FACT member Byron Clark was at DECULT last month. Here’s his report.
Thanks to the support of FACT Aotearoa, I attended the ‘DeCult’ conference in Otautahi Christchurch in October. DeCult was the first conference of its kind in Australasia, bringing together experts on cults and high control organisations, including many former members of cults. One of those experts with lived experience of being in a cult was Janja Lalich, a sociologist from the USA. Lalich gave the keynote speech and told the audience that “As an American I can say that ideological extremism is alive and well, and it’s the stuff that cults are made of”. My background researching extremism had driven my interest in this conference. There are similarities and overlaps between cults and extremism but also differences. A big one is that while extremist groups manifest their violence outward, cults manifest their violence inwardly toward members.
Sex trafficking is one type of violence seen with cults. I attended a session by Bec Sonkkila, a former member of the Movement for Spiritual Integration into the Absolute (MISA). Gregorian Bivolaru, MISA’s leader and founder was arrested in France last year and is facing preliminary charges of human trafficking, organised kidnapping, and rape. Labour exploitation is even more common. At one session, a former follower of Sri Chinmoy read out the recipe for the vegetarian sausage rolls sold by the Lotus Heart restaurant. The Lotus Heart staff were underpaid for their work, and the business was fined by worksafe for not following public health requirements during the COVID-19 pandemic. (This saw the Sri Chinmoy Centre ending their relationship with the restaurant’s owner). The recipe reading gave a lighthearted touch to an event where clearly many attendees were carrying trauma from their experiences in high-control organisations. The Lotus Heart hosted the Christchurch event put on by disinformation platform Counterspin Media during their ‘Lets Not Forget’ tour in 2022. Opposition to vaccine mandates and other pandemic related requirements appear to be what gave these two otherwise quite different groups common cause.
Cults are more common in Aotearoa than I had realised. 50,000 of us have been impacted by cults. I was unaware of, to give one example, the Highden Temple Mystery School in Manawatū. The ‘mystery school’ is part of the International School of Temple Arts (ISTA) and offers training under the umbrella of self help. ISTA has drawn complaints globally, particularly for their ‘sacred sexuality’ courses.
MISA and ISTA are reminiscent of the “new age” spirituality that I associated with the term “cult” but I was surprised to learn how cult-like some Christian sects can be, not just the well known example of Gloriavale, who operate an isolated community disconnected from wider New Zealand society, but groups like The Exclusive Brethren, The Two-by-Twos, and the relatively mainstream Seventh Day Adventists and Jehovah’s Witnesses. The panel ‘Invisible Rainbow Youth’ gave the audience an opportunity to hear from members of the LGBT+ community who had grown up in these groups. Andre Afamasaga told of his experience of conversion therapy in the Seventh Day Adventists. When an audience member asked if there were transgender people in these groups, Craig Hoyle, who was raised in the Exclusive Brethren, responded that in the Brethren there was no concept of that, with people shielded from the world outside the group. As people start to become more aware of the outside world however, they might start to see themselves. Afamasaga reminded us that wider society becoming more accepting of transgender people will also help anyone who may be trans “on the inside” in one of these groups.
The panel ‘Rabbit Hole Resistance: Cults, disinformation and online radicalisation’ chaired by FACT’s Stephen Judd further explored some of the similarities and differences between extremist groups and cults. Cults typically have a charismatic leader, while the kind of online radicalisation we’ve seen in recent years often lacks a charismatic leader and instead offers an alluring ideology. In the case of the Qanon conspiracy theory, the figure at the centre “Q” is almost semi-mythical, their real identity unknown and possibly multiple individuals. Qanon has however inspired something that looks more like a cult as it would typically be defined, with Qanon adherent Romana Didulo declaring herself Queen of Canada and later setting up a community with her followers in a small town.
Ulrike Schiesser, a psychologist and psychotherapist working in Austria’s Federal Office for Cult Affairs (Bundesstelle für Sektenfragen) which deals with cults, noted that during the COVID-19 pandemic a lot of people made contact with the office about someone they knew getting involved in conspiracy theory. Professor Ekant Veer, a lecturer in the business school at the University of Canterbury with an interest in digital communities, told the audience that people who feel powerless offline can develop a sense of belonging in online spaces, and then feel powerful online. Without the central leader, the deceived also become the propagators of misinformation, similar to a pyramid scheme. Notably, many disinformation spreaders in Aotearoa have a background in multi-level marketing organisations.
Continuing the pyramid scheme theme, Schiesser pointed out that quite often conspiracy theory does become a money making scheme; the audience is told that the world as they know it is coming to end, so you should buy gold and ‘prepper’ equipment from them. A prepper is a person who believes a catastrophic disaster or emergency is likely to occur in the future and makes preparations for it, typically by stockpiling food, ammunition, and other supplies. (Sales of dietary supplements and prepper gear have netted Alex Jones, host of ‘Infowars’ millions of dollars)
How do we get people out of the rabbit hole? It’s actually quite similar to getting someone out of a cult. Psychotherapist Paul Wilson notes that the cult wants their recruit to break their relationship with you. Schiesser encourages people to keep the relationship but also make boundaries. Adam Elmasri, Australian-Egyptian human rights activist reminds us that countering misinformation with accurate information is not a strategy that will work, “for every article you provide, their community will provide five”. People don’t like to leave cults, or misinformation communities, in part because it’s hard to admit that you were wrong. Fostering critical thinking is a long-game, and one that those of us interested in countering disinformation and conspiracy theories need to commit to.
