Cults influencing US Government.
While there is a long discussion about the Mormon faith in the thread concerning Pete Hegseth, we need to remember Pete Hegseth is also a member of a cult too. In fact, I am thinking the Pete Hegseth v LDS church is a good example of the clash of cults. Both are very extreme. In many ways, they proport the same thing: God has given American a most favored ruling. And their view of the ideal family structure is similar. One could say some of the claims in the thread on Fascism and child abuse can be found in Pete Hegseth's cult.
Now there is information coming out that Tulsi Gabbard was under the control of a Hare Krishna type cult headed by a guru named Chris Butler who would literally dictate what she was supposed to say in Congress and, later in the administration as the Director of National Intelligence. In fact, when she suddenly resigned it was largely because the Washington Post was about to come out with and expose on her connections to this group.
Speaker Mike Johnson is also said to be a Christian Nationalist, though of the Conservative Baptist variety. Hegseth’s Christian nationalism is militarized, apocalyptic, and identity‑driven. Johnson’s Christian nationalism is legalistic, covenantal, and theocratic in structure.
Then there is Clarence Thomas who has the view that biblical law is the basis for civil law.
Ron Desantes who relies on theocratic Catholic advisors, and a few Senators and Representatives who profess New Age type doctrines.
All, in all, I could argue maybe one of the reasons why America is so messed up is because of our openness to all these religions. Certainly is interesting that under the least spiritual presidential administration, these cults have a lot of sway in it.
Now there is information coming out that Tulsi Gabbard was under the control of a Hare Krishna type cult headed by a guru named Chris Butler who would literally dictate what she was supposed to say in Congress and, later in the administration as the Director of National Intelligence. In fact, when she suddenly resigned it was largely because the Washington Post was about to come out with and expose on her connections to this group.
Speaker Mike Johnson is also said to be a Christian Nationalist, though of the Conservative Baptist variety. Hegseth’s Christian nationalism is militarized, apocalyptic, and identity‑driven. Johnson’s Christian nationalism is legalistic, covenantal, and theocratic in structure.
Then there is Clarence Thomas who has the view that biblical law is the basis for civil law.
Ron Desantes who relies on theocratic Catholic advisors, and a few Senators and Representatives who profess New Age type doctrines.
All, in all, I could argue maybe one of the reasons why America is so messed up is because of our openness to all these religions. Certainly is interesting that under the least spiritual presidential administration, these cults have a lot of sway in it.
Comments
If I understand the WP reporter, though, didn't he say that the emails stopped coming in when she resigned from Congress?
As for the content of the stuff she did get, I'd wager that the statement on Syrian Kurds and the one on veterans' health care were roughly in line with her known positions on those broad issues. So this probably isn't quite on the level of eg. the CPUSA switching from "Hitler is an over-rated threat" to "Hitler is the greatest menace to humanity ever" after getting the memo on June 22 1941.
Has that been established? Did the reporter say that in his articles or in the interview?
What do you mean by "our openness to all these religions?" And what would be your solution to this allegedly harmful "openness"?
FWIW, I don't think there are many liberal democracies where any of those religious tendencies are illegal. Maybe hate-speech laws would kick in against some of their more extreme bigotry, but I'm pretty sure those wouldn't prohibit the Science of Identity Foundation from promoting its apparent views on Syria and veterans' health.
But the point of the OP is not only about Gabbard, but the way other cults have also been influencing the government of the US, especially during this administration. I mentioned two different brands of Christian Nationalism. Thomas Clarence could be called a Christian Reconstructionist (which is also similar to CN) and Ron Desantis tries to a theocratic movement within the Roman Catholic Church.
Is it any wonder many Americans have such a distrust of science?
Is it any wonder that many Americans do not take care of the poor and infirm?
Is it any wonder many Americans continue to cling to biblical literalism, apocalyptic thinking, moral purity movements?
Look at our attitudes toward climate change, public health, sex education, abortion. Is it any wonder we are miles behind European progessive movements?
re: your posited causality at the end there...
