SOURCE: ISKCON Communications Journal Vol 1, No 1
January 1993
Larry D. Shinn
Introduction
Let me begin by saying how pleased I am to be here in Budapest and by thanking you for your hospitality. I want to introduce my comments today by telling you briefly who I am and why I stand before you to talk about new religions in general and the Hare Krshna as in particular. I will conclude my presentation by urging you in Hungary not to follow the precedent set by us in the United States in our response to New Religious Movements (NRMs)and the Hare Krsnas over the past two decades. I believe thereis much you can learn from the mistakes we have made.
I am a professor of religion at Bucknell University who also holds an administrative position equivalent to Vice Rector in a European university. I have been a student of Indian religions for twenty-five years, and studied a form of Hinduism centring on the God Krsna for my doctoral work at Princeton University. This academic interest in the Krsna tradition led me to study the Hare Krsnas in America from 1980 to the present, study that has included living in fourteen Krsna communities in the United States and two in India for a total of four and a half months. I have interviewed more than one hundred and twenty Krsna devotees for an average of three hours each to seek to understand why these young people joined this Hindu religious movement. I have read dozens of books by the Krsnas and by their anti-cult critics. I have also interviewed anti-cult professionals. The results of this intensive study are incorporated in my book, The Dark Lord: Cult Images and the Hare Krsnas in America.
I am not a Hare Krsna devotee myself. Rather, I am a Christian minister (an elder of the Methodist church) who is keenly interested in understanding the world’s many different faiths. In fact, I am now on the way to New Delhi, India, where Christians and Jews, Hindus and Muslims, Buddhists and Sikhs, will gather to seek ways to create world peace through religious understanding rather than permit religion to continue to divide people. It is this quest – to seek understanding of others’ faiths before condemning them – that contributed to my study of the Hare Krsnas.
Fear of the cults and brainwashing
During my study of the NRMs in America, I have witnessed a rising tide of fear and prejudice against marginal religious movements like the Moonies, Hare Krsnas, Mormons, as well as against established religious faiths. Often, alarm with NRMs resides in a fear of ‘brainwashing’. Certainty of mind control resulted in a California family paying thousands of dollars to de-programme their daughter from a revolutionary political group to which she didn’t even belong. Most tragically, the conviction that brainwashing is a universal reality led the Reithmiller family in Cincinnati to subject their daughter to kidnapping and alleged rape by paid ‘rescuers’, who were trying to break the ‘lesbian spell’ that her roommate had cast upon her.
A 1988 deprogramming case near Albany, New York, revealed that even traditional Christian religious groups are not immune from anti-cult attacks and charges of brainwashing. The New York Times reported that a Catholic nun, Mary Sue Greve, was kidnapped and deprogrammed from a conservative monastic order. The mother, Suzan Greve, decided that her daughter was being brainwashed by these conservative Catholic priests and hired a deprogrammer to restore her daughter to ‘her right mind’.
Not since the days of the Red Scare and McCarthyism have Americans witnessed such destructive effects of pervasive fear as it works to undermine basic legal and religious freedoms. ‘The cults are coming!’ has replaced ‘The Russians are coming!’ as the battle cry of the anti-cult pied pipers. In times such as these, the very legal and social institutions we expect to guarantee our rights and freedoms are unwitting – or all too willing – participants in the very kinds of oppression they were instituted to prevent. A tragic example is the 1988 decision by the California Supreme Court in the Molko and Leal case against the Moonies. In its decision, the State Supreme Court said that civil court juries can distinguish between legitimate religious proselytising and ‘coercive persuasion and mind control’.
While the California Supreme Court properly recognised the deprogrammed plaintiffs’ charges of deception in its six-to-one decision, it mistakenly permits an insidious intrusion of exaggerated anti-cult views of brainwashing and mind control into its ruling.
