Cult Followings
A review of "Cults: Inside the World's Most Notorious Groups and Understanding the People Who Joined Them" by Max Cutler and Kevin Conley
I really hope the people at Parcast will forgive me for calling them the Nickelback1 of podcast networks, but there are too many similarities to ignore. Their shows are very popular - so much that Spotify spent at least $40M (and maybe as much as $100 million) to acquire the company - and yet no one seems to like them very much.
I’ve listened to several of their shows, and they usually involve very interesting subject matter - serial killers, unsolved murders, cults - in the most dry, overly scripted, often fact-challenged manner possible. They can be best compared to someone reading Wikipedia entries out loud.
Here’s a little experiment for you: listen to an episode of their Dictators show and follow it up with a episode of Noiser’s Real Dictators, which is much better written and features interviews with actual historians, experts, and even survivors. It’s like comparing the low-budget 1990 Captain America movie with an MCU film.
(Incidentally, the Parcast shows about serial killers, unsolved murders and cults are titled…Serial Killers, Unsolved Murders, and Cults. I saw someone on Reddit suggest that their podcasts are popular for this very reason. Before the Spotify acquisition, if you searched for a show about “serial killers” on a podcast app, of course their show would come up first.)
For what it’s worth, Cults is the one Parcast show I check out on the regular, simply because it is such a fascinating subject, even if presented in a dull manner. And that description applies to the company’s first attempt at a tie-in book, called - what else? - Cults.2
Parcast founder Max Culter and co-author Kevin Conley retell the history of several notorious religious cults, which as often as not ended with murders and suicides. Neither author purports to be a psychiatrist or psychologist, but they nevertheless attempt to explain the cult leaders’ mental states and how they were able to maintain such tight control over their disciples’ lives.
Yes, it is indeed a book version of a Parcast show, right down to the “…is not a licenced psychologist or psychiatrist, but has done a lot of research for the show” part.
Most of the big ones - Heaven’s Gate, Jim Jones’ People’s Temple, David Koresh’s Branch Davidians - are covered, but there is little sign of any original reporting. Admittedly these high-profile cults, all of which famously ended with mass death and destruction, be it through murder, suicide, or a bloody standoff and firefight with government agents - have arguably been studied to death, and have all had definitive books written and documentary films produced (and sometimes other podcasts recorded) about them. If you already know their stories, there really isn’t anything new here.
Still, for every Jim Jones or Marshall Applewhite who goes achieves pop culture infamy, there are several cult leaders who remain obscure even though their stories are pretty freaking wild. The Cults book is at its best when it covers some of these lesser-known groups, some of whom really should have had a dozen Netflix documentaries about them by now.
There are the Narco-Satanists based in Mexico, whose name pretty much says all you need to know about them. Actual human sacrifice comes up several times in that chapter. Two of the more interesting cases featured in the book have connections to La Belle Province - “Rael,” a failed French race car driver who convinced people he’d had contact with aliens from outer space and whose group (which also got media attention in the early 2000s for its purported attempts at human cloning) had an outsized presence in Quebec, and the “Ant Hill Gang,” whose leader Roch Theriault committed unspeakable acts of abuse at their wilderness compound.
But the most horrific story might be that of “The Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God,” based in Uganda, a country where religious cults and scams have found unusually fertile ground. (Seems like only yesterday I reviewed The Missing Crypto Queen, about a cryptocurrency Ponzi scheme which sucked many Ugandans.)
Leader Credonia Mwerinde parlayed her alleged vision of the Virgin Mary into founding her own breakaway Roman Catholic sect, even convincing some Catholic clergy to sign on. She ultimately convinced her followers to enter wooden “arks,” which were then set afire, resulting in a death toll even worse than that of Jonestown, while she allegedly took off into the jungle and hasn’t been seen since. Now that’s a story that deserves a deep-dive investigative podcast.
Cults would have been a much better book had it skipped People’s Temple and the Branch Davidians in favor of other obscure groups with truly fascinating stories, many of which have been featured on the podcast. (I’ll long remember the episode about the “Workers’ Institute of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought,” a tiny Maoist splinter group whose story didn’t make it into the book, despite holding its followers hostage for many years in a London townhouse and proving - as if the past few years didn’t already make it clear - that a political organization can be as much a cult as a religious one.) As it stands, readers will likely discover something new, but it’s mixed in with a lot of stuff that students of “new religious movements” will already have read many times over.
Incidentally, there is one notorious cult that doesn’t get a chapter in the book. Its name starts with S and ends in Y, it has a very high profile in Los Angeles and Clearwater, Florida, and it has even inspired great works of music and cinema. But I guess even with up to $100M in the bank, the Parcast people still don’t want to be sued.
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Obligatory: “WARNING: if you get an email with a link to the new Nickelback album, DO NOT OPEN IT. The link actually goes to the new Nickelback album.”