...even assuming America is the worst of the worst on all counts, the Southern Baptist Convention probably bears a heckuva lot more responsibility for that state of affairs than does some schismatic Hare Krishna group.
But you don't often see the SBC on lists of dangerous cults, partly(but not only) because, I suspect, a lot of those lists are made by, or at least with input from, people affiliated with churches of the same ideology and socioeconomic status as the SBC.
Though the moonies are an interesting case, since their global membership is tiny(and they TOTALLY bombed with Koreans), but they enjoy, or at least used to enjoy, a rather outsized presence in the political circles of various nations, mostly because of Moon's acquired wealth through sweatshop-wage labour, donations, whatever he got personally funelled through the KCIA back in the day etc. But their political platform is mostly lifted wholesale from what the right-wing of the Republican Party is saying at any given times since the early 1970s; whereas their more purely theological positions are idiosyncratic to the point of zany eg. Jews should apologize for the Deicide and Christians should reciprocate by removing crosses from their churches. Moon actually got a few struggling inner-city churches to sign on for that in exchange for donations of one sort or another, and managed to segue the thank-you ceremony into a coronation carried out by somewhat befuddled congessional reps, including Democrats.
I shrugged, then laughed and said that ship sailed a looong time ago and that she was in that particular political party: the reason Canadians have healthcare and public pensions is the innate link between the Social Gospel Movement within the United Church and the Baptist Conventions, thence to the CCF, thence to universal healthcare and pensions.
She was a bit speechless after that but warmed up to it.
I would go with this: Cults are social groups which have unusual, and often extreme, religious, spiritual, or philosophical beliefs and rituals. Extreme devotion to a particular person, object, or goal is another characteristic often ascribed to cults. (From wikipedia)
I believe sociologists called it "The Lutheran Consensus" or some such?
I will say that the situation in Canada is probably not extremely parallel to most of Scandinavia, because, I think it safe to say, Canada is a little more confessionally pluralistic than the Scandinavia of recent memory. I read somewhere that, even during the height of Loyalist-spawned Establishment in the mid-19th Century, Anglicans never reached a majority of the population of Upper Canada. Even if I'm wrong about that, it's still the case that other protestant groups, mostly of a Non-Conformist variety, in numerical combination with Catholics were quite well-represented, and often not shy about vocalizing their differences in either the ecclesiastical or political realms(*).
The Social Gospel Movement of the C20 was, as @Sober Preacher's Kid mentions, largely a low-candle, Non-Com affair, represented by denominations with little or no formal connection to state administration. Dan Heap was an Anglican cleric-MP in the 1980s, but that was LONG after the general perception of state-sponsorship or even social prestige had faded from the Canadian via media. Same situation for the Catholic Father Bob Ogle out on the prairies.
(*) Lower Canada's a different story: the glory days of French Catholicism are well-known, and I get the impression a tighter sense of confessional cohesion existed among the anglo protestants as well, but that's another discussion.
50% of settlers who homesteaded in Upper Canada were actually Methodist, it's one reason the United Church has far, far too many buildings in Southern Ontario.
The Ojibwe, the majority First Nation in Southern Ontario were Methodist and then United Church.8
Between the United Church and its predecessors and the Baptists, Anglicans never had a majority in Ontario, nor in any other Colony or province, certainly not like Australia.
Sorry. I was gonna use more proper terminology, but I couldn't find my copy of Bishop Strachan's Book of Homilies.
Loot 'em for all the rotten wood and wet mud ya can get!
Thanks. Given that Methodism in Canada was almost entirely merged into the UCC, it might be easy to forget both their size and sociopolitical power of days gone by.
To bring this slightly back on topic, the history of sectarian strife in 19th Century Canada, while quite mild by historical European standards, provides a useful case study as to how such matters might have unfolded differently in Canada than in Scandinavia during the same time period.
(To be fair, I know next to nothing about modern Scandinavian religious politics, beyond that I've never heard of any dramatic struggles between Lutheranism and non-Lutheran faiths, or for that matter between various factions of Lutherans, or some
sorta kulturkampf-style anti-church campaign by the state.)