In spite of its protestations, the court’s majority opinion clearly does reflect a biased opinion on the conversion/brainwashing issue. The court’s account shifts from a view of brainwashing that requires the condition of imprisonment by physical force to one that is characterised only by a controlled environment. Not surprisingly, the court consistently describes the views of the active, anti-cult psychologist Margaret Singer as ‘scientific’ and removes the lower courts’ inadmissibility of her testimony. Singer said in her Molko testimony that brainwashing is ‘the systematic manipulation of a person’s psychological and sociological environment’. Her professional critics note that what she has described is the socialisation process not brainwashing.
The State Supreme Court’s decision to allow a Civil Court to determine the ‘factual question’ concerning what is mind control and what is not opens the door wide for the courts in America to decide which are legitimate religious proselytising techniques and which are not. Furthermore, by its action, the high court obviously already had swayed subsequent legal judgements by its misinformed characterisation of the issue surrounding the notion of mind control and its reliance upon ‘expert’ testimony from those who are not experts at all in determining genuine from forced religiosity. It is incredible to read the majority opinion and realise that not one of the dozens of psychological or religious studies done by scholars who systematically have studied new religious groups and that refute Singer’s brainwashing claims, was cited in the court’s judgement.
As in the days of the seventeenth-century Salem witch trials when spectral evidence alone was conclusive, there is no defence against the California court’s description of brainwashing. Saying one has been brainwashed and having a host of expert prejudiced witnesses to concur seems to be enough in a court of law in California to make brainwashing a fact.
Religious intolerance
America once again seems headed down the all-too-familiar road of religious intolerance that has detoured our legal and justice systems many times in the past. Racial prejudice and religious intolerance have been deeply rooted and often intertwined features of American life throughout its history. There is a lengthy and sad record of prejudice against blacks, Native Americans, and the people of Indian and Asian descent. Religious intolerance has also been directed at groups as different as Jews, Catholics, Mormons, and Hare Krsnas. A persistent method of engendering suspicion, fear, and even hatred of such marginal racial and religious groups has been to generalise from personal and misleading atrocity stories to create negative stereotypes of the entire target group. For example, in Prison or Paradise: The New Religious Cult, the Rudins repeatedly use the events and spectre of Jonestown to implicate all NRMs as physically violent and psychologically destructive.
What we are seeing in decisions like that in the Molko and Leal case and in books such as Prison or Paradise are but a reflection of the time-worn American pattern of fear-mongering. The most notable example in recent times is the Red Scare which culminated in the McCarthy era. Not only are the patterns of fear-mongering similar across these political and religious spheres but corresponding instances of social intolerance and legal excess can be found as well.
The rising Red Fear led in 1938 to the establishment of the House Committee on Un-American Activities; in 1939 to the Hatch Act forbidding Communists from becoming government employees; and in 1940 to the Smith Act banning violent anti-government activities. The Cold War exacerbated previous fears of the Communists. The Alger Hiss and Rosenberg cases received national media attention. President Harry S. Truman inaugurated a loyalty check, and Congress passed the Internal Security Act and the Communist Control Act. Conservative congressmen formalised the structure of the House Un-American Committee, and the purge was on. It was onto this political, legislative, and media-aroused stage that Senator Joseph McCarthy cast his dramatic productions. Rather than its creator, McCarthy was simply a more violent and forceful propagator of the Red Scare than his predecessors had been. In The Great Fear, David Caute asserts that, ‘McCarthy’s role was historically healthy because he dramatised intolerance, lent it crude, villainous features, personalised it, and stole it away from the low-profiled bureaucrats’. What made McCarthy effective for a lengthy period of time was his manipulation of the press, the plausibility of his guilt-by-association reasoning, his attack on liberal values and institutions, and his version of the Big Lie. These were his instruments of fear.
Senator Millard Tydings, chairman of the sub-committee of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations that investigated McCarthy’s charges against the State Department, reported his group’s findings this way on 15 July, 1950: ‘Senator McCarthy and McCarthyism have been exposed for what they are and the sight is not a pretty one. McCarthy’s charges and methods are a fraud and a hoax . . . perhaps the most nefarious campaign of untruth in the history of our republic . We have seen the technique of the ‘Big Lie’ elsewhere employed by the totalitarian dictator with devastating success, utilised here for the first time on a sustained basis in our history.’
