Building a Cult

Abstract

This chapter studies how and why Americans in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s came to believe that some religions were “cults,” and interrogates the assumptions that underlay that category. After 1981, many people outside the group began to suspect that MOVE was a cult. Increasingly, the idea that MOVE was a religion—albeit a bad religion—began to make sense. The Philadelphia Special Investigation Commission concluded that in the early 1980s, MOVE was evolving into a “violence-threatening cult.” This belief had less to do with transformations within MOVE, I argue, than it did with transformations in American culture. After John Africa’s acquittal, Americans began to think of MOVE as a cult because scholars, journalists, and their government taught them to.