“Heavens Gate: Cult of Cults” - A Jehovah’s Witness Viewer Response
The following article is a viewer response to the documentary miniseries Heaven’s Gate: Cult of Cults on HBO Max about the Heaven’s Gate religious group and their leader Marshall Applewhite.
When I was a devout Jehovah’s Witness (JW), I would not have dared to watch a documentary like HBO Max’s Heaven’s Gate: Cult of Cults. Because of the cognitive effort required to deny the similarities to my beloved organization, I avoided documentaries about Charles Manson, The Peoples Temple (Jim Jones), Scientology, and the like.
In general, a JW’s well-oiled psychological defense mechanisms are triggered upon hearing the word “cult”. From a psychological perspective, this defense mechanism is called Rationalization. According to John M. Grohol, Psy.D. rationalization “is putting something into a different light or offering a different explanation for one’s perceptions or behaviors in the face of a changing reality” (Grohol, 2016)
An excellent example of rationalization can be seen on the Frequently Asked Questions page of Watchtower Bible & Tract Society’s (WTS) official website JW.org in an article that comes up as the 4th result in a Google search of the question: “Are Jehovah’s Witnesses a Cult?” (Watchtower, 2021).
WTS states, “the term ‘cult’ means different things to different people. However, consider two common perceptions regarding cults and why those perceptions don’t apply to us”. (WTS)
The authors then use a logical fallacy called a strawman defense; a “fallacious argument that involves the distortion of an opponent’s view in order to make it more extreme and therefore less acceptable, thus easier to attack.” (Schumann et al, 2019). WTS distills the characteristics of a cult into two reductive elements: “a new or unorthodox religion” and “a dangerous religious sect with a human leader” (Watchtower, 2011).
Having defeated these two strawman opponents, the article sums up “Far from being a dangerous cult, Jehovah’s Witnesses practice a religion that benefits themselves and others in the community” (WTS).
End of discussion.
It is for the above reason that I choose to avoid the term “cult” in my book, A Voice from Inside - Notes On Religious Trauma Syndrome in a Captive Organization and in most of my published articles. I hope to avoid a semantic debate and use more academic terms such as New Religious Movement (NRM), High Demand Religious Group (HDGR), and Captive Organization.
Eerie Similarities
That being said, as an awakening Physically-In-Mentally-Out (PIMO) JW, I gobbled up HBO’s 4-episode documentary in one blissfully bingeful Sunday afternoon.
Just like WTS, the Heaven’s Gate group displays sociopsychological peculiarities common to all ideologically totalist environments. In A Voice From Inside - Notes On Religious Trauma Syndrome In a Captive Organization, I apply researcher Robert Jay Lifton’s Eight Criteria of Thought Reform to WTS. These “eight deadly sins” (Lifton, 1989) of thought reform are obvious in the Heaven’s Gate community too, although to a more extreme degree.
One of Lifton’s eight criteria is called “Loading the Language”. “Loading the Language” applies to the use of specialized vocabulary within a closed community to strengthen in-group comradery and alienate outsiders. In Heaven’s Gate, the group distributed a written manual to new members with a list of alternative terms for everyday items; the kitchen was the “Nutri-lab”, members’ bodies “vehicles”.
Loading the language as a single criterion doesn’t categorically condemn a group to cult-hood. Anyone who has begun a career in a specialized industry knows that getting up to speed with technical acronyms can be overwhelming at first. But when language is so completely altered that outsiders can not comprehend the communication of in-group members, the group begins to feel even more misunderstood by mainstream society and further isolate themselves.
After noticing some other eerie linguistic similarities (the use of “our Heavenly Father”, “the Kingdom of the Heavens”, “the truth”, and replacing the lyrics of popular songs with esoteric theological vocabulary - all of which I experience regularly as a JW), my jaw dropped in Episode 3, The Second Harvest. The episode contains clips of a radio interview with Heaven’s Gate members that will send chills down the spine of anyone with family or friends associated with WTS. After some time listening to the group’s indistinguishable jargon, the interviewer asks them: “How do you know you are not brainwashed?”
“In a lot of ways, we hope that we are”, reply the cadets.
Compare that response to the following quotes published by WTS:
“It is certainly true that we have been brainwashed!” (Watchtower, 1986)
“Some said that I was being brainwashed. In all honesty, my brain needed cleansing” (Watchtower, 2011)
“Some said that I was being brainwashed. In all honesty, my brain needed to be washed”
(Watchtower, 2011)
Thought Terminating Cliché & The Arresting Power of Synonyms
The above is an example of Lifton’s “thought-terminating cliché”; an expression that stifles further thought and discussion when a conversation diverges into territory that threatens the belief systems of the group. “I needed to be brainwashed” is a classic example from the JW community. No further discussion.
As mentioned earlier, something similar can be said of the word “cult”. In a sense it is its own thought-terminating cliché; stifling conversation and presenting interlocutors with an insurmountable impasse:
“You are in a cult”, “No I’m not”, “Yes you are”, “No, I’m…”
The only way to break through faith-protecting defense mechanisms supported by esoteric language and thought-terminating cliché is to use synonyms that bypass normative thinking. If we seek to awaken cult members to their conditioned psychology, we cannot succumb to reductive vocabulary ourselves.
What if the radio interviewer had instead asked, “What percentage of your thinking has been influenced by your societal environment?”
Or perhaps, “How often do the restrictions of your community conflict with your individual intuition of right and wrong?”
How would you answer those questions?
References:
Grohol, John M. (2016) 15 common defense mechanisms. PsychCentral. Retrieved from: https://psychcentral.com/lib/15-common-defense-mechanisms
Lifton, R. J. (1989) Thought reform and the psychology of totalism: A study of “brainwashing” in China W.W. Norton & Company
Schumann, J., Zufferey, S., & Oswald, S. (2019). What makes a straw man acceptable? Three experiments assessing linguistic factors. Journal of Pragmatics, 141, 1–15. https://doi-org.ezproxy.umgc.edu/10.1016/j.pragma.2018.12.009
Watchtower Bible & Tract Society of Pennsylvania (2011). Are Jehovah’s Witnesses a Cult? Watchtower Bible & Tract Society of New York, Inc. Brooklyn, New York. Retrieved from: https://www.jw.org/en/jehovahs-witnesses/faq/are-jehovahs-witnesses-a-cult/
Watchtower Bible & Tract Society of Pennsylvania (1986). Kingdom proclaimers report-they will not prevail against you. The Watchtower January 1, page 27. Watchtower Bible & Tract Society of New York, Inc. Brooklyn, New York. Retrieved from: https://wol.jw.org/en/wol/library/r1/lp-e/all-publications/watchtower/the-watchtower-1986/january-1
Watchtower Bible & Tract Society of Pennsylvania (2011). The bible changes lives. The Watchtower, May 1, page 30. Watchtower Bible & Tract Society of New York, Inc. Brooklyn, New York. Retrieved from: https://wol.jw.org/en/wol/library/r1/lp-e/all-publications/watchtower/the-watchtower-2011/public-edition/may-1
