Ron Hubbard have been. Hassan says they can be, but the process will require not only empathy and individual family involvement but a wholesale change in how social media and information systems separate fact from dangerous fictions.
This is defined by four overlapping components that I referred to as the BITE model of authoritarian control. The b of BITE stands for behavior control. Then the i is information control. Thought control is the t, and e is emotional control. My definition of an authoritarian cult is these four components are used to change the person into a mirror or a clone of the cult, that is dependent and obedient. As a mental health professional, we think of that as a dissociative disorder.
This new identity has taken over, and thought-stopping mechanisms and phobias are installed in the cult identity to keep it in control. Quick funny story. Many years ago I was interviewed by a writer of a book who said his editor told him to interview me. And I laughed. There are people who are really passionate followers of actors, actresses, rock music.
The difference between a hobbyist or a passion, what we might simply call a nerd, gets a little squishy. Were the Nazis a cult? Yeah, Hitler and the Nazis absolutely were a political cult.
In my definition of a destructive cult, the stereotypical profile of cult leaders is malignant narcissism. They think nothing of making threats or committing violence. I would argue that cult leaders typically did not have a healthy childhood. He was trained to do thought-stopping from his childhood, about any doubts, any negative thoughts. Cult leaders are much more dangerous because they have a delusion. They have incorrect wiring operating in their brain for conscience and empathy and reality testing and respect for others, as well as respect for the rule of law.
Have people objected to this concept of you calling him mentally ill or assessing him that way? How do you come to that conclusion scientifically for yourself?
I am a licensed mental health counselor. They just have narcissistic personality disorder, and antisocial personality disorder, and such. It is interesting that there are psychiatrists, some forensic psychiatrists like Bandy X. But her job as a forensic psychiatrist with an expertise on dangerousness is usually based on not seeing the person in-person, but based on what they say and what they do.
When somebody says I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and kill someone and my followers will still believe in me or follow me, that is a classic statement of someone who is dangerous. The definition of a cult is difficult to nail down in some ways. I think celebrities do have cult followings. The question is, are these people deceived and are they being exploited?
Is their fundamental personality and belief system being changed, and are they being alienated from family and friends? Put simply, Iowans aged 18 at the time of the November 3 election and over who are registered Democrats will gather in caucus sites school gyms, churches, community halls in their designated precinct, and vote with their feet by splitting into groups based on their preferred candidate.
That result is used to calculate the number of national delegates each candidate receives. National delegates eventually choose the nominee at the Democratic convention in July. Pence was quick to echo her remarks in his speech. Other research showed that the blend of religious activism and Republican politics likely played a significant role in increasing the number of religiously unaffiliated people. One study, for instance, found that something as simple as reading a news story about a Republican who spoke in a church could actually prompt some Democrats to say they were nonreligious.
But the numbers began to add up, opening a rift between conservatives and liberals. As a result, views about religion and its role in American society have become increasingly polarized. According to surveys by the Pew Research Center, the percentage of liberals who believe that churches and religious organizations positively contribute to society dropped from nearly half 49 percent in to only one-third 33 percent today.
And according to data from the Voter Study Group, only 11 percent of people who are very liberal say that being Christian is at least fairly important to what it means to be American — compared to 69 percent of people who identify as very conservative. And although the people who have left religion could return, it seems more and more unlikely.
For one thing, conservative Christians are still a key part of the Republican coalition , where their agenda on issues like abortion and religious exemptions remains a high political priority within the party.
There were prominent Protestants at the turn of the century who also trusted in science and, as scientific knowledge grew, accepted that the world was not created in six days but rather over millennia, and that humankind was a product of evolution. These were not necessarily hills on which Christianity needed to die — after all, evolution does not rule out the possibility of divine purpose — but the subsequent theological liberalism that grew out of these findings created a backlash that gave rise to fundamentalism, the belief that the Bible was fundamentally, historically, and scientifically true.
We have our own churches. We have a bus running to programs. The isolation created a stark religious and cultural divide in America. It was a fall from a great height. Out of the seeds of the ensuing resentment and cultural irrelevance — and as a means of overcoming them — American evangelicalism was born.
By the s, Graham was preaching against communism and hobnobbing with presidents — though he once horrified Harry S.
Truman by praying on the ground outside the Oval Office. He was interested in the political shape of things.
In , 43 percent of Americans were members of a church; by , that figure had jumped to 63 percent. Together, they reframed the debate, creating a playbook for a defense of white supremacy. With a sleight of hand, he recast the issue as a defense of religious liberty. Everett Koop, the films and accompanying book argued that abortion was infanticide. They began to see the political left as being the church of secular humanism. Despite having signed into law the most permissive abortion bill in the U.
At one point, my parents forbade TV altogether, and disconnected the stereo system in my car. We awaited the Rapture, when Christians would be spirited away and Jesus would return to deal violently with the mess humans had made of things. Over time, and even before the introduction of Fox News, whatever nuance we might have seen in the culture evaporated into a stark polarity. Zooming out, that cleaving was by design: It created a powerful us-versus-them mentality that mobilized the Christian base fiscally and politically.
We were Christian soldiers, and the weapons we had were our votes and our tithes. The wedge issues created during the culture wars of the Eighties and Nineties were thus not matters of equality and social justice or anything that might evoke the liberalism of the Social Gospel though Jesus spoke on such matters abundantly. There was now a scorched-earth policy, and any leader who tackled the wedge issues with Trumpian ferocity was on the side of righteousness.
Which also happened to be where the money was. Right-wing crazy people. And as Jesus himself pointed out, money tends to shut down moral inquiry. Not everyone capitulated. Moore was quickly chastised. More than churches threatened to cut funding to the SBC, and some left the denomination altogether. His wings were clipped. And what happened? I was in my early twenties, living in London, when my mother called to inform me that if I did not cast my absentee ballot for George W.
Bush, I could not possibly be a real Christian. She was adamant, unyielding.
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