How Horrific Can Cult Thinking Actually Get? The Examples of the Jonestown Massacre, NXIVM (Providence), and QAnon Conspiracy Cults
Pictured is Jim Jones with the young boy he took from his parents care into his own personal harem of sexual abuse victims, which contained both men and women, boys and girls. Jones’ sexual abuse of his followers had begun early on, in San Francisco, where Jones’ had relocated his ‘People’s Temple,’ and reports had been circulated in media and law enforcement. Both of the boy’s parents were in the cult, having followed Jones to the Jonestown ‘commune’ colony in Guyana. The boy and his mother died as victims of Jones’ mass murder of his followers via poisoned Kool-Aid (actually Flavor-Aid brand, laced with cyanide — which is an horrific and painful way to die), but the father escaped into the jungle as the mass murder-suicide began.
The boy, Jones’ current ‘favorite,’ was among the first to be killed by Jones, as an ‘act of mercy.’ In an interview for one of the many documentaries made about the events broadly outlined below (as presented in the Wikipedia entry on Jim Jones), the boy’s father was asked how it was that he never rebelled until it was too late — never took his family to safety before his final flight into the jungle, when the mass murder began to unfold — not even when his own son was taken and abused by Jones. His answer was that, by then, both he and his equally educated, erudite scientist wife were “too compromised.”
To admit any flaw in Jones’ brainwashing cant, or to face the fact that Jones was a fraud, would be to admit (and have to accept) it all — their utter debasement and abuse at Jones’ hands — their absolute degradation, subjugation and humiliation by a transparent religious hoaxter (both parents had been raped by Jones before he moved on to the boy). If Jones wasn’t a divine reincarnation of Christ, as he claimed, then all that he had done to them, all the pain, all the loss, had not been the ‘honor’ and divine grace that he had told them it was, but mere, tawdry control and abuse. Psychologically, such an admission was insupportable. One-time science professors from Berkeley, they were not ‘ignorant,’ not unintelligent, not unworldly, though they may have been emotionally naive. But many prominent, educated, privileged society leaders supported Jones throughout the 60s and early 70s, showering him with approbation and near euphoric praise.
From Wikipedia:
‘Jones was ordained as a Christian minister in the Independent Assemblies of God, attracting his first group of followers while participating in the Pentecostal Latter Rain movement and the Healing Revival during the 1950s. Jones’ initial popularity arose from his joint campaign appearances with the movements’ prominent leaders, William Branham and Joseph Mattsson-Boze, and their endorsement of his ministry. Jones founded the organization that would become the Peoples Temple in Indianapolis in 1955…. Following a period of negative media publicity and reports of abuse at Peoples Temple, Jones ordered the construction of the Jonestown commune in Guyana in 1974 and convinced or compelled many of his followers to live there with him. Jones claimed that he was constructing a socialist paradise free from the oppression of the United States government. By 1978, reports surfaced of human rights abuses and accusations that people were being held in Jonestown against their will. U.S. Representative Leo Ryan led a delegation to the commune in November of that year to investigate these reports. While boarding a return flight with some former Temple members who wished to leave, Ryan and four others were murdered by gunmen from Jonestown. Jones then ordered a mass murder-suicide that claimed the lives of 909 commune members, 304 of them children; almost all of the members died by drinking Flavor Aid laced with cyanide.
‘…Peoples Temple joined the Disciples of Christ denomination, whose headquarters was nearby in Indianapolis….Jones was ordained as a Disciples minister at a time when the requirements for ordination varied greatly and Disciples membership was open to any church. In both 1974 and 1977 the Disciples leadership received allegations of abuse at Peoples Temple. They conducted investigations at the time, but they found no evidence of wrongdoing. Disciples of Christ found Peoples Temple to be “an exemplary Christian ministry overcoming human differences and dedicated to human services.” Peoples Temple contributed $1.1 million ($4,697,803 in 2020 dollars) to the denomination between 1966 and 1977. Jones and Peoples Temple remained part of the Disciples until the Jonestown massacre.
