and become “emancipators of humanity.”)

Millenarianism also provides a powerful insight into the hold of cults over their followers. As mentioned above, some cults, such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses, have had the bad judgment to prophesy the date of doomsday, yet almost all such cults have managed to retain a majority of their blindly believing followers despite their failed predictions.  The Witnesses had predicted in the 1980s  that doomsday would arrive with the new millennium. But, having been burned many times by their false predictions, they backed away from that particular one.  So, Witness faithful no longer have a year-specified doomsday to look forward to. They simply have the assurance that doomsday is coming soon.

 

More shortly.

 

 

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Characteristics of Cults (Part VIII)

Posted: October 13, 2014 in Cults, Psychology, Religion
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Alcoholics Anonymous: Cult or Cure? front cover(This is a slightly revised version of material from Chapter 9 of Alcoholics Anonymous: Cult or Cure? We’ll post the rest of the chapter’s material on cult characteristics over the next few days in installments.)

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19. Deceptive Recruiting Techniques Some cults routinely deceive potential recruits, which is understandable: most potential recruits would not find attractive the prospect of slavishly following the orders of a guru-figure while working 16 to 18 hours a day for little or no pay. The Unification Church in particular is notorious for deceptive recruitment tactics. The primary recruitment targets for the Moonies are unattached young people. They usually have a member of the opposite sex approach the target and invite her or him to dinner. According to those who have attended such dinners, no mention of Moon or the Unification Church is made. Rather, there is general talk of a “family” and improving the world. Next follows an invitation to spend a weekend at a retreat. Those who accept are “love bombed” (showered with attention) by members and are invited to a longer retreat. If they accept, they’re again “love bombed,” kept constantly occupied, accompanied by a Moonie at all times (even while going to the toilet), and denied adequate sleep. And before they know it, they’re selling flowers 18 hours a day for room and board.

Another tactic of the Unification Church is the setting up of front groups, such as the Collegiate Association for the Research of Principles (CARP), and having members like about their association with the Unification Church if asked. In the late 1970s, CARP appeared on the campus of Boise State University, and I investigated it for the school newspaper, the BSU Arbiter. Even though CARP’s address was the same as that of the local Unification Church, and its literature was distributed by members of that Church, the Moonies staunchly maintained that there was “no connection” between the Unification Church and CARP.

Other cults also employ front groups. The LaRouchites in particular are notorious for this practice. This amoeba-like cult spawns front groups so often that it’s difficult to follow its permutations. Some of the names it has operated under include the U.S. Labor Party, National Caucus of Labor Committees, International Caucus of Labor Committees, Fusion Energy Foundation, the Schiller Institute, the National Anti-Drug Coalition, the National Democratic Policy Committee, Executive Intelligence Review Press Service, and at least three dozen other names.

Since the 1990s, this political cult, which continues to operate largely through front groups,  has turned its attention to both of the major political parties. In 2010, it took part in the Tea Party disruptions of congressional town halls, and was responsible for the iconic image from those infamous episodes: the widely distributed doctored photo of Obama with a Hitler mustache. Its primary major-party target, however,  has been the Democratic Party;  it sometimes runs candidates in Democratic primaries, especially in solidly Republican districts where its candidates occasionally nab a nomination because they’re unopposed.

 

More shortly.

 

 

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Characteristics of Cults (Part VII)

Posted: October 12, 2014 in Cults, Psychology, Religion
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Alcoholics Anonymous: Cult or Cure? front cover(This is a slightly revised version of material from Chapter 9 of Alcoholics Anonymous: Cult or Cure? We’ll post the rest of the chapter’s material on cult characteristics over the next few days in installments.)

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18. Economic Exploitation. Cults not only exploit their own members, but, when they can manage it, nonmembers as well. Some, such as the LaRouchites, Synanon, and the People’s Temple, have extensively targeted nonmembers.

