Nova Religio Symposium : Academic Integrity and the Study of New Religious Movements

For the last two or three decades new and alternative religions have been at the center of heated controversy in the United States as various advocates have debated the desirability of curbing the operations of leaders and organizations that, many believe, have abused their followers and constitute a real threat to society. This controversy has spread to the scholarly community that studies this relatively small byway in American religious life. The majority of the scholars involved in the debate have concluded that the fears and impressions prevalent among the general public and worried parents of "cult" members are overblown; their research has tended to debunk the widely held perception that many alternative religions engage in brainwashing and mind control, leading them to conclude that, although abuses do occur in some specific situations, by and large the alternative movements are, if unorthodox, worthy of the general protection of the First Amendment enjoyed by larger, more accepted faiths. Other scholars, however, have come to very different conclusions and argue that something like mind control does exist at least occasionally and that significant numbers of the nonconforming contemporary movements in question do present a real threat to the public. Both camps have among their adherents goodly numbers of social activists—defenders of nonmainstream movements against their critics, on the one hand, and, on the other, critics whose courses of action range from purely rhetorical combat to advocacy of forcible intervention, deprogramming, and legal restrictions on the activities of nonmainstream groups deemed abusive or otherwise unacceptable. This still-new journal has quickly been drawn into the scholarly fray. Central to the ongoing controversy has been the debate over brainwashing/mind control, and, in a two-part article published in Nova