Doomsday Cults

▪ 1998

by Martin E. Marty

      Waco, Heaven's Gate, Solar Temple, Aum Shinrikyo ("Supreme Truth"), and People's Temple, or Jonestown, are shorthand terms often used to recall places, movements, and events associated with groups known as doomsday cults. Hearing predictions that there are likely to be more such cults as the year 2000 approaches, many who do not belong to them are trying to make sense of these movements, which they find both strange and threatening.

      The first thing people do when they are puzzled by something complex is turn to the experts, in this case the scholars. The first thing most of those who study cults say is do not use the word cult, or be careful when you do use it, and perhaps keep it in quotation marks. They hold that while the word cult originally was intended to be neutral and innocent, since Jim Jones in 1978 provoked mass suicide among his followers, many have associated cults with killing. That assumption, state the scholars, is unfair to all those who belong to quite peaceful and harmless movements. Yet no one has settled on a satisfactory alternative term, though some speak of NRMs ("new religious movements").

      In addition, if people use the word cult carefully, they would do well to attach adjectives to it each time. Sometimes the adjective used is apocalyptic. Because of the Christian shading of the term apocalypse ("involving or portending widespread devastation or ultimate doom"), however, many prefer a word that stretches across the religions and therefore advocate the word doomsday.

      Doomsday cults have a long history in the United States. Beginning in colonial times, preachers and leaders of many spiritual movements often made the final judgment of a person's life and the subsequent threat of his or her doom central to their proclamations and appeals. Rarely would these leaders proclaim that everyone was doomed. Instead, they would draw on old biblical stories or invent new ones, stories that described how a minority would be saved, while many, maybe most, would be "lost" forever. In order to be saved, followers were instructed that they had to respond to the appeals, change their ways, believe what the leader taught them, and, frequently, form tightly bonded groups so that they could stay at some distance from lures and distractions—including, often, members of their own families. In their closed-in, cultic circles, they would receive the messages of truth, affirm one another, screen out other interpretations of reality, and support each other through ordeals that the group envisioned.

      In the 19th century two newly developing religions had elements that led them to be regarded, especially by their many rivals and enemies, as something like today's doomsday cults. Most familiar of these movements was the gathering on a hilltop in New York of followers who had been persuaded by William Miller that they should sell all their possessions, gather, and greet Jesus Christ, who was returning, making a "Second Advent" in 1843 or 1844. When Jesus failed to appear, the disappointed regathered in what is today Seventh-day Adventism. Students and followers of Charles Taze Russell foresaw doom at various times, notably 1914. They survive as Jehovah's Witnesses. In neither case did the followers physically come and stay together in communes or other enclaves, however. Unlike those in many present-day cults, they had and have regular jobs, regular lives.

      The charismatic leader has been central in the groups thought of as doomsday cults in the late-20th-century U.S. This is often a person who draws on ancient scriptures and prophecies and then interprets what the Bible calls "the signs of the times." All around, this leader sees evil and corruption and views them, sometimes even including natural disasters, as tokens of divine wrath and signals of judgment, doom, and the end of the world. Immorality, relativism, the competition between religions, the loss of meaning, wars, and rumours of war—all count as such tokens. But there is a way to avoid doom, say such leaders: join the tightly formed group; keep your distance from others; obey what the leader says, especially as new prophecies come forth. Then, be ready to do what you are told to avoid the wrath to come.

      Many of these features are present in the cases of the best-known leaders. Jones began his ministry as a conventional mainstream Protestant (Disciples of Christ) pastor. He came to lead the People's Temple movement, eventually from bases in the United States to a remote area in Guyana. While the movement was being observed and exposed by U.S. governmental and other agencies and scholars, Jones evidently talked his hundreds of followers into simultaneous mass suicide.

      Similarly, David Koresh had been brought up in orthodox Seventh-day Adventism, a religious movement not considered dangerous by other Christians and the public at large. Koresh's new revelations, however, went beyond the bounds of the Bible and early Adventist leaders and inspired him to lead his Branch Davidians to near Waco, Texas. There federal officials, having lost patience and quite likely having misinterpreted what they had learned about Koresh's followers, in 1993 attacked his enclave in an assault that prompted the cult members to set the compound on fire and led to the death of 74 people, including Koresh.

      Not all such movements grow up on Jewish and Protestant soil, as became clear in 1995 in Japan, where perhaps the most dangerous of the doomsday cults, the one that demonstrated the greatest potential for killing innocent nonmembers, formed and acted. This was the Aum Shinrikyo group, led by Shoko Asahara, who was later arrested and accused of murder. Largely on the basis of Japanese religious resources—where talk of an end of history is less frequent—Asahara proclaimed that only he and his followers should control history. In Quebec and Switzerland in 1994, many members of the Order of the Solar Temple, a group that combined elements of feminism and apocalypse, were murdered or committed suicide.

      In the U.S. another doomsday cult showed that even on the soil of a nation where 80-90% of the people professed a faith grounded in the Bible, there could develop intense religious movements that had little, if any, biblical prophetic base. This was the movement called, in the end, Heaven's Gate. It had been led by two people who at one time called themselves "Bo" and "Peep." It was leader Marshall Applewhite ("Bo") who talked his followers into being sequestered into a single community. They committed suicide in 1997, as their previously taped testimonies revealed, in order to leave Earth to ride Comet Hale-Bopp to "Heaven's Gate." They stated that they would willingly shrug off and shed their bodies in order to reach the new state and place—while the rest of the human world sped on toward doom.

      Are there more groups like these? Will there be more like them? Gnostic sects (groups that claim esoteric knowledge) and eschatological hysteria (anxieties about the end of the world) are as old as religion itself and have occurred in many places and times. In our times there have been Shiˋite Islamic fundamentalist terrorists, Jews who interpret biblical texts and follow new leaders, and various Christian groups and even secular "militias" in the United States that arm themselves and keep others at a distance. Most of them can be studied and classified in the context of old religions newly interpreted, but most of them are also similar to the doomsday cults in their view that they are a specially selected people. They believe that they alone hear the voice of God accurately, that they alone act upon what they hear, and that they and their leader foresee doom for others. The result of their actions can be lethal. They, however, are less divorced from inherited and host religions than are the fully identified doomsday cults.

      Why do these cults exist? Human action, especially responses to leaders who invoke the sacred, the divine, is always complex. Cult followers tend to be people who are unsatisfied by the complexities, contradictions, and ambiguities of life—including life as interpreted by the mainstream religions. They seek answers, and the modern world, with its pluralism and its rapid communications, can confuse them and undercut their belief systems and their "orthodox" communities. The cult leader offers a single answer, keeps the rest of the world at bay, and reinforces only one belief system.

      The turning of the calendar page to 2000 is inspiring—and will almost certainly inspire all kinds of prophecies and movements. Some may become dangerous. It will be a time that should not be faced complacently.

Martin E. Marty is a professor of religion at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, a senior editor of Christian Century magazine, director of the Public Religion Project, and author of many books and articles.

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