I recently watched the 2020 HBO series The Vow which documents the rise and fall of NXIVM, a self-improvement company that turned out to be the outward face of a very dangerous cult. The cult revolved around NXIVM’s founder, Keith Raniere, who is currently serving a 120 year sentence for racketeering, human trafficking, fraud, and a wide range of sex offenses. NXIVM was populated by the children of the wealthy and privileged, business leaders, lawyers, writers, directors, and successful actors, including Smallville star Allison Mack who served two years in prison for her role in the organization. It is hard to imagine how so many smart people with bright futures could be drawn into something so sinister, but Raniere is a master manipulator. Over a period of many years, he carefully conditioned his followers through secrecy, appeals to loyalty, and gaslighting.
It is easy from a removed distance to pass judgment on NXIVM, yet there are many people who also regard the Catholic Church as a cult. The word comes from the Latin cultus which can mean reverence, adoration, or worship. It is the root of terms like culture and cultivate, and historically it described any organization of great devotion. Taken in that way, the Church has many cults, such as the cult of devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary.
That is not what is generally meant by the term cult today though. Since the early 1970s, cult has been used as a way of describing what are sometimes called “high-control groups,” in which a charismatic leader or leaders demand total allegiance from their followers for some sort of vague higher purpose. While these cults often have spiritual beliefs, they need not. Raniere, for instance, styled himself not as a priest but as a “scientist,” convincing his members that he had developed a “technology” through scientific exploration of human potential that could guarantee them joy.
Zoe Heller, writing about the NXIVM fallout for The New Yorker in 2021, said “The convictions that Jesus was the son of God and that ‘everything happens for a reason’ are older and more widespread than the belief in [Love Has Won cult leader] Amy Carlson’s privileged access to the fifth dimension, but neither is, ultimately, more rational.” Her assumption is that belief in the divinity of Jesus is largely built on the emotional appeal of such a proclamation, or some kind of private personal experience, rather than on the historical claim that Jesus rose from the dead.
Of course, emotion and personal experience certainly enter into the equation, as they always do with human reasoning, but to say that belief in Jesus is irrational is akin to saying the belief that Abraham Lincoln was assassinated is irrational, or the belief that Socrates ever lived at all is irrational. Neither of those things can be proven through experimentation, but they are not irrational. They are beliefs built on evidence, as is the claim about the divinity of Jesus. Historical claims are sometimes hard to interpret, but that does not make them purely subjective. Cults peddle in irrational beliefs, not just on their fringes but at their core. Boil down Raniere’s talk about the science of joy or his therapeutic language about the original wounds of men and women, and what you are left with is not a single idea that holds any real weight. Boil down Catholicism to its essence, and what you are left with is an encounter with Jesus Christ that you may not choose to trust but that cannot simply be waved away as wishful thinking.
Nevertheless, while faith in Christ is rational—and, I would argue, so also is faith in the Church’s vast array of authoritative teachings that spring from that fact—that does not mean that Catholics are unaffected by the kind of magical thinking that is ripe for manipulation by those with sinister intent. Whether it is burying St. Joseph upside down in the yard to sell your house or the belief that praying certain novenas produces automatic miracles, the practice of Catholicism is rife with superstitions that are not a part of official teaching but that nevertheless condition the minds of believers. Many of these things are relatively harmless, but they can feed into larger problems, such as clericalism, an overly elevated view of the clergy and an assumption that they are by definition closer to God than everyone else. Pope Francis has described clericalism as “a whip, it is a scourge, it is a form of worldliness that defiles and damages the face of the Lord’s bride.” His emphatic rejection of clericalism is commendable, but it is not always clear he sees the full picture of what it is and how it affects the Church.
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