For Corey Slavin, it came from a co-worker. At 25, she was living away from her parents for the first time and feeling shaky, she confided. The other woman was reassuring. Corey’s parents obviously didn’t understand her, but never mind, she did-and so did God. From that comforting beginning, Slavin, who is Jewish, fell ultimately into the embrace of the Church Universal and Triumphant, a Montana-based Christian-cum-New Age group. The church leader had her followers build underground shelters against the coming nuclear holocaust while transmitting to them the amalgamated wisdom of “ascended masters,” such as Christ, Buddha and Hercules. Before Slavin got out, she spent much of her time “decreeing”-repeating the sect’s spiritual chant as much as five hours a day, at hypnotic speed.
It often happens that way in the cults. Ordinary people, many of them favored with sound intelligence and high education, are recruited at a point in their lives when the summons to some larger collective purpose seems just the antidote for their alienation. Gradually they’re induced, under the sway of a mesmerizing leader and mind-numbing rituals, to surrender the judgment, the scruples and, sometimes, the savings of a lifetime. Slavin was one of the luckier ones. She stayed with the Triumphants only eight months, long enough to run through all her money, including the $6,500 she paid for a space in the bomb shelters. When she was hurt in a tumble into one of the shelters, she was told it was because she wasn’t “holy” enough. That started the doubts that led her to quit.
Outsiders usually shake their heads in disbelief at the more bizarre cultic practices. But in the calculated isolation that envelops members, almost anything is possible. At first, they are made welcome by fellow cultists, who seem always to be blissfully smiling. “Belonging” boosts their self-regard, and the cult leader’s often messianic agenda gives them a core belief that may have been lacking in their lives. But somehow they are also made to feel unworthy. Former members tell of a “1984” atmosphere that encourages cultists to monitor each other and report infractions.
Sometimes, it appears cult leaders have all read the same operating manual. Many seem to know instinctively that an outside threat increases the cohesion of a group. They foster a them-and-us mentality: members are the chosen ones, and their mission is transcendent, whether it is building bomb shelters or preparing for the Second Coming. Everyone else is an “outsider” and a potential enemy-particularly family members.
Before long, a cultist’s sense of well-being comes to depend on remaining close to other members. Social psychologist Richard Ofshe, who shared a Pulitzer for a newspaper expose of the Synanon cult, says that the tie with peers is what ultimately binds the members. An intimacy develops among them, based on revealing weaknesses in collective sessions. “Then the leader,” says Ofshe, “can use everything they revealed to manipulate them.”
The leaders themselves have no peers to keep them in line. They may start out benignly enough, but their increasing power over their followers becomes intoxicating. Many present themselves as prophets, with special trunk lines to God. Eager to preserve the illusion, members will rationalize the leader’s abuses (“He’s just testing us”). In the process, says Marc Galanter, a psychiatry professor at New York University School of Medicine, “leaders who are not necessarily grandiose may become so. There’s an interplay between leaders whose needs become increasingly bizarre and followers who are willing to serve their every need.” At that point, danger looms. “When there’s absolute control, it suggests something is quite pathological,” says Alexander Deutsch, director of inpatient psychiatry at New York’s Cabrini Medical Center. “The group and the leader get so bound together that it’s almost as if they were part of the same organism.” The only check on the leader is the limit of his imagination: Jim Jones led his flock to a tub of poisoned Kool-Aid; former members say many Branch Davidians surrendered their daughters to David Koresh.
People, of course, do leave cults. They get out when their doubts begin to overwhelm their trust. In most situations, they’re held back only by their own fears. “I’ve interviewed people who said they wanted to leave for six months before they told their spouse, fearing the spouse might turn them in-only to discover the spouse had the same desire and fear,” says Ofshe.
After they’ve resumed normal lives, defectors may be as puzzled as the rest of us over how they joined a cult to begin with. Slavin, who went to Wellspring, an Ohio rehabilitation center for ex-cultists, and then to a psychotherapist before she could pick up her life again, is still trying to come to terms with the episode. “I know that I was in a vulnerable period,” she says. “I felt lost. I didn’t feel I could go to anybody.” As it turned out, she went to the wrong people.
