A History of American Cults, from the Pilgrims to MAGA

A new book examines the Doomsday thinking that drives our politics

Is the United States of America really just one giant cult?

That’s the provocative question at the heart of Cults Like Us: Why Doomsday Thinking Drives America, a witty, insightful new book charting the history and widespread influence of cult-like groups in North America.

Author Jane Borden begins with the arrival of the Mayflower in 1620, arguing that the Pilgrims were religious zealots who believed the end of the world was imminent, so only the righteous few would be saved from eternal damnation. She makes a compelling case that the Pilgrims, despite their ubiquity in grade school lessons, were, in fact, a pretty weird bunch. (In one grimly funny account featured in the book, the Pilgrims supposedly propped up corpses against trees on the edge of their settlement and placed muskets in their hands to ward off their Native American “neighbors.”)

“Yet everyone in the United States retains the societal DNA laid down when those ideas dominated New England,” Borden writes. “Puritan doomsday beliefs didn’t go away; they became American culture.”

With pithy humor and a knack for evocative details, Borden traces this lineage over the centuries, looking at groups from the Oneida Community, the 19th-century utopian religious commune known for its “free love” ethos; to NXIVM, the self-help cult whose former leader, Keith Raniere, was sentenced to 120 years in prison for racketeering and sex trafficking.

She draws connections between these groups and their distinctly American traits, including a relentless zeal for self-improvement and susceptibility to conspiracy theories. In one particularly resonant chapter, she considers how a long tradition of American anti-intellectualism helped give rise to what may be the most pernicious cult of all: the MAGA movement, with its red-hat bearing, Capitol-storming devotees.

The origins of the book date back to the divisive days of the first Trump administration, when the political divisions in the country were becoming painfully apparent. At the time, Borden was writing about NXIVM and other cults for Vanity Fair.

“The more I learned about cult ideology, I started seeing it in American secular culture, and I just kept pulling the thread,” she recalled in a recent Zoom conversation from her home in California. “Then, one day, I was like, ‘Oh my god, the Puritans were a cult!”

The latest decade has brought an explosion of “cult content’—documentaries, books, and podcasts about high-control groups, from the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to Heaven’s Gate.

But what sets Cults Like Us apart is Borden’s interdisciplinary approach, the deft way she weaves together history, popular culture, and theology. She also applies her knowledge of cults to political groups and figures, including the John Birch Society, Michael Flynn, and Joseph McCarthy.

Borden didn’t set out to write a political book, “But every Puritan train of thought I followed ended at the alt-right depot,” she said.

The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

You write that the doomsday beliefs of the Puritans didn’t go away; they became American culture. Can you elaborate?

The Puritans have had such a large influence on American culture, because they were an incredibly successful settlement and community that never went away. Whatever grew out of New England, grew out of them. Also, at a certain point in the 1800s, we chose the Pilgrims to be our avatar. We’ve really turned to them, in a variety of ways, and their ideas have shaped American culture, even the ones that were, quote-unquote extreme or wacky. Those ideas didn't go away. They just shape-shifted. Their ideology can be traced through secular history, not just the Protestant church.

There is debate over the definition of a cult and even the usefulness of the term. For the purposes of the book, what definition did you use?

Most anti-cultists rely on the definition put forth by Robert Jay Lifton, which has three characteristics. First, there’s a charismatic leader who is worshipped. Second, thought reform, undue influence, and mind control—what used to be called brainwashing—are at play. The third point is that actual harm is done, either to people within the group or outside of the group.

Do you consider the MAGA movement a cult, as at least one Jan. 6 rioter does?

I wouldn't say everyone who voted for Donald Trump did so because of indoctrination. People have various reasons for making that choice. But within the movement are certainly the hallmarks of cult-like thinking.

If you take the traditional definition [of a cult], it’s certain that Trump is a charismatic leader who’s worshiped by a lot of people. It’s also certain that mind control techniques are at play. He lies to us. He tells us what we want to hear. He promises relief from our pain, and that’s what apocalyptic stories have always, always done. That's the throughline of apocalyptic thinking: Your persecutors will be destroyed and you will have comfort. You will be rescued, you are chosen.