‘The first known cases of serious abuse in Peoples Temple arose in California as the Planning Commission carried out discipline against members who were not fulfilling Jones’s vision or following the rules. Jones’s control over the members of Peoples Temple extended to their sex lives and who could be married. Some members were coerced to get abortions.[127] Jones began to require sexual favors from the wives of some members of the church, and raped several male members of his congregation. Members who rebelled against Jones’s control were punished with reduced food rations, harsher work schedules, public ridicule and humiliations, and sometimes with physical violence. As the Temple’s membership grew, Jones created an armed security group to ensure order among his followers and to guarantee his own personal safety….Jones grew the Temple by purposefully targeting other churches. In 1970, Jones and 150 of his followers took a trip to San Francisco’s Missionary Baptist Church. Jones held a faith healing revival meeting wherein he impressed the crowd by claiming to heal a man of cancer; his followers later admitted to helping him stage the “healing”. At the end of the event, he began attacking and condemning Baptist teachings and encouraging the members to abandon their church and join him.
‘Jones became active in San Francisco politics and was able to gain contact with prominent local and state politicians. Thanks to their growing numbers, Jones and Peoples Temple played an instrumental role in George Moscone’s election as mayor in 1975. Moscone subsequently appointed Jones as the chairman of the San Francisco Housing Authority Commission. Jones hosted local political figures at his San Francisco apartment for discussions. In September 1976, Assemblyman Willie Brown served as master of ceremonies at a large testimonial dinner for Jones attended by Governor Jerry Brown and Lieutenant Governor Mervyn Dymally. At that dinner, Willie Brown touted Jones as “what you should see every day when you look in the mirror” and said he was a combination of Martin Luther King Jr., Angela Davis, Albert Einstein, and Mao. Harvey Milk spoke to audiences during political rallies held at the Temple, and he wrote to Jones after one such visit: “Rev Jim, It may take me many a day to come back down from the high that I reach today. I found something dear today. I found a sense of being that makes up for all the hours and energy placed in a fight. I found what you wanted me to find. I shall be back. For I can never leave.”
‘Through his connections with California politicians, Jones was able to establish contacts with key national political figures. Jones and Moscone met privately with vice presidential candidate Walter Mondale on his campaign plane days before the 1976 election, leading Mondale to publicly praise the Temple. First Lady Rosalynn Carter met with Jones on multiple occasions, corresponded with him about Cuba, and spoke with him at the grand opening of the San Francisco headquarters — where he received louder applause than she did. Jones forged alliances with key columnists and others at the San Francisco Chronicle and other press outlets that gave Jones favorable press during his early years in California….Jones began to receive negative press beginning in October 1971 when reporters covered one of Jones’s divine healing services during a visit to his old church in Indianapolis. The news report led to an investigation by the Indiana State Psychology Board into Jones’s healing practices in 1972. A doctor involved in the investigation accused Jones of “quackery” and challenged Jones to give tissue samples of the material he claimed fell off people when they were healed of cancer. The investigation caused alarm within the Temple.
‘Jones had been performing faith healing “miracles” since his joint campaigns with William Branham. “On several occasions his healings were revealed as nothing but a hoax.” In one incident, Jones drugged Temple member Irene Mason, and while she was unconscious, a cast was put on her arm. When she regained consciousness, she was told she had fallen and broken her arm and taken to the hospital. In a subsequent healing service, Jones removed her cast off in front of the congregation and told them she was healed. In other instances, Jones had someone from his inner circle enter the prayer line for healing of cancer. After being “healed” the person would pretend to cough up their tumor, which was actually a chicken gizzard. (Svendsen, Ann Kristin (July 25, 2013). “White Nights In Guyana: Leadership, conformity and persuasion in Jonestown and Peoples Temple”. Alternative Considerations of Jonestown and Peoples Temple. San Diego State University. Retrieved March 16, 2022.)
