forum Does anyone know how to correctly write a Cult?

Started May 03, 2018 by @AJ

tune

In one of my stories, my group of characters come across a cult. I've got most of their belief system down, I just need help figuring out how they implement it. Any advice?

Check out the Teded vid about cults on Youtube - helpful for explaining how cults recruit and operate in present day.

My advice would be to research cults in real life to get an idea of how other cults function and express their beliefs. It also depends if your cult is relatively mild, like their sort of just a society that lives in the middle of nowhere and they have this controlled community with a dictator-ish leader, or they're insane and sacrifice babies and drink the blood of virgins and crap. And like @doug said, checking out Teded videos about cults (or just other videos in general) would be helpful too.

It turns out my friend actually grew up in a cult. She was a kid but wasn't aware of what was going on until much older. At a certain point all the followers were given different names than their birth name. My friend's sister is Samantha, but they named her Adele. This is a way of getting you to disassociate from yourself and your life outside the church. Also men and women were separated between floors of the house, even if married. They also woke up early for prayer and ceremonies, but went to bed late, this works as a way of keeping their followers sleep deprived and dependent on them. They slowly integrated more controlling ideals until you were actually living in house with them, and by that point it was very hard to get out. My friends family did get out, but after a good amount of interventions. My friend is somehow extremely well adjusted, she also never accepted the name they gave them which may have helped with her keeping independence. This cult wasn't like what you hear on the news about preying on children or "drinking the kool-aid" but it held the same structure and a man at the top who truly believed he was "Jesus reborn". He called himself Father Peter. Hope this helps!

Woah. I'm sorry about your friend and glad they got out. Adding to that, feeding people a carb-rich diet with high sugar and low nutrients can make them easier to control. When they eat, they'll feel euphoric, this is when the leader should be around them. For an hour or so afterward, have them work or play games outside. They'll crash hard afterwards and be exhausted. This is a good time to feed them legends and lies, when people are tired, their minds are malleable. Keeping them away from technology is also important if they need to be isolated.

When people who are not in the cult talk/think about it, give them little to no knowledge about the group and it's members. Cults are usually somewhat secretive and very exclusive.

The general stereotype of blood and sacrifices and all that is hugely blown up by Hollywood. Generally cults are more subtly manipulative just from my limited knowledge, so I'd suggest you research different examples and draw inspiration from them. The minuite you start rambling about blatant Satanism and blood rituals it generally starts to feel unbelievable, unless you have a very good way of integrating it into the story. Cultists aren't evil; they're manipulated. Cult leaders usually do as they do in order to control people, though perhaps they can also be victims of previous cult leaders and actually believe what they say, or are just generally delusional, perhaps getting more delusional over time if they keep repeating the lie. Cults aren't horror movie Satanism, scary and gothic, it's a community of phycological abuse, and the reason many cults are so secluded is so that the members can't see the outside world to learn that they're being abused or to get help. They'll probably be fed lies such as everything is for their own protection, the cult leaders are the only good people, they need to become better and purer people to ascend in the cult rank, etc. I'm not pretending to know a lot about the subject so you can research it yourself or please correct me if I'm wrong.

Cult leaders, especially successful ones, generally draw on childhood experiences in order to influence the emotion of their follows. David Berg, the leader of the Family International, was abused as a child— subsequently he incorporated systematic abuse of children into his teachings at the cult. The leader of Heaven’s Gate was a gay man closeted by his strict faith; it was discovered after their mass suicide that many of the male members of the cult had castrated themselves. The reason that the in-depth stories of cults are so sad is because they stem from the emotional trauma of their leaders. I would suggest giving the leader a believable background to base his cult’s particular perversions on.

Okay so there's this podcast (yes, I'm a nerd) called The Grift and it has an episode on cults that I thought was fun to listen to and really informative. I think it's episode 4? http://thegriftpodcast.com

If we're talking about podcasts, there's a podcast called "Cults" about famous cults, who lead them, why they were formed, and why they attracted so many people.

https://www.parcast.com/cults/