How Have Cults Shaped American History?
From a cult’s rogue personalities to its foundational ideologies, how have fringe beliefs guided the direction of the American dream?
‘The idea of the cult represents the very core of the American Dream’
Susan-Mary Grant is Professor of American History at Newcastle University
In the context of American history vary widely. Describe something as a cult to a modern audience and what will most likely spring to mind is the Manson Family murders (1969), the 900 Jonestown murder-suicides (1978), the Branch Davidian murders and mass suicides (Waco, 1993), or the Heaven’s Gate suicides (1997). These examples are extremes, the dramatic and therefore visible tip of an iceberg of some 10,000 cults that exist in America. But they have led to the belief that across the nation, at various points in its history, dangerous cults, centred on a charismatic but violent and corrupt leader, are warping souls, controlling bodies, and destroying lives. The modern cult is, as popularly portrayed, about mind control and, in its worst manifestation, murder.
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