Would you happen to know far this spilled over into the political realm? Like, was the Lutheran-Reform fusion something that would have impacted the outcome of elections, maybe provoked riots here and there?
That's pretty shameful, but hardly confined to Lutherans. Canada refused entry to Jewish refugees from nazism, supposedly out of deference to Catholic opinion in Quebec(and elsewhere, I'll make a semi-educated guess). And there were elements among the RCC during the war who were happy to sit back and watch Hitler try and take down the Bokshevik-Masonic whatever.
I'm gonna speculate that there had been too many intervening variables between the heyday of the Vikings and the rise of the modern Scandinavian welfare-state to posit the Vikings as anything more than one small thread of historical influence there.
But, sure. If we can say that the principles of the Magna Carta are seen in action at petty-theft trials in rural Wyoming...
Were these German leaders forcing the merger within Germany itself, or in Scandinavia, or both?
I know I've heard of Reform having a presence in Germany, but not so much in Scandinavia.
AS for your latter paragraph, it's very kind of you, but we might as well own the shame and make something helpful of it, if possible. As for the former--I never did get a chance to study German history, and so about the only thing I know about that period is that the future "Germany" was then a bunch of warring states, as Nick Tamen notes. I'm pretty sure Bavaria was trying to force union as well, because that's where most of the forebears of the Lutheran Church--Missouri Synod hailed from. It may have been several Germanic states, I don't know. (and yes, being super slow to get over the trauma of the past, we STILL warn one another of the dangers of "unionism"--though in the U.S. this is far less likely to become a real threat, at least the forced union type. (The problem is doctrine; if you try to force two groups to unite who still have strongly held differing opinions on doctrine, you're risking everything from new schisms to a horrible mishmash of doctrines taking over, neither fowl nor fish nor good red herring.) Better to let administrative union come AFTER we fumble our way to doctrinal union, we think.
Yeah, I figured it wasn't Germany per se, but wasn't sure what to call it.
The reason I wanted to know was that @Gramps49 had been talking specifically about the influence of Lutheranism on the Scandinavian social system, but it seems to me that Scandinavia and Germany have rather different religious histories.
Prussia wasn't big on elections and like most German states didn't let elected legislatures have much power. Prussia had no Parliament until 1847.
Interestingly enough the Prussian Union of Churches was a bugbear in the Presbyterian debates about merging into the United Church. The Prussian Union was very much top-down but did allow for local parish confessional control, that is a parish could be Lutheran, Reformed or both at its choice. Ditto for pastors.
The United Church of Canada is the opposite, we're a bottom-up merger with no reservations of confessional control locally.
It was the Prussian state which made most of the German Lutheran church system into a more 'Reformed' one.
The rulers of each state determined the religious policy of the state.
In Scandinavia the rulers favoured an episcopal church system.
Right. When I wrote that, I was refering to Scandinavia, in the context of Lutheran influence on the welfare state.
Thanks.
My original plan was to write something "whatever Germany was in.those days", but figured that would be too clunkerous.
Deutschland ist ein geographischer Begriff
(Germany is a geographical expression)
Going to jump in here a bit. The unionism @Lamb Chopped is talking about is called the Prussian Union. Bavaria reacted by moving to protect the Lutheran church in its borders. The people that formed the LCMS came from Saxony. In Saxony the government pressured pastors to soften confessional boundaries. Rationalism dominated theological seminaries and pastors were supposed to conform to state approved doctrine and liturgy. Even though Saxony was not Prussia, the Prussian union terrified confessional Lutherans and so they began immigrating. Two synods were evenutally formed. The LCMS of which Lamb Chop is a member of and the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (WELS) which were largely Prussian.
Now, in regards to Scandinavia: Lutheranism arrived in Scandinavia through King Christian III who embraced Lutheranism after hearing Luther at the Diet of Worms. He imposed Lutheranism in Denmark, Norway and Iceland since they were under is crown. King Gustav Vasa of Sweden used Lutheran reform to break the power of Roman Catholic bishops. Finland at the time was ruled by Sweden.