‘Jones’s also pretended to have “special revelations” about individuals which revealed supposed hidden details of their lives. “Jones had coworkers who called at the potential recruits’ homes, and asked detailed questions in the cover of doing an unrelated examination. This provided Jones with inside information that would make him seem clairvoyant and being in possession of superhuman powers.” (Ann Svedsen) Jones was fearful that his methods would be exposed by the investigation. In response, Jones announced he was terminating his ministry in Indiana because it was too far from California for him to attend to and downplayed his healing claims to the authorities.The issue only escalated however, and Lester Kinsolving ran a series of articles targeting Jones and Peoples Temple in the San Francisco Examiner in September 1972.
‘The stories reported on Jones’s claims of divinity and exposed purported miracles as a hoax. In 1973, Ross Case, a former follower of Jones, began working with a group in Ukiah to investigate Peoples Temple. They uncovered a staged healing, the abusive treatment of a woman in the church, and evidence that Jones raped a male member of his congregation. Reports of Case’s activity reached Jones, who became increasingly paranoid that the authorities were after him. Case reported his findings to the local police, but they took no action. Shortly after, eight members of Peoples Temple made accusations of abuse against the Planning Commission and Peoples Temple staff members….On December 13, 1973, Jones was arrested and charged with lewd conduct for allegedly masturbating in the presence of a male undercover LAPD vice officer in a movie theater restroom near Los Angeles’s MacArthur Park. On December 20, 1973, the charge against Jones was dismissed, though the details of the dismissal are not clear. The court file was sealed, and the judge ordered that records of the arrest be destroyed [no doubt covered up as his exposure would expose too many of his most voluble supporters as well, including Moscone, Mondale, the Carters, Jerry Brown, and countless Christian ministers].’
~ Excerpted from the article titled ‘Jim Jones,’ in Wikipedia
The International Cultic Studies Association estimates there are 10,000 cultic groups in North America, up from 5,000 in 2003. One of the more populous and powerful is the Providence cult, a quasi-Christian sect founded by former “Moonie” Jung Myung-seok that grooms followers to be his “spiritual brides.”
Members sever ties with their families and follow a strict doctrine that enforces sleep deprivation, restricted diets, a rigorous work schedule, and disciplines members to keep painfully slim and dress well. It boasts over 100,000 followers worldwide and has been operating in Australia since 1997. Ex-members have reported that female recruits were encouraged to have sex with Jeong for “purification.” (Casey Kleczek, Salon, ‘How to rescue a cult victim: An expert explains how he saves your loved ones from the grips of cults like NXIVM,’ July 30, 2022)
Recruits are approached by members boasting Christian credentials or invited to Bible study, where they are “slowly conditioned on their particular brand of religion.” Eventually they are persuaded that the cult is the “ultimate truth” and that they need to dedicate their lives to it. They are persuaded to move into group homes with other indoctrinated members similar to that occupied by Trump appointee to the Supreme Court, Justice Amy Coney Barrett in her Catholic cult, People of Praise, where members lived and were steeped in the lifestyle of the cult.
Barrett was designated a “handmaid” in the People of Praise hierarchy, and conditioned to accept her husband as the ‘head’ over her, and the cult leader as the group’s supreme ‘head’ and ultimate authority overall. “In one of the most rigorous critiques of Barrett’s group — a 152-page booklet written in 1997 by a former member named Adrian Reimers — there are numerous references to the powerful experience that swept up so many young people of faith during that time.” (Jon Ward, ‘Who are the ‘People of Praise’ that Supreme Court contender Amy Coney Barrett belongs to?’, Yahoo News, July 7, 2018)
From Ward’s 2018 article:
Reimers also shows what he considers a darker side to People of Praise, a controlling and unhealthy environment for people who committed themselves to the community. All members were assigned a “head” to advise them, and because the group believed itself to be divinely inspired and directed, this structure of personal oversight often became oppressive and intrusive.