Not surprisingly, the techniques McCarthy used to engender fear of communism are now used effectively by anti-cultists Clark, Singer, the Rudins, Delgado, and others whose persistent campaigns to engender fear of the cults has reeked a similar havoc in our own day. What is the ‘Big Lie’ they tell about the NRMs?
The effects of fear
My first encounter with the extent and power of the cult fear in America was as a spectator in a Santa Monica courtroom in June 1981. I watched a family tragedy unfold as a young woman, Rebecca Foster, testified to the physical and psychological abuse she underwent at the hands of deprogrammer Ted Patrick during his kidnapping, false imprisonment, and forced deprogramming of her. What had inspired her mother, brother, and sister to attempt to force Rebecca out of her year-old Hare Krsna faith by hiring Patrick? By their own testimony, the Foster family’s fear of the cults stemmed from reading Patrick’s book, Let Our Children Go, Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman’s Snapping, and Jack Spark’s The Mind Benders.
As I sat in the courtroom after the trial, mulling over the court’s verdict that Rebecca’s family was guiltless, I realised that there was something going on in the minds of the jurors that I did not understand fully. Only later, when I read juror-interviews that talked of Rebecca’s zombie-like state and her ‘robot’ appearance on the witness stand, did I begin to realise why they had refused to believe her testimony. The foreman of the Foster jury said after the trial, ‘Her testimony was quite plastic. She was like a puppet with strings being pulled by someone else.’ In a similar fashion one cannot believe the testimony of witches.
In May 1983, I found myself back in Los Angeles, this time to serve as an expert witness in the Robin George trial (a case still under review). During the intervening two years, I had altered my original religious conversion project to include an intensive study of anti-cult literature. I was thunderstruck at the glaring weaknesses in the arguments I found in the anti-cult literature that some mental health professionals, ministers, lawyers and judges were taking seriously.
During the four years between my testifying in the Robin George trial and the publication of my book, The Dark Lord: Cult Images and The Hare Krsnas in America, I completely recast the presentation of my research. Rather than give an historical analysis of the Hare Krsnas in India and America, which I originally intended, I decided that I needed to address the cult stereotypes that we imbedded in the anti-cult literature about this and similar groups.
In The Dark Lord, I describe ‘The Great American Cult Scare’ that I now would compare to the Red Scare. There are two basic assumptions of the anti-cult critics upon which they build their fearful stereotypes. First, they insist that all NRMs are the same. They consistently list the Moonies, Scientology, The Way International, and the Hare Krsnas among the dangerous cults, in spite of the real differences they know to exist or regardless of the specific point they are attempting to make. Their presentations simply ignore the real and dramatic differences between a People’s Temple that imprisoned and killed its members in a Ghana jungle and a Hindu missionary movement like the Hare Krsnas that, for all of its exuberant excesses, never has ceased being a faith based upon the traditional Indian god, Krsna. Here, the technique of claim guilt by association is used – all NRMs are one and the same.
Second, the anti-cult propagandists, including the ones cited in the Molko case, proclaim that all cults are destructive psychologically and often physically. Groups like the Cult Awareness Network and the American Family Foundation steadfastly refuse to believe the systematic psychological and sociological studies of new religious movements that refute their claims that brainwashing is a fact in all cult adherents of NRMs. The Australian psychiatrist, Michael Ross, has shown longitudinal studies that most Krsna devotees mature and become well-adjusted the longer they are in the movement. Nonetheless, anti-cult critics like Singer and Clarke still insist that daily chanting of the name of Krsna is mentally debilitating and a form of brainwashing. Self-proclaimed experts like Singer and Clark, who have not done a single systematic and controlled psychological study of the NRMs, confirm public fears, while scholars like Ross are ignored or dismissed as academic ‘liberals’.