Some Reformed groups also left Saxony for that reason too. They settled in Minnesota for the most part.
It was a high level political union. It came from the Prussian King.
Of the Electoral Princes some were Catholic and others were Protestant
the secular princes were traditionally the King of Bohemia, the Duke of Saxony,the Count of Brandenburg and the Count Palatinate and the religious electors were the bishops of Cologne,Trier and Mainz. The three bishops were Catholic as was the King of Bohemia but the others were Protestant until the Duke of Saxony became Catholic in order to become King of Poland also. The Saxons soon lost Poland but kept the title of King and their Catholicism opened doors for them with marriage to the leading Catholic families of Europe.At the same time the King of Saxony was responsible for all the major Lutheran church appointments.
Hanover was later added to the ranks of the Electoral Princes and at least twice sons of the English Georges were awarded the title of Bishop of Osnabruck during the Protestant tenancy.
No wonder that Voltaire classified the Holy Roman Empire as neither 'holy' nor 'Roman' nor an' Empire' but it existed in some ways for over 11000 years.
Many people could say the same thing about basic orthodox Christianity with that definition, though. The question of what is defined as unusual or extreme seems kind of subjective, depending on who you’re talking to. I mean, we (orthodox Christians) literally believe that Jesus is God. We ceremonially eat His body and blood frequently in church, and many of us believe that we are genuinely, not just symbolically, eating His real body and blood. We are called to love our enemies.
Don’t get me wrong, I believe that some of the groups you’ve talked about would fall under the negative category of cults, though I’m not sure I would call the Mormons that currently in the way that I would the Moonies or the Jehovah’s Witnesses. I think the level of control exercised over members is a big factor. (I think there’s also a spectrum of less or more cultish as well, rather than a single clear dividing line.)
And even if we're going by the more mathematically based criterion of "unusual"...
King's Chapel in Boston uses its own unitarianized version of the Book of Common Prayer, which AFAIK is not used by any other shack anywhere in the world. So it's a pretty major statistical outlier, but certainly not the kinda group PROGRESSIVES are being asked to imagine when someone invokes the label "cult".
Though I could easily imagine FUNDAMENTALIST anti-cultists latching onto the marginal nature of Kings Chapel to brand it a cult, since that's the kinda group they hate to begin with. For myself, I do think that that the church/cult distinction can be a useful categorization for everyday thought and discussion, but at the end of the day, I have to apply the judge's famous criterion for obscenity "I can't define 'cult', but I know one when I see it." IOW the concept is not one I would want to see applied in law, and I am agnostic leaning skeptical about its usefulness for academia, serious media discussion, etc.
(I suspect a lotta my views above overlap with those presented in the 1981 book Strange Gods: The Great American Cult Scare by Shupe and Bromley. See Stephen Kent PhD for a scholar who DOES think cults can be considered distinct from, and more dangerous than, legit faiths.)
1. Their view of the Godhead. They actually think the Godhead is made up of three different Gods--God, the Father; God, the Son; and God the Holy Spirit
2. They will say the Jesus opened up the way of salvation--but we still have to earn it.
3. The preexistence of souls--we just do not remember what we were like before we were born; and,
4. Their additional holy books and how they obtained them: The Book of Mormon, and Doctrines and Covenants and the Peril of Great Price.
Yes, in many ways Christians have been thought of as a cult at one time. Definitely why Christians were persecuted toward the end of the Roman Empire.
But not now. We are not socially separated, we do not practice coercive control, and there is not rigid internal sanctions typical of actual cults.
I think that, at least as “cult” is used in the US, there is an understanding of control by leaders that results in a lack of personal autonomy or freedom, coupled with separation and even avoidance and suspicion of those outside the group, including family. “Cult,” again as generally used in the US, implies unhealthy control of individuals.