Cults which target nonmembers solicit money by presenting themselves–or their front groups–as doing good works, such as fighting drug addiction, when in fact virtually all of the money that they raise is spent on their own operations and, often, on enriching their leaders. Synanon fundraisers, for example, routinely represented Synanon as a drug rehabilitation program for years after it had effectively abandoned working with drug abusers. The LaRouchites have gone further and have engaged in criminal fraud–under the guise of fighting drugs and other good works–on a massive scale. A a result, many of the top members of the cult, including founder Lyndon LaRouche, Jr., were sentenced to lengthy prison terms in the late 1980s. Drug addiction programs remain a fundraising/recruiting tool with cults today, and the Church of Scientology’s Narconon program is currently engulfed in a sea of lawsuits filed by former clients and public agencies.

Direct economic exploitation of members by their cults is often even less subtle. Many cults, such as the People’s Temple, strip their members of assets. In the People’s Temple, the technique was crude: members were pressured to “donate” their possessions to the church. The Scientologists have taken a more sophisticated approach–potential members are lured by street recruiters and advertisements to take a “free personality test,” which, of course, shows personality defects, for which help is available. “Raw meat,” those who bite, then take low cost introductory courses leading to much higher priced courses, with many expensive “auditing” sessions along the way. The total Scientologists pay to go up “The Bridge” (to total freedom) commonly costs up to and over one hundred thousand dollars.

Another way in which cults exploit their members is by having them work long, exhausting hourse for little or no pay. Cults which employ(ed) such tactics included Synanon, the People’s Temple, the Unification Church, the Church of Scientology, and the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (Hare Krishnas).

Finally, lest we forget, a good majority of cults in the United States are religious organizations, and enjoy all of the many public benefits showered on religious groups.  One of these benefits is exemption from paying property taxes. So, in a very real sense, all other Americans–through the taxes they pay–are picking up part of the tab for the Church of Scientology, Moonies, FLDS, Church Universal and Triumphant, and other cults.

 

More shortly.

 

 

Characteristics of Cults (Part VI)

Posted: October 11, 2014 in Cults, Mormonism, Psychology, Religion
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Alcoholics Anonymous: Cult or Cure? front cover(This is a slightly revised version of material from Chapter 9 of Alcoholics Anonymous: Cult or Cure? We’ll post the rest of the chapter’s material on cult characteristics over the next few days in installments.)

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 16. Self-Absorption. The primary focus of a cult is the cult itself. Whatever its ostensible aims, in reality a cult is overhwelmingly self-absorbed. Cults are prone to extreme gradiosity, to what could be termed organizational narcissism; and so a cult’s primary concerns are its own survival and expansion, with the ends justifying the means.

As an example, the Mormon Church, according to Robert Bridgstock in The Youngest Bishop in England: Beneath the Surface of Mormonism, spends approximately 1% of its estimated $5 billion to $6 billion per year annual income on “actual charitable giving.” (p. 184) The situation is similar in many, almost certainly most, other cults and mainstream religions, though a good many of these tax-exempt (in the U.S.) organizations  do no “charitable giving.”

17. Dual Purposes. This extreme self-absorption leads to what Margaret Singer [author of Cults In Our Midst] terms dual purposes–in other words, cults have their stated purposes and their real purposes. As regards individual members, cults present themselves as ways for members to meet their own needs, grow personally or spiritually, and/or to realize high social or spiritual goals. In reality, Singer notes, the purposes of cults is to subject their members to mind control techniques in order to control and exploit them.

The dual-purpose aspect of cults is also noticeable in their dealings with outsiders, and it’s particularly noticeable in their fundraising activities. Cults frequently raise huge sums of money which they allege will be used to alleviate social problems such as alcoholism, drug abuse, homelessness, and abandoned or abused children, when in relaity they spend all, or nearly all, of the money raised to support the cult. For example, in its fundraising materials, the People’s Temple routinely represented itself as a do-good organization caring for abandoned children.

