Nobody Signs Up for a Cult
Cult founders are almost never a stranger with wild eyes. More often it's a guidance counselor or a music teacher, someone who ran a decent business before he started talking about the end of the world. The people who followed them were mostly educated and employed, and most of them were skeptical of exactly this sort of thing right up until they weren't. Recruitment usually looks like a dinner invitation or a free seminar on managing stress, and the strange components creep in later in small digestible increments. Here's 20 groups that began with people who would have seemed unremarkable at a bus stop.
State of California, San Quentin Prison on Wikimedia
1. Peoples Temple
Jim Jones ran a soup kitchen in Indianapolis and integrated his congregation in the 1950s, which eventually earned him a seat on the city's Human Rights Commission. San Francisco politicians courted him for years because he could turn out volunteers faster than any campaign office in the city. More than nine hundred people died in Guyana in 1978, many of them families who had come for the civil rights work.
2. Heaven's Gate
A music professor and a nurse met in a Texas hospital in 1972 and left town together shortly after. Marshall Applewhite had directed university choirs, and Bonnie Nettles had raised four children before any of this started.
Their group lasted twenty-five years and ended in a rented San Diego mansion with thirty-nine bodies in matching sneakers.
San Diego Sheriff's Department on Wikimedia
3. NXIVM
The entry point was a personal development course with a certification track and glowing testimonials from actual executives. Keith Raniere had run a multilevel marketing operation in upstate New York and sold himself as a self-taught genius with a measurable IQ. Branding women's skin came near the end, after years of ordinary corporate coaching.
United States Federal Bureau of Prisons on Wikimedia
4. Branch Davidians
Long before David Koresh, the group was a quiet Seventh-day Adventist splinter with a rural compound and a regular Bible study schedule. Koresh showed up as a handyman named Vernon Howell, a guitar player who had failed to get anywhere in Los Angeles. Seventy-six people died at Mount Carmel in 1993, twenty-five of them children.
5. Aum Shinrikyo
It started as a yoga studio in Tokyo in 1984 and pulled in graduate students from Japan's most competitive universities. The membership skewed hard toward chemists and physicians, which is the only reason the group could produce sarin in the first place. Thirteen people died in the subway attack of 1995, and thousands more were injured.
6. Rajneeshpuram
Thousands of Western professionals sold their homes to move onto a ranch in rural Oregon, plenty of them therapists and academics in their forties.
The commune ran for years with an airstrip and its own bus system before the leadership poisoned salad bars in The Dalles to swing a county election. It's still the largest bioterror attack in American history.
7. The Manson Family
A house full of young people around Haight-Ashbury in 1967 was the least remarkable thing on any given block. Several of the people who moved in came from stable suburban families and had never been in trouble. The Beach Boys recorded one of Charles Manson's songs before anyone understood what he was assembling.
California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation on Wikimedia
8. Children of God
David Berg opened a coffeehouse ministry for hippies in Huntington Beach with funding from mainstream evangelical churches. Within a decade it had spread into a worldwide network of communes where child sexual abuse became written policy. Rose McGowan and Joaquin Phoenix both spent part of their childhoods inside it.
9. Synanon
For most of the 1960s it was a respected drug rehabilitation program in Santa Monica, respected enough that judges sent people there instead of prison. Charles Dederich was a recovering alcoholic and former Gulf Oil man who built the whole method around brutal group confrontation sessions. By 1978 members were shaving their heads and someone had left a rattlesnake in an opposing lawyer's mailbox.
William Templeton on Wikimedia
10. Order of the Solar Temple
A homeopath and an orchestra conductor built a following among wealthy professionals across Switzerland, France, and Quebec.
The dead included a journalist, a civil servant, and the mayor of a small Quebec town. Seventy-four people were killed in a run of coordinated fires and shootings between 1994 and 1997.
11. The Family (Australia)
Anne Hamilton-Byrne taught yoga in Melbourne, married a physicist, and moved through the city as a well-connected socialite. Doctors and nurses inside her circle helped her acquire fourteen children through adoption paperwork and maternity ward arrangements. The kids were dyed blonde, dressed identically, and dosed with LSD at a house in the Victorian bush.
Unknown authorUnknown author on Wikimedia
12. The Fellowship of Friends
Robert Burton was a fourth-grade teacher in Northern California who started a study group around the ideas of Gurdjieff in 1970. The group bought land in the Sierra foothills, planted a vineyard, and assembled a serious art collection, and its members tended to be professionals with graduate degrees. It still operates today, and former members have spent decades describing what went on behind the winery.
13. The Sullivanians
Two Manhattan psychoanalysts opened a practice in the 1950s and steered their patients into communal apartments on the Upper West Side. Members were writers and professors who had been persuaded that the nuclear family causes mental illness. Children were handed off to rotating caregivers and often shipped to boarding school at four.
14. Church Universal and Triumphant
Elizabeth Clare Prophet was a Boston University student who married into a small metaphysical publishing business.
By the late 1980s she had moved thousands of followers to a Montana ranch and stocked underground shelters ahead of a Soviet strike she had dated to 1990. Nothing came, and the membership drained away over the following years.
BlackSun at English Wikipedia on Wikimedia
15. Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God
Credonia Mwerinde sold banana beer in southwestern Uganda before she began reporting visions of the Virgin Mary. A former Catholic priest signed on, which gave the operation a veneer of legitimacy in a deeply Catholic region. At least 778 people died in a church fire and a series of mass graves discovered in 2000.
16. Colonia Dignidad
Visitors to the German farming settlement in rural Chile came away describing it as spotless and impressively productive. Paul Schäfer had led a group of families there in 1961, and the compound ran a hospital that treated local Chileans for free. It also functioned as a torture site for the Pinochet regime while Schäfer abused the children living inside.
17. Twelve Tribes
A Chattanooga guidance counselor named Elbert Spriggs started a Bible study for teenagers in the early 1970s. The group now operates cafés and delis across several countries, staffed by people who look like any other wholesome family business. Governments in three countries have investigated its treatment of children over corporal punishment and labor.
B. Gibson Barkley on Wikimedia
18. Love Has Won
Amy Carlson managed a McDonald's in Kansas and had three kids before she ever turned on a camera. Her audience found her on YouTube during a stretch when a lot of people were home and searching for something to believe. Her mummified body was found wrapped in Christmas lights in a Colorado home in 2021.
19. Buddhafield
Jaime Gomez was a working actor and dancer in Los Angeles who started teaching meditation to a crowd of artists and film people in the 1980s. Members kept their jobs and paid their own rent, and the evening sessions felt closer to group therapy than to religion. Will Allen filmed the group for two decades from the inside and turned the footage into a documentary.
Walterlan Papetti on Wikimedia
20. The Source Family
John Lennon and Julie Christie ate at the Source, a health food restaurant on the Sunset Strip that was one of the best in the city. Jim Baker owned it, and his staff lived together in a Hollywood Hills mansion under his direction while the business kept turning a profit. He died in 1975 after taking a hang glider off a cliff with no training whatsoever.
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