I think that #1 and #4 make Mormons extremely heretical, yes (and the doctrine of eternal progression, where God was once human like us and we will one day be on the same level that God is now, and so on, etc.). Some would argue, within orthodox Christian beliefs, about how God's and our actions are involved in the work of salvation (often with distorted views of how other orthodox Christians believe these matters (Protestant and Roman Catholic have often had distorted views of each other's theology of "faith" and "works," for example)), and the question of "are souls created with our bodies, or did our souls exist before being put into our bodies, or..." etc. is something orthodox Christians can have different beliefs about. (The Mormon view of human spirits and angels, however, is heretical.)
I think the "coercive control" thing is the big flashing red light for me. Some otherwise orthodox (in terms of basic theology) Christian groups can exercise that and get into the danger zone, and some groups with outlandish theology can have a total lack of coercion.
Yes, this.
I can see that as a useful distinction. Scientology, for one, was known in its heyday for using some pretty hardcore tactics against its internal dissenters and their governmental allies(see Operation Snow White), though I don't know how typical that was among the groups generally labelled cult. Re: the tendency that prompted this discussion, I suspect you could quit the average Reconstructionist congregation without having to endure anything more menacing than a nasty-whisper campaign.
(I read somewhere that one of the guys from Led Zepplin did a stint at some Reconstructionist retreat run by one of the big names, I think Schaeffer. Maybe in Switzerland.)
Yeah. @Gramps49 there is employing what would have to be the most theology-based definition of a cult that I have ever seen.
I would agree with him that the early-church probably was considered a cult in the Roman Empire, but that's probably at least as much connected to stuff like eg. requiring followers to cut ties with family, as it was with deviation from standard Judaism.
They have very high behavioral expectations which are unusually detailed. There is a heavy emphasis on temple worthiness and family structure. They are to have periodic interviews with their bishops (local leaders) to review sexual behavior, tithing, belief in church authority and adherence to the commandments. This is not like private confession. It is a check off on how good one is. I can tell you leaving the church can be costly. The family will likely disown you. Former friends will not speak to you. There is a lot of social and psychological pressure.
Oh, absolutely agreed. I just think that it’s not quite on the same level as some of these others. I think there were some periods early on historically where there were some absolutely scarier things than the stuff going on in the main LDS church now.
@stetson said
Oh God yes. It’s scary.
Mmm, while I acknowledge the formal difference between, on the one hand, an interview with the bishop featuring a pre-set list of topics, and on the OTHER, the more free-flowing structure of the confessional, I can easily see the latter as open to about as much abuse, depending on the ethics of a given clergyman.
But question: are the contents of a Mormon interview known only to the bishop and the interviewee?
And the thing is, precisely BECAUSE of how hardcore and disruptive some of their tactics have been(see the aforementioned Operation Snow White), the CoS is probably one of the LAST groups that the US federal government would ever get into an alliance with.
Back in the late 90s, I saw an interview with one of their leaders(maybe Miscavige, not sure), in which he stated that when Hubbard and the Sea Org were sailing around the Mediterranean, a lot of the locals they encountered in the port towns assumed that the group was a CIA front. He observed that this was somewhat ironic, because "In those days, we were at war with the CIA."
Their anti-psychiatry activism has probably produced some beneficial outcomes here and there. And I don't believe the Citizens Commission on Human Rights promotes the practices of Scientology, though arguably helps improve the church's image via association.
The difference is the interview with the LDS bishop is to tell the bishop how well you have lived up to LDS standards; where as, with the Christian Confessional is to admit where you have sinned.
To the question of whether the contents of the interview is known only to the bishop and the interviewee, I think that is a fuzzy question. I know if a young person is applying to go to Bringham Young University they have to have the recommendation of their local bishop which is based on whether the person is an upstanding member of the LDS community and has no unresolved issues of worthiness.
A non LDS young adult can apply to BYU, but has to go two separate interviews to prove their worthiness. The first is with the local bishop, and the second is with the BYU chaplain.
There is really no such thing as pronouncing grace which would be in a Christian confessional.