The American character is full of curious contradictions at once potentially creative - and destructive. Nowhere is this more apparent than in its religious life. Based upon a Judeo-Christian heritage of European origin, America's religious mainstream is largely Protestant, with the majority denominations of a "presbyterian" organizational character - that is, determinedly anti-hierarchic and democratic. But the same seed from which the flowering of the U. S. Constitution sprang also carries in it a less admirable trait: cultism. American religious cults are the logical extension of anarchic and charismatic tendencies of mainstream Protestantism of the presbyterian character.
In the wake of the recent tragedy in Oklahoma City, where at least a hundred confirmed lives were lost in the bombing of a federal office building, Americans are asking questions about what kind of "cult" is behind the terrorist action. The prime suspect in the popular imagination, despite repeated denials by investigators, is the Branch Davidian sect of Christian belief: the bombing occurred two years later to the day when federal officials stormed the Davidians' compound in Waco, Texas, with the resulting death of cult leader David Koresh and 85 followers (Wall, 1993, p. 1291). The word "cult" then, and now, is used to demonize small groups whose ethical values seem outside, or at least estranged from, the mainstream understanding of such things.
The term "cult" is virtually meaningless. It tells us far more about those who use it than about those to whom it is applied. It has become little more than a label slapped on religious groups regarded as too exotic, marginal or dangerous.
Michael Barkun, Syracuse University
"Reflections after Waco" (1993, p. 597)
Last year's cults are this year's mainstream. As the media scrounge for cult connections in Oklahoma City, it is well to remember that in the 1940s popular media labelled these g...