In my view, these two basic assumptions upon which anti-cult propaganda is built are fallacious. Not only are all NRMs not the same, even cult antagonists cannot agree upon a definition or consistent criteria for the term ‘cult’ that does not include most traditional religions as well. Furthermore, study after study, whether by a religious scholar or psychologist, has shown that the so-called cults in America like the Moonies and Hare Krsnas are less violent than their mainline religious counterparts.
Techniques of fear
It was not until I pondered the California Supreme Court decision that I understood the extent to which the fostering of cult fears over the past decades in America has succeeded in undermining even the legislated protection of the First Amendment. Historical accounts of how the Red Scare was spread over three decades in America closely approximate anti-cult techniques of propagating fear. This process has four tried and tested components:
First, McCarthy knew that guilt by association is a key technique in fear generation.
To show that one college professor holds Marxist revolutionary convictions makes it easier to paint with the same anti-communist brush all professors who favour egalitarian social or political theories. Likewise, to claim that a marginal religious group centred upon a strong and demanding leader in a cult is an effective way of associating a known evil, Jonestown, with a suspected one, the Hare Krsnas. Of course, the very act of naming a group communist or cult creates in the minds of the hearers that label as a fact – independent of what is true. Thus, epithets like cult, brainwashing, robot and zombie are impossible to refute because they have no specific reference except one associated with a generalised atrocity story – like that of Jonestown. The Rudins and other anti-cult writers effectively use this guilt-by-association technique.
A second way of generating fear is to manipulate the public media, and thereby, public opinion.
For example, in America an exaggerated story appeared in 1988 with the release of a sensationalist book by John Huber and Lindset Gruson called Monkey on a Stick. This expose of violence among the Hare Krsnas uses the murder of Stephen Bryant, a Krsna fringe devotee, as a springboard for speculation concerning the Krsnas’ teachings about violence – and confirming the Jonestown stereotype. Monkey on a Stick is historical fiction at its best and fear-mongering at its worst. We should not be surprised if the media uses this cult exposยพ to confirm the public’s fear that the Krsnas are just as dangerous as any cult, including the People’s Temple.
Dismissing contradictory and scholarly evidence by name-calling alone represents a third effective fear-mongering tactic.
Those who study the cults and plead for discriminating distinctions to be made can expect angry late night phone calls, insulting verbal barrages, and abusive name-calling. McCarthy used this technique effectively, and I have encountered this tactic regularly since I have been willing to put my reputation as a Christian minister and college professor on the line in defence of the First Amendment Freedoms for the Hare Krsnas. A ‘bleeding heart liberal’, and ‘First Amendment flunky’ are among the kinder names I have been called. What is not done is to take seriously the evidence I and other NRM-researchers have presented.
The fourth and most insidious technique to engender cult fear is the Big Lie.
What anti-cult antagonists have done in their books, literature, films and speeches is to combine the effects of the previous strategies to create a believable picture of how dangerous and deceptive the cults are. They create a generalisable picture from code words like ‘authoritarian leader’, ‘mind control’, false imprisonment’, ‘deceptive proselytising’, ‘brainwashing’ and ‘violence’. All of these hot words are woven into a general narrative that closely approximates the story of Jonestown, but can be made to fit any unfavoured marginal religious group.
The final result is an anti-cult Big Lie, a story that goes something like this: ‘A greedy or power-hungry guru or his successors seduce new converts into a completely submissive faith and life by brainwashing them. The only avenue out of the cults for a member, therefore, is by deprogramming them and breaking the cult spell.’ This is the anti-cult thesis I tested during four years of research into the literature, practice, and life of devotees in the Hare Krsna temples and farms in America. I found the generalised and anti-cult thesis wanting again and again as I measured it against the Krsna conversion stories I heard, the life of the varied temple and farm communities in which I lived, and the religious faith I saw practised.
Though I can show that the anti-cultist’s Big Lie in fallacious and does not describe the Hare Krsnas in America or India accurately, the victory words of the prosecuting attorney in the George trial drowns out my protest with his raging proclamation, ‘This decision (against the Krsnas) sends a message to all cults in this country.’ He simply draws his listeners on the jury back to the Big Lie that all NRMs are evil and interchangeable. It is his fearful and unsubstantiated story that is believed and that guides judicial decisions like that in the California George and Molko cases.
