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The Rhetoric of Religious "Cults": Terms of Use and Abuse
Anabelle Mooney
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. ISBN-10: 1403942854; ISBN-13:
978-1403942852 (hardcover), $74.95. 224 pages.
The Rhetoric
of Religious Cults serves as a
cult apologia. Annabelle Mooney’s
central thesis is that the
persuasive techniques used by cults
are no different than those used by
groups accepted by the dominant
culture, including anti-cult
organizations and corporations. She
makes this case by performing
careful rhetorical analyses of
recruitment texts from the Church of
Scientology, Jehovah’s Witnesses,
and The Family and comparing them to
literature from anti-cult
organizations and from McKinsey &
Company, a business consulting
corporation. For all these
organizations except anti-cult
organizations, she chooses specific
texts, but she fails to do so with
anti-cult groups. During her
rhetorical analysis of anti-cult
literature, she speaks very
generally. On occasion, she does
specifically mention aspects of the
website of Info-Cult, a cult
information organization in Canada.
In the
introduction, Mooney explains that
her message is important in light of
recent legislation in parts of the
world regulating the activities of
certain groups labeled as cults. She
then focuses on recent French
legislation in an attempt to
dismantle the understanding of the
nature of cults that led to this
legislation. She takes issue with
the problematic identification of
groups as cults and the equally
problematic determination of “mental
manipulation,” the controversial
wording upon which the French law
hinges.
She believes that laws should focus
on individuals and their behaviors
irrespective of their involvement
with any particular organization.
She sees her efforts as an argument
for the human rights of cult
members.
The book reads
very much like a dissertation, with
the obligatory first chapter
outlining the theoretical approach
and placing it in context with the
work of other scholars. She draws
heavily on Aristotle and some
twentieth century rhetorical
theorists as well as speech-act
theorists, J. L. Austin and John
Searle. Speech-act theory maintains
that to say something is to do
something. Austin and Searle
identify three kinds of speech acts:
locutionary, illocutionary, and
perlocutionary. Locutionary acts are
the words and sentences in and of
themselves apart from any social
context. Illocutionary acts are the
intentions of the speaker to
accomplish something with the words.
Perlocutionary acts are the actual
effects of the speech act, i.e. what
really happens as a result of the
statement.
From Aristotle,
she invokes his rhetorical
canons—memory, invention,
arrangement, style, and delivery—and
his persuasive appeals—ethos, logos,
and pathos. She uses a number of
contemporary rhetorical theorists
and language philosophers to show
how Aristotle’s canons have been
updated and their relevance
preserved. She draws on speech-act
theory because of its contention
that words have “perlocutionary”
effects. That is to say they do
things.
The following
three chapters then analyze one
recruitment text from each of the
following groups: the Church of
Scientology, Jehovah’s Witnesses,
and The Family. She claims to have
chosen these groups because they in
particular have received bad press
and been targets of unfair lawsuits.
She analyzes these three texts in
terms of memory, invention,
arrangement, style, and delivery.
The text she chooses from the Church
of Scientology is L. Ron Hubbard’s
speech, “The Story of Dianetics and
Scientology.” From the Jehovah’s
Witnesses, she chooses the pamphlet,
A Book for All People. And
from The Family, she analyzes their
Love Charter, a sort of
constitution that outlines their
beliefs, structure, membership
types, and other central organizing
principles.
Her rhetorical
analyses are indeed careful, astute,
and insightful on the surface. She
is careful to underpin her
explanation of meanings and
assumptions of these texts with well
established theory. Her
interpretations seem
straightforward, fair, and unbiased.
In the final chapters, her
comparisons of the recruitment texts
to the literature from anti-cult
organizations and McKinsey & Company
seem equally straightforward, fair,
and unbiased. What strikes me as
very odd, however, is the departure
from the parallel structure when she
analyzes the anti-cult organization
recruitment texts. She doesn’t focus
specifically on any one organization
nor on any one text as she does with
the other organizations. She
specifically mentions the website of
Info-Cult on occasion to illustrate
certain points, but she speaks very
generally for the most part in this
section. Nonetheless, her conclusion
clearly expresses that cult language
is, indeed, not distinctive, and if
the label “cult” is to be used at
all, it should be used evenly to
apply to other organizations who use
similar recruitment strategies.
In spite of her
excellent surface analyses of the
texts, I take issue with certain
conclusions drawn from them. First
of all, in one of the final
chapters, she takes on the
challenging work of defining a cult.
Most scholars who study cults have
agreed that the definition is
problematic, and as many who write
about cults have acknowledged, the
best we can do is come up with some
general characteristics. But in my
estimation, Mooney leaves some very
important general characteristics
out. To quote directly from the
book, she establishes these
characteristics:
- Cults
express an ideology different to
that of the dominant ideology.
- Cults are
groups of people brought
together by beliefs and ideas.
- Cults have
a centralised authority
structure.
- Cults
distinguish between members and
nonmembers, between us and them.
- The group
is a source of identity for the
individual. (167)
If we use only
these general characteristics to
establish what cults are, it is
clear that many organizations that
don’t share the label could be
identified as such. In my
estimation, however, the
characteristics she has chosen are
incomplete, and in fact,
self-serving. Many social scientists
have ascribed other important
characteristics such as withholding
important information about the
central beliefs and expectations in
initial recruitment efforts. That
is, deliberately obscuring important
information that the recruits would
more likely reject initially. For
instance, the text analyzed from the
Church of Scientology says nothing
about the fact that the member will
eventually be expected to accept
that he or she is in fact a “thetan”
who has lived in other bodies at
other times and will have to be
“cleared” of any “engrams” they
might have accrued along the way,
and that they will have to pay for
each “clearing” session. Not
surprisingly, Mooney never mentions
this either. She also eschews the
characteristic that cults are
totalizing; they not only
“distinguish between us and them,”
but they, in fact, demonize everyone
outside the group. I teach at the
University of Florida, and I am a
proud Gator fan. That does not mean,
however, that I believe every
Florida State fan is a satanic pawn
who wants to lead me astray. In
short, Mooney minimizes the
characteristics she lists in order
to force them to apply to other
acceptable, benign groups. The
differences are, in these cases,
ones of degree and not of kind.
Still another
very sad implication of Mooney’s
take on cults is that she ignores
the fact that these people raise
children. To grow up thinking you
are specially chosen by God and
anyone outside the group is a
satanic pawn who wants to lead you
astray, as many children of
Jehovah’s Witnesses claim to have
been taught, creates psychological
discord and pain for those children
who come to believe later that those
claims are hogwash and that their
entire identity and worldview were
lies foisted upon their parents by
clever religious entrepreneurs. I
doubt seriously that the children of
employees of McKinsey and Company
feel so betrayed. This is, of
course, speculation on my part.
In spite of
these shortcomings in her analyses,
I have to say that I think there is
an important message that Anabelle
Mooney makes, a reminder that might
serve us all well who champion human
rights and freedom. That message is
that we have to be very careful that
we don’t villainize people or groups
of people who share beliefs
different from our own, just
because they are different from
our own. This admonition is the
strength of her argument and one
that I think deserves careful
attention.
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