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1. Church of Bible Understanding



Stewart Traill


The Church of Bible Understanding (formerly known as the Forever Family) is a destructive cult started in 1971 by former atheist and vacuum repairman Stewart Traill in Allentown, Pennsylvania. The cult targeted teens as young as 13 by drawing on their weaknesses. Throughout the 1970s, the cult expanded to many other parts of the United States.

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2. Manson Family





The Manson Family was a cult started by Charles Manson. Manson was born to Kathleen Maddox, an unwed sixteen year old girl, in 1934. It is said that his mother, an alcoholic, sold him to buy beer. When he was returned to her she had him sent to a boarding school. After a number of years living with his religious aunt and uncle, he returned to his mother who rejected him. After a number of robberies, he was put in jail for the first time. One month before his parole hearing in 1952, he raped a boy in jail by holding a razor to his throat. Two years later he was paroled. Manson began to pimp a young woman he met and eventually took her, and a second woman to New Mexico to work for him as prostitutes. He was caught and tried under the Mann Act (a 1910 act that prohibited white slavery and trafficking for immoral means).

In 1967 he was released (having spent more than half of his life in institutions). Upon release, he requested permission to move to San Francisco which was granted. When he arrived he became part of the Hippie movement centered around the Haight-Ashbury region and he set himself up as a guru. He moved in with 23 year old student Mary Brunner and convinced her to allow other women to join them. Eventually eighteen other women were living with them – this was the beginning of the family.

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3. Aum Shinrikyo





Aum Shinrikyo, is a Japanese religious group founded by Shoko Asahara. The group gained international notoriety in 1995, when it carried out a Sarin gas attack in the Tokyo subways. In 2000 the organization changed its name to “Aleph” (the first letter of the Hebrew and Arabic alphabet), changing its logo as well. In 1995 the group had 9,000 members in Japan, and as many as 40,000 worldwide. As of 2004 Aum Shinrikyo/Aleph membership was estimated at 1,500 to 2,000 people.

The movement was founded by Shoko Asahara in his one-bedroom apartment in Tokyo’s Shibuya ward in 1984, starting off as a Yoga and meditation class known as Aum-no-kai and steadily grew in the following years. It gained the official status as a religious organization in 1989. It attracted such a considerable number of young graduates from Japan’s elite universities that it was dubbed a “religion for the elite”. Aum’s PR activities included publishing. In Japan, where comics and animated cartoons enjoy unprecedented popularity among all ages, Aum attempted to tie religious ideas to popular anime and manga themes – space missions, extremely powerful weapons, world conspiracies and conquest for ultimate truth.

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Aum Shinrikyo had started as a quiet group of people interested in yogic meditation, but later transformed into a very different organization. According to Asahara, he needed “to demonstrate charisma” to attract the modern audience. Following his decision, Aum underwent a radical image change. The rebranded Aum looked less like an elite meditation boutique and more like an organization attractive to a broader, larger population group. Public interviews, bold controversial statements, and vicious opposition to critique were incorporated into the religion’s PR style. The cult started attracting controversy in the late 1980s with accusations of deception of recruits, and of holding cult members against their will and forcing members to donate money. A murder of a cult member who tried to leave is now known to have taken place in February 1989.

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4. Restoration of the 10 Commandments





The full name of this cult is the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God. The Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God was a breakaway group from the Roman Catholic Church that formed in Uganda in the late 1980s. As the name implies the group strongly emphasized the Ten Commandments. This emphasis meant they even discouraged talking: out of fear of breaking the commandment about giving false witness. They also believed that their strict adherence to the Ten Commandments would be advantageous after the apocalypse.

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5. Raëlism



Founder, Claude Vorilhon (right)


Raëlism or Raelian Church is a UFO religion founded by a purported contactee named Claude Vorilhon, who is known recently for supporting Clonaid’s claim that an American woman underwent a standard cloning procedure, which led to the birth of her new daughter Eve in December 26, 2002. National authorities, mainstream media, and young adults have increasingly investigated the church’s activities as a result of controversial statements by Clonaid’s head Brigitte Boisselier the day after.

Members of the Raëlian Church consist of people who have been baptized by Raëlian clergy in quarterly ceremonies, and among the converts are members of Raëlian-founded free love groups such as the Order of Angels and Raël’s Girls. The organization—which preaches a sensual philosophy and a physicalist explanation of the origin of life—could have as many as sixty-five thousand members.

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Raëlians emphasize secular and hedonistic ideas, rather than worshiping a supreme metaphysical deity.[30] The Raëlian Church members follow a UFO religion that favors a strong version of physicalism – the belief that everything consists only of physical properties. Raëlians deny the existence of the ethereal soul and a supernatural god, and believe that the mind is a function of matter alone. This ties into their belief that mind transfer is possible and that it will be possible to create an identical human clone in terms of mind and personality—as long as the clone and the original are not alive at the same time.