This was most clear in the way that wives were told to submit to their husbands. “This teaching, that the husband is spiritual head or pastor to his wife, is one of the most firmly held and foundational teachings in that community,” Reimers wrote. “The wife, as a good member of the community, has a prima facie obligation to obey her husband as the bearer of God’s will. In practice, this means that the two do not — indeed, cannot — relate as equals. His will reveals God’s to her, whereas her will is merely human. The two cannot meet as equals, because the husband always has divine authority on his side.”
Barrett, 46, a mother of seven children, was confirmed to the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago last October, after 15 years as a law professor at Notre Dame. Barrett is married to a federal prosecutor, Jesse Barrett, who is listed by the Notre Dame law school as a 1996 alumnus. He has served as an Assistant United States Attorney in the Northern District of Indiana since 2005.
Despite insinuations by Barrett’s opponents, it’s unclear what impact her membership in People of Praise would have on her jurisprudence. There have been intimations that because members of the group have depended so heavily on the counsel of their assigned “head” in the past, Barrett’s decisions in key cases would lack independence.
In the Providence cult, inductees are worn down and eroded by attrition: “The cult worked its members extremely hard — restricted our food intake, drastically reduced our allowed sleeping hours to about 4 per night, and in between working jobs to pay for our rent and food and studying in my case, we had to pray for hours, evangelize on the street, hold multiple church services and run extra-curricular programs the cult used as front groups to try to recruit more people,” recounts a deprogrammed Providence cult member. She had participated in, herself, recruiting new inductees by managing a sham modeling business. “I was supposed to be one of the women who belonged to the leader when he eventually came out of prison,” she remembers. Followers had been told he was in prison because of “persecution from Satan,” and Elizabeth says she was once flown overseas to visit the leader, Myung-seok, who was being detained in South Korea, in prison. (Casey Kleczek, Salon)
This particular Providence cult member (‘Elizabeth’) was fortunate enough to have devoted parents who hired a cult deprogrammer called Rick Ross:
Ross is the preeminent cult deprogrammer in the United States and the head of the Cult Education Institute, a nonprofit library with archived information about cults. For the last 40 years, he’s made a career out of assisting family members and friends who hire him to help loved ones leave a cult. He’s written multiple books about deprogramming, has testified as an expert in dozens of court cases, has been sued and tracked by Keith Raniere, the founder of NXIVM, and was on David Koresh’s “enemy list.” With over 500 interventions throughout the world under his belt and a 70% success rate, he is considered an expert in his field as cults continue to increase in numbers.
Over the years Ross had developed a formula to his interventions, with four basic blocks of discussion: defining a destructive cult, discussing coercive persuasion and influence techniques, disclosing and discussing specific research about the group and leader, and talking about family concerns. The process typically takes 3 to 4 days, with 6 to 8 hours of discussion a day.
Elizabeth meant to run, but she didn’t know where to go. “I was so convinced of the cult being the truth and so terrified to leave, that I came to the conclusion I would need to go back and would probably die. But even so, leaving the cult was never an option,” Elizabeth recalls, “I was scared to call the cult and go back right away, and thought maybe I could just endure the conversation.” Elizabeth couldn’t have predicted how long she would have to endure.
“Rick talked all day. For hours. Non-stop.” Like a filibuster, he knew he couldn’t cede the floor.
Over the years Ross had developed a formula to his interventions, with four basic blocks of discussion: defining a destructive cult, discussing coercive persuasion and influence techniques, disclosing and discussing specific research about the group and leader, and talking about family concerns. The process typically takes 3 to 4 days, with 6 to 8 hours of discussion a day. During the time the family is present and can contribute their observations and concerns.
“We began by discussing cults generally and then delving into coercive persuasion and influence techniques,” explains Ross, “The objective was to stimulate Elizabeth’s critical thinking.”
“I was scared of going back to the cult, and I was scared to stay… I finally said, ‘Okay, I can see that the group I’ve been in is actually a cult. Please just give me all the information you can about them. I’m ready to hear it.’”