Secular cults are every bit as self-absorbed as religious cults. Political cults have long been notorious for infiltrating social change groups and manipulating them for the benefit of the cults (usually for the purpose of recruitment), often destroying the social change groups in the process. In the 1960s, the trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (itself heavily infiltrated by the FBI) and the stalinist Progressive Labor Party wreaked havoc in the anti-war movement through this tactic; in the 1970s, the International Socialists and other sects targeted the women’s movement; and in the 1980s and 1990s, the New Alliance Party and the Humanist Party infiltrated environmental and other progressive groups. More recently, the LaRouche cult infiltrated the Tea Party disruptions of congressional town hall meetings in 2010 prior to passage of the Affordable Care Act; the LaRouchites were not there out of altruism.

Whether religious or political, the stated purposes of cults are not their actual purposes.

 

More shortly.

 

 

Characteristics of Cults (Part V)

Posted: October 10, 2014 in Cults, Psychology, Religion
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Alcoholics Anonymous: Cult or Cure? front cover(This is a slightly revised version of material from Chapter 9 of Alcoholics Anonymous: Cult or Cure? We’ll post the rest of the chapter’s material on cult characteristics over the next few days in installments.)

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13. A Charismatic Leader. Present in almost all cults, the leader can be living (Revolutionary Communist Party, FLDS, Larouchites) or dead (Synanon, Scientology, Unification Church). In cases where the leader dies, the cult either fades away (The Source, Synanon), is taken over by a direct relation of the deceased charismatic leader (Unification Church), or is taken over by a member of a pre-existing hierarchy (Scientology).

14. A Hierarchical, Authoritarian Structure. While this is a very common feature of cults, it should be noted that relatively new cults often have little structure. But as time passes, hierarchy and bureaucracy usually arise, as is to be expected in authoritarian setups. If a hierarchy does not arise–this sometimes happens because of the charismatic leader’s fear of take-over attempts–the cult will probably disintegrate upon the leader’s death, unless a new charismatic leader quickly arises to take his or her place.

15. Submission of the Individual to the “Will of God” or to some other abstraction, such as the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” This means abandonment of individual decision making in favor of obeying the “will” of the abstraction as interpreted by the cult. In practice, this means obeying the orders of the charismatic leader or the hierarchy which controls the group.

One outward sign of individual submission to the charismatic leader is the infantilization of members. In many instances, the People’s Temple and Unification Church being examples, members very often refer to and address the leader as “Father.” (In the relatively few cults with charismatic female leaders, such as the Church Universal and Triumphant, members often refer to the cult leader as “Mother.”)

In many cults the submission of the individual is so complete that the charismatic leader and/or hierarchy make all significant life decisions for the individual, up to and including choice of sex and marriage partners. In Synanon, the control of its founder, Charles Dederich, was so complete that he forced all of the male members of his cult, save himself, to undergo vasectomies. He later forced all members to switch sex partners. The leader in “The Source” cult, “Father Yod” also assigned new sex partners to members. And in the Unification Church, the hierarchy picks the marriage partners of members. In that church, it’s common for brides and grooms to meet for the first time at their weddings.

But perhaps the ultimate expressions of the submission of the individual to the “will of God” (that is, the cult) are mass murder, mass suicide. and self-mutilation. The prime example of mass murder and suicide is, of course, Jonestown. The Order of the Solar Temple provided more recent, though smaller scale, examples of such murder and suicide.

As for self-mutilation, the most memorable example was provided by the Heaven’s Gate cult. In it, a majority of the male members of that severely anti-sexual religious group–in order to remove themselves from temptations of the flesh–”voluntarily” submitted to castration prior to the cult’s mass suicide in 1997, in order to somehow join the (of course nonexistent) UFO that cult leader Marshall Applewhite said was in Comet Hale-Bopp’s tail.

 

More shortly.

 

 

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