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Reports and allegations have been made, by journalists, courts, and governmental bodies of several countries, that the Church of Scientology is an unscrupulous commercial enterprise that harasses its critics and brutally exploits its members. In some cases of US litigation against the Church, former Scientologists were paid as expert witnesses and have since stated that they submitted false and inflammatory declarations, intended to be carried in the media to incite prejudice against Scientology, and deliberately harassed key Scientology executives, by knowingly advancing unfounded opinions, either to get a case dropped or to obtain a large settlement.

Although Scientologists are usually free to practice their beliefs, the organized church has often encountered opposition due to their strong-arm tactics, directed against critics and members wishing to leave the organization.

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A few days later, Di Mambro and twelve followers performed a ritual Last Supper. A few days after that, apparent mass suicides and murders were conducted at two villages in Switzerland, and at Morin Heights — 15 inner circle members committed suicide with poison, 30 were killed by bullets or smothering, and 8 others were killed by other causes. Many of the bodies when found were drugged, possibly to prevent the members from objecting. The buildings were then set on fire by timer devices, purportedly as one last symbol of the group’s purification.

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8. Heaven’s Gate





Heaven’s Gate is a destructive, doomsday cult centered in California. 21 women and 18 men voluntarily committed suicide in three groups on three successive days starting on March 23, 1997. Most were in their 40′s; the rest covered an age range of 26 to 72. Two months later, two additional members, Charles Humphrey and Wayne Cooke attempted suicide in a hotel room a few miles from the Rancho Santa Fe mansion; Cooke succeeded. Humphrey tried again in the Arizona desert during Feb 1998 and was successful.

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Members called themselves brother and sister; they looked upon themselves as monks and nuns; they lived communally in a large, rented San Diego County (CA) home which they called their monastery. Most members had little contact with their families of origin or with their neighbors. Many followed successful professional careers before entering the group. Some abandoned their children before joining. They were free to leave at any time. They dressed in unisex garments: shapeless black shirts with Mandarin collars, and black pants. They were required commit themselves to a celibate life. Eight of the male members, including Do, submitted to voluntary castration. This seems to have been a form of preparation for their next level of existence: in a life that would be free of gender, sexual identity and sexual activity.

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9. Branch Davidians





The Branch Davidians are a religious sect who originated from a schism in 1955 from the Davidian Seventh Day Adventists, themselves former members of the Seventh-day Adventist Church who were disfellowshipped during the 1930s. From its inception in the 1930s, the splinter movement inherited Adventism’s apocalypticism, in that they believed themselves to be living in a time when Christian prophecies of a final divine judgment were coming to pass. They are best known for the 1993 siege of their Center near Waco, Texas, by the ATF and the FBI, which resulted in the deaths of eighty-two of the church’s members, including head figure David Koresh. However, by the time of the siege, Koresh had encouraged his followers to think of themselves as “students of the Seven Seals” rather than as “Branch Davidians,” and other Branch Davidian factions never accepted his leadership.

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The government’s siege on the Branch Davidians ended on April 19 when federal agents released CS tear gas into the compound. During the assault, several fires broke out and spread quickly through the buildings, killing approximately 79 Branch Davidians, 21 of whom were children. Autopsies confirmed that many of the victims, including David Koresh, had died of single gunshot wounds to their heads.

The government put some of the survivors on trial. All were acquitted of conspiring to murder federal agents but some were convicted of aiding and abetting voluntary manslaughter.

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In the United States in the 1970s, the media reported on the high-pressure recruitment methods of Unificationists and said that the church separated vulnerable college students from their families through the use of brainwashing or mind control. Moon dismissed these criticisms, stating in 1976 that he had received many thank-you letters from parents whose children became closer to them after joining the movement. Moon and his wife were banned from entry into Germany and the other 14 Schengen treaty countries, on the grounds that they are leaders of a sect that endangered the personal and social development of young people. The Netherlands and a few other Schengen states let Moon and his wife enter their countries in 2005. In 2006 the German Supreme Court overturned the ban.

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In 1993, Chung Hwa Pak released the book Roku Maria no Higeki (Tragedy of the Six Marys) through the Koyu Publishing Co. of Japan. The book contained allegations that Moon conducted sex rituals amongst six married female disciples (“The Six Marys”) who were to have prepared the way for the virgin who would marry Moon and become the True Mother. Chung Hwa Pak had left the movement when the book was published and later withdrew the book from print when he rejoined the Unification Church. Before his death Chung Hwa Pak published a second book, The Apostate, and recanted all allegations made in Roku Maria no Higeki.

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Since that time, Jonestown and its leader Jim Jones have entered American discourse as code for the dangers of cults and cult leaders. The expression “drinking the Kool-Aid”—which means both blindly jumping on the bandwagon, and being a team player—is one manifestation of this. The story of Jonestown, and of its parent organization Peoples Temple, however, is more complicated than sound-bites comparing strict parents to Jim Jones, or pundits relating religious violence (such as the suicide air strikes of 11 September 2001) to Jonestown. Instead, Jonestown serves as a lesson in how a combination of media, government, and citizens can create a climate of persecution and fear. It also provides an example of how uncritical acceptance of the status quo and social and geographic isolation can lead to violence and even death.


Notable Exclusions: The Children of God, Mormonism, Jevhovah’s Witnesses, Seventh Day Adventists

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