Let’s be real, we’ve all had those days where we sat on the couch and binge-watched shows on true crime and cults. I’ve seen around five different documentaries on Charles Manson within these past couple months, and I’m pretty sure I’ve seen almost every Forensic Files episode. So, if you ever feel strange or sick for watching and indulging in this stuff, just know you’re not alone.
This spooky season, I’ve found an interest in cults. What about cults allows followers to be persuaded to kill others and themselves under the eye of their so-called leaders?
The cults we’re talking about today are either religious cults that are no longer around due to tragedy or cults that are popular in culture.
The People’s Temple:
The People’s Temple was started by leader Jim Jones in the 1950s in Indianapolis. Jones’s beliefs were that of Christianity, communism and socialism. Jones later moved his congregation to California, only after reading an article about the best places to survive a nuclear holocaust. Jones saw a rise in his followers from less than a hundred to thousands after the move.
Jones then began building a commune called “Jonestown” in Guyana, South America. After Jones heard a rumor regarding New West magazine planning to write an expose about life in The People’s Temple, he moved his congregation again to reside officially in Jonestown in 1977.
A year after their move to Jonestown, US Congressman Leo Ryan was convinced by former People’s Temple members to investigate Jonestown due to claims of abuse. After members of Jonestown told Ryan they wanted to leave with him, some of Jones’ men showed up and shot Ryan, three journalists and one of the members trying to leave. As this was happening, Jones managed to convince his members to kill themselves by drinking a concoction of cyanide-laced grape-flavored Kool-Aid. More than 900 people died that day, including 276 children.
Heaven’s Gate:
Heaven’s Gate was founded by two Americans in the 1970s, Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles. Applewhite and Nettles believed they were the two witnesses mentioned in Revelations 11. They gained their followers by preaching their apocalyptic prophecies in California and Oregon. They told their listeners that a spaceship would soon be coming for the worthy and their bodies would be kept in a cocoon state as they were transported to Heaven.
The groups were made to live closely together and to give up their possessions and families to fully prepare themselves for salvation. They also had to give up sex and emotion while being told to dress androgynously and shave their hair.
While they mostly kept a close profile they reemerged in the public in 1993 to prophesize their beliefs and used the internet to spread their message to the masses. In 1997, the group believed that their salvation was coming after a UFO was rumored to be following the Hale-Bopp comet heading to earth. In March, the 39 members of the group were found dead after what is believed to be a suicide to prepare them for their transition to Heaven.
The Manson Family:
In 1967 Charles Manson, who had up to this point spent most of his life in and out of prison, moved to San Francisco and began proclaiming that he was some sort of guru in the region and used this power to manipulate people to get things in return and thus gaining a small following of mainly females who called themselves “The Family.”
Manson didn’t have a set following of one specific religion, he took some ideologies from Satanism, Scientology, the Process Church and many other religions. Manson firmly believed that The Beatles White album predicted an upcoming race war and that African Americans would win but would look for leadership in a small group of white people, Manson planned to take a small group of people into the commune to survive the race war and come out the end as the leaders.
The Manson family soon emerged into something different, turning them into murderers The exact reason they started killing still isn’t formerly known. With beliefs that they did it in hopes that one of their members who were in prison would be released by pretending the real murder was still on the loose. Some believe they wanted to begin the race war by blaming the murders on the Black Panthers.
Their most famous murder was that of pregnant Sharon Tate an actress and wife of Roman Polanski. They murdered several people in the house including that of Tate and Abigal Folger, the coffee heiress. They murdered a couple the next day in the same neighborhood and wrote “pig’ on the wall in blood in hopes of blaming the murders on the Black Panthers. They were later caught and sentenced to death but after the death penalty was abolished in California they were sentenced to life in prison.
While all of these cults are no longer around, let’s discuss a cult that is still active and running today.
Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints
Also commonly referred to as the FLDS, they are an offshoot of Mormonism and are constantly in the news for unsavory reasons. The FLDS favors polygamy which the mainstream LDS outlawed a century ago. The group has anywhere from 6,000 to 10,000 members in the more rural areas of Utah and Arizona. They have almost total control of two small linked border towns in the two states.
While Morman splinter groups had been around before the FLDS, they got their start in 1991 by two men who had been excommunicated by the church. They went through a range of leaders who all claimed to be prophets of the church until 2002 when Rulon Jeffs took over. He died shortly after taking over and his son Warren took over after his death. It was under Warren’s leadership that the acts of FLDS’s child marriage, incest, bigamy, racism, abandonment of teenage boys and child abuse became known knowledge to the public.
Warren was sent to prison in 2007 but continues to be the head of the church from prison as his successor’s squabble for power.
If you’d like to know any more information regarding these cults, Netflix has great documentaries regarding the Manson Cults and The Peoples Temple, while Dr. Phil and others have interviewed members of the FLDS who have left the church.