He tells us what we want to hear in order to manipulate us to give him money and power, the things that all cult leaders want. Is there actual harm being done? I would say yes. People are losing their jobs—literally, their livelihoods.

The main bit of cult-like thinking currently driving MAGA is the desire for an autocrat, and that that very much comes from Puritanical thought. I found this fascinating book by John Shelton Lawrence and Robert Jewett called The American Monomyth. They [identified] this one narrative everywhere in American culture, most explicitly in Westerns, comic books, and superhero movies: that of a small Edenic community that is under threat. Seemingly out of nowhere, this outsider appears. That person rescues the community, and it’s always, always through violence.

This is the story of a dictator, essentially. We can't save ourselves. We can't turn to democracy, We can only be rescued by an all-powerful person who will kill all the bad guys. That is exactly what's happening right now. All of the DOGE cuts—they're telling us that it’s okay because these guys never showed up to work. They make it okay by saying. “These are the bad guys who deserve it.”

What did you learn about successful deprogramming? And can that be applied to 70 million voters?

A condition first has to be met in order to even get to the deprogramming phase. For exit counselors, which is what they’re called instead of “deprogrammers,” the technique is to get a person talking so that they start hearing themselves and their critical thinking skills return. You can’t convince someone of anything, as we’ve learned on the internet. I mean, it works so well on Facebook, right? You can’t argue with people. You can’t say, “You’re in a cult.” None of that will ever work.

[You have to] get someone’s critical thinking skills to return, and two things are necessary for that: unplugging from the cult, the charismatic leader, the undue influence, and then just time and talk. They start to see it for themselves, and go, “Oh, my God, I was in a cult.” It takes years to get over it. I interviewed India Oxenberg, who had been in NXIVM, about her deprogramming experience. She talked about how crazy she felt and the physical ramifications of the process of returning to herself—panic attacks, disorientation.

I think in America, before we can even get to that point, we have to deal with the conditions that have given rise to the psychological vulnerabilities to these ideas, and that is a chronic lack of resources. That is the wealth gap and the extreme income inequality ravaging Americans. Love Has Won [the subject of the HBO documentary Love Has Won: The Cult of Mother God] was fueled by people who had been burned by the healthcare system, or found themselves in need and couldn’t afford it. When you make people this vulnerable, they grasp at straws.

You joke about being in the “cult” of improv comedy in your twenties. But did any of these groups seem appealing to you? Which ones would you have been susceptible to?

The Oneida [Community]. There was some female liberation involved in that group. They wore pants, they had childcare, they got to have sex with whoever they wanted, kind of. I think people see most cults as dangerous for women because they are [often] sexually exploited. And that's true, but the idea of a woman getting to have sex with more than one partner can be attractive to a lot of female followers. I think that's part of why they join. Also, in some cults, women were allowed to have roles of leadership which were not available to them in traditional churches. All of these reasons make cults attractive to women, including—if I were alive at various points in history—me.

Since the ‘60s, we have seen a lot of new religious movements that draw from Eastern spiritual traditions. How does that fit into your argument?

That started exploding after the 1965 changes to the immigration laws from Asia, and we had this huge influx of immigrants from, for example, India. Then, of course, you are also going to see an uptick in wolves in guru’s clothing and all that. That is a part of the cult boom of the ‘70s. The other thing was the Baby Boomer population, all these extra people needed somewhere to go and something to believe in. There's so much beauty in [these traditions], people were very attracted to them. Not all of these movements were destructive, but it allowed for a lot of charlatans to wear a new costume.

So were the ‘70s the peak, or are we living in a new cult boom time now?

I think we’re living in a new Golden Era now. The estimate is 10,000 in America. These things are impossible to count, but that’s an estimate. Because we’re living in a time of crisis, we’re turning toward that salve. We’re turning toward dictators. Cult leaders are dictators. They’re little autocrats.

Meredith Blake is the Culture Columnist for The Contrarian