“He first started talking about similar cults, not the one I was involved in. I didn’t realize that through that he was opening up my mind to realize that my group wasn’t unique in its methods and beliefs.” Elizabeth tried to block out what he was saying by dissociating and praying inside her head. But the information found cracks in the logic of her group. And it was starting to show. She thought she was going insane. She drove to a parking lot away from her house and screamed in the car. She texted the group leader who immediately tried to book a redeye flight to another city to hide.
“Hours of information was starting to crack open my psychological barriers. At this stage, I was scared of going back to the cult, and I was scared to stay. It was an incredibly confusing, hard time and my body was very weak. Again, I stayed. By the end of the second day of Rick providing information and expertly guiding the conversation to help disarm the psychological traps that had been set up in my mind, I finally said, ‘Okay, I can see that the group I’ve been in is actually a cult. Please just give me all the information you can about them. I’m ready to hear it.’” Ross came well prepared.
“She learned about his history of sexual abuse that he was being imprisoned for, something that the group had previously dismissed as an attack by the devil, and how he was charged with eight counts of rape and imprisoned in South Korea for 15 years,” said Ross.
Elizabeth turned a corner after that.
“I learned all I could, things I was never allowed to know the truth about when I was on the inside, and then began the long journey towards healing. Rick stayed one extra day to talk and help support me as I started to understand what had happened to me,” she continues. Finally, Elizabeth was on the road to healing. (Casey Kleczek, Salon)
The excerpt from Kleczek’s marvelous article above is encouraging, but the problem of cults is worsening in unprecedented ways. There is a sinister evolution underway involving cults and their recruitment methods. “For the first time after forty years — in an industry that Ross grandfathered — he’s encountering his limitations. Early in his career — when he was rescuing people from the Moonies, the Branch Davidians, and more — recognizing cults, cult leaders, how they recruit, and what they expected from their members was more clear. The Charles Mansons, Jim Joneses, and David Koreshes of that time were hauntingly psychopathic, inarguably deranged, and patently abusive to their followers. Recruitment was done in open, public spaces like college unions and music festivals. Rescuing a loved one from their grasp meant kidnapping — physically extricating them.
“Today, recruitment happens online. The targets are difficult to protect — bullied 13-year-olds unknowingly getting sucked into Reddit feeds, Iraq-war veterans with PTSD stumbling across Twitter screeds, or people who have been battling mental illness for years. The leaders, like ‘Q,’ are sometimes unknown, perhaps not even individuals but groups, and may never meet their followers. How they exploit people, or what their objective is, is often murkier.” (Casey Kleczek, Salon)
There are more and more online cults proliferating, that recruit online, sustaining their membership through social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube videos and podcasts. They can induct people through Zoom meetings, and they get money through PayPal or E-Transfer. They never have to present themselves in the flesh to be assessed — to be counted. “This is where Ross has hit a brick wall. While countless family members have called him for advice, no one has retained him for intervention for QAnon or other ideologies and conspiracy theories, because Ross tells them for many of these cases, there is nothing he can do,” recounts Kleczek. “You cannot deprogram mental illness, and you cannot deprogram deeply and sincerely held beliefs that a person has had for many, many years. And so this is a new phenomenon, QAnon is much more nuanced than a typical destructive cult in that many of the people that became involved have a history of psychological and emotional problems.”
For these inductees, the prognosis is not encouraging as their indoctrination is difficult (if not impossible) to address:
…A study of the January 6 uprising found that a third of those arrested had been previously diagnosed with either bipolar, paranoid schizophrenia, depression, or PTSD. “So they were not well,” Ross says. “They were already deeply troubled, and so they became involved in QAnon. And there’s also a significant piece of Q-anon that are people that have a long history of having deeply held beliefs that feed into the argument on conspiracy theories, whether it would be religious beliefs, anti-government beliefs, conspiracy theories — and those folks, I don’t think that I can help.”
