A brief history of cults

Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene was stripped of her committee positions over her support of QAnon conspiracy theories. Picture: AFP

Like Australia, the United States manufactures fewer and fewer of the goods it consumes. But the US leads the world in the manufacture of madness – in everything from conspiracy theories to armed militias. Likewise it stands alone in the creation of cults.

The deceased Soviet Union embodied its Cult of the Personality in one monster, Joseph Stalin, an awful example currently echoed by the Republicans with Donald Trump. But what makes the US so fascinating is the mass production of that idea – scaled down to the death cults of Jim Jones, Charles Manson, David “Moses” Berg and the Branch Davidians. And let us remember the rapacious Rajneesh and other Indian imports – gullibility knows no bounds. Racism, too, has been giving birth to cults since the Ku Klux Klan started burning crosses and lynching African-Americans after the Civil War. And it remains the driving force for a large percentage of followers in Trump’s MAGA cult.

A religion is simply a cult with more members – and the US is arguably the world’s most religiously diverse nation. Here are a few born in the last century alone: Pentecostalism. Scientology. The Nation of Islam. Eckankar. The modern American order of Rosicrucians. Hare Krishnas. People of Praise. Go back to the 19th century for the Episcopalians, the Church of Christ, the Church of the Latter Day Saints, Christian Science, Jehovah’s Witnesses. Cults by the score, some accumulating enough followers to become big time – the seven million Mormons having their own capital in Salt Lake City. And, like the fundamentalist televangelists, enjoying tax exemption. Ask Australia’s Hillsong. There’s big bucks in the born-again business.

The New Age spawned hundreds of cults – among them Heaven’s Gate, based on UFOs, and Berg’s free-love Children of God. Soon there were more fad faiths than products in Walmart. The US was spoilt for choice. (Which reminds us of the infinite variety of breakfast cereals created since Seventh-Day Adventist doctor John Kellogg invented the corn flake in Battle Creek, Michigan in the late 1800s; these days you can still support the religious group with your purchase of Sanitarium-brand Weet-Bix.)

After the Cult of Celebrity, perhaps the biggest cult in the US is the deadly religion energised by the National Rifle Association, which claims to have 5.5 million members. The independent global Small Arms Study estimates that in the US there are about 400 million guns for the population of 330 million. With all the assassinations, murders and massacres that follow.

Cultists circle 9/11 like vultures, most famously the “truthers”, and new cults abound around the Covid pandemic. Mad theories about the origin of the virus, of how it doesn’t exist or is an evil scheme by George Soros and Bill Gates. Note the holy war on masks and the resurgent ranks of the anti-vaxxers. Double, double, toil and trouble, fire burn and cauldron bubble.

And now we’ve the QAnon cult, at the pinnacle of the maddies list and happy in its new home, the Republican Party – while gaining a toehold in Australia’s increasingly rabid, rancid and racist politics. Let us remind ourselves what the ultra-right ratbags at QAnon attest: that a cabal of Satan-worshipping, cannibalistic paedophiles head a global effort to destroy Donald Trump. Obama, the Clintons, Soros and any number of Hollywood stars are, of course, involved. As indeed am I. Interested in joining? Then let’s also offer you free membership of DENSA, my low-IQ MENSA.