and practices. Most often, however, it is used in reference to sects with beliefs the larger society holds to be "unorthodox or spurious" and which, in some way, exert undue levels of influence over their members (Clark 388). This discussion focuses primarily on such "totalist cults," which Louis J. West defines as a groups based on "great or excessive devotion to some person, idea, or thing, and employing unethical, or manipulative or coercive techniques of persuasion and control designed to advance the goals of the group's leaders, to the possible or actual detriment of members, their families, or community" (quoted in Clark 388).
Current estimates of the number of cults in North America vary considerably with some experts putting it as high as 2,500 while others set the figure at nearer 700. The spectrum ranges from very small sects to large operations with hundreds of thousands of members and it includes everything from rigidly fundamentalist Christian groups to organizations such as the Church of Scientology, begun in the 1950s by science-fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard, whose self-realization courses claim to develop complete freedom for the individual who can then "experience life unencumbered by inhibitions reactively dictated" by old ideas and become "capable of accomplishing anything . . . knowing and willing cause over life, thought, matter, energy, space and time" (quoted in Barker 57). Big or small, however, these cults share numerous aspects of doctrine, recruiting methods, focus on the sinfulness or everyone else, and a belief that only the initiated can overcome the troubles of this world and/or being taken to the next.
Though most discussions of contemporary cults begin with the two nights of murders committed by Charles Manson's followers in 1969, there are few aspects of today's cults that are unique to the period 1960-2000. In the more recent past there have been cults very similar to those common today. ...