Conclusion
From what I have learned from newspaper articles published here in Hungary, I am concerned that you might be starting down the same road of religious intolerance we have forged in America. Let me be clear that I am not here to defend particular Hare Krsna devotees or communities. I do know that human nature and institutions are not perfect or without flaws. However, from reading three published essays about the ‘Helping Friend Team’, and the views of Nemeth Geza, I see signs that the Big Lie of brainwashing and the cults is being propagated in Hungary and falsely pictures the Hare Krsnas as an evil cult.
In his published writings, Nemeth Geza claims, ‘Now the Hare Krsnas, who reject drugs, have appeared to brainwash those inexperienced youngsters who are unable to defend themselves.’ He accuses the Hare Krsnas of ‘creating masses of schizophrenic and emotionally badly deformed people’. He says the Krsnas do this with ‘the psychic and social manipulation of the naรฏve teenagers’. Reminiscent of Margaret Singer’s claims in the United States, Geza does not explain how such brainwashing functions psychologically and ignores all the careful studies of brainwashing and the Krsnas that refute such unfounded claims. I have just finished a review of a decade of English literature on conversion and brainwashing that makes clear why theories of brainwashing are conflicting and why views such as those of Margaret Singer and Nemeth Geza are unfounded. Still, self-proclaimed experts will rise up to play on your fears, if you let them. The essays by Nemeth Geza also claim the Hare Krsnas were founded in California in America only twenty-five years ago. I have written a whole book showing the authenticity of this movement as a missionary form of Hindu-Krsna tradition from India, revived in the sixteenth century and extending back more than two thousand years. Nemeth Geza lumps the Hare Krsnas with other cults, like the Moonies, revealing the cult-fallacy mentioned earlier. The simple truth is that not all NRMs are violent, like the People’s Temple of Jonestown.
As I read about the formation of the ‘Helping Friend Team’, I was reminded of the Cult Awareness Network and American Family Foundation who preach fear, appeal deceptively to family loyalties, and distort their description of groups like the Krsnas which they brand as ‘cults’. Much of the criticism against the Krsnas, such as the denial of traditional religious values, bowing before a guru, the institution of Indian food, dress and rituals, represents the kind of misunderstanding of missionary faiths that Christianity has experienced in other parts of the world. Isn’t it time to send such ethnic and religious intolerance?
I would urge you to avoid succumbing to the temptations of the techniques of fear I have described. To lump all ‘cults’ together is to trust a ‘guilt by association’ logic that ignores real and major differences among groups and fails to root out the potentially illegal or dangerous practices of any religious groups – big church, small church, or cult. Beware of the misuses of television, newspapers and magazines that often exaggerate atrocity stories and then brand all NRMs guilty of the same offences. Seek out scholarly studies and witnesses to reduce unnecessary fears of this chimera called brainwashing. Finally, reject the Big Lie about both NRMs and groups like the Hare Krsnas that engenders fear.
What is at stake, finally, is all religious liberty and democratic freedom. Remember the extreme instances of religious intolerance I mentioned in the beginning of my talk. Once unfounded fears of the cults and brainwashing are spread throughout the populace by the media, loving parents can be incited to act in irrational ways, thinking they are saving their children from groups of the orthodox Christian faith.
In the conclusion of my book, The Dark Lord, I argue that anti-cult views are fundamentally anti-religious. They are suspicious of, or opposed to, any faith that requires complete religious commitment or surrender and that appeals to youthful idealism. Such standards would have deprived the world of Mother Teresa and Mahatma Gandhi. Such a view also neglects reforms of the traditional religious institutions that have too often lost touch with their young people. As a Christian minister, I would argue that this is the most important question the NRMs set before us – can we provide a religious vision and a commitment that will capture youthful energy and idealism? This is the real challenge our Krsna brethren have placed before us.