A Checklist for High Control Groups and Cults

In my Patheos column Leadership on Fire, I explored the ideas behind cults in my post, What Makes a Cult a Cult? Space didn’t allow me to include my checklist for High Control Groups and Cults, thus I am posting that here, as a companion piece.

___ Group appears innovative and exclusive; leader claims to be breaking with tradition or restoring an ancient tradition while offering something new, different, or new and different; involvement with the group can heal the world and all its ills.

___ A charismatic, determined, and domineering leader or leaders, totalitarian and messianic in personality; claims to have a special mission in life, and this is it.

___ An authoritative power structure; control and decisions come to the control of one or a few individual persons.

___ Wisdom claimed by leader(s), a great amount of infallibility declared about decisions.

___ Wisdom credited to leader(s) by members; members trust all decisions made by leader(s).

___ A great amount of external political power, influence, or the desire to obtain said power, by political maneuvers or other means including overthrow or revolution.

___ Perspective of the group is absolutely and truly infallible and adequate to explain everything.

___ Concepts taught are doctrinally and morally error-free; doctrines are unchangeable and inflexible, even denying doctrinal alterations occurring historically.

___ Repeated changing of the rules while claiming the same level of infallibility and eternal truth and doctrine that remains unchanged; telling people that these new teachings have in some form always been taught.

___ Altering of history or facts of history to somehow suit the claims of the group.

___ Leader(s) encourage(s) veneration and allegiance to him/her/themselves.

___ Top priority goals, even though unspoken, are recruitment and fundraising.

___ A great amount of internal wealth; a great emphasis upon monetary donations.

___ Potential converts are drawn through a profoundly mystical experience (prophecy, miracle, etc.) from group or leader(s), encouraging potentiate to join the group because of a specific calling that can only be fulfilled within the group; experience often fabricated, manufactured, or unfactual.

___ Denies alternate or negative experiences within the group, citing that those who have left the group were poorly educated, improperly taught beliefs, or are simply spiteful; denies that bad things are done by individuals within the group, particularly leader(s).

___ Great emphasis placed upon attracting new members; excessive amounts of proselytizing.

___ An intensity of efforts directed at preventing or reconverting dropouts through a number of methods including shunning, visitation, and making it very difficult to leave the group from a membership perspective.

___ The practice of branding members through dress, physical markings, or widely practiced behaviors, antisocial or not.

___ Salvation is possible only within the group.  Those who leave the group or do not come to the group are doomed.

___ High demand for purity and perfection only obtainable through the group, and even then, impossible to keep.

___ Pre-group existence and group existence are narrowly and decisively interpreted through absolute doctrine, even when experience contradicts doctrine.

___ Emphasis on experiencing the group and its experience before obtaining information about the group; unwillingness to disclose even simple matters; evasiveness on key issues or even simple issues.

___ Members think within narrow parameters of group’s doctrine; expressed through language specific to the group.

___ Use of jargon, clichés, or expressions repeated over and over again; words and terms used only within the group, and therefore only understood by the group; or using words and terms used by other groups, religious or otherwise, but with radically different meanings intended to confuse non-members and mislead them into thinking the group believes one thing, when in reality, they believe something else.

___ A double-standard of ethics, encouraging openness and honesty within the group, but dishonesty, deception, cover-up, and secret behavior when dealing with outsiders.

___ The willingness to bear the soul; divulging of information that one would normally be unwilling to share and remains unwilling only with those not in the group.

___ The use of censorship and control over members’ access to outside opinions on the group, its doctrines, or leader(s).

___ Encouragement or forbidding members to stop communication with “outside” family and friends except for conversion purposes.

___ Forbidden contact with “outsiders” particularly to discuss religious issues unless in the context of proselytizing.

___ Intense concepts of “us” (the pure, the group) vs. “them” (the world, the impure outsiders) creating an antagonism with society and social behavior(s).

___ Justification of group and leader(s), even when evidence convicts to the opposite of claims.

___ Extreme grimness, particularly on the issue of disapproval concerning jokes about group, its doctrines, or leader(s).

___ Use of sexual manipulation of members by leader9s), or a great control of sex lives of members; outright prohibition on sexual matters, such as birth control; sexual abuse of members, adult, child, or both.

___ Members are all expected to adhere to rigid guidelines, all within the same way, with no exceptions or interpretations.

___ Sacrifice of lives or children’s lives for the sake of the doctrine.

___ Use of traditional or non-traditional religious or spiritual symbolism with an alternate or altered meaning.

___ Severe levels of paranoia involving real or imaginary enemies, and the perceived power of their opponents.

___ Endorsement of violence when used by or for the group or its leader(s) while condemning the use of violence when used by opponents or opposing causes.

___ A great number of subsidiary groups using names different from that of the main group with same objective as group.

___ Belief in the coming extinction of all those not affiliated with the group; those who are not in the group are not worthy of life and shall in a coming day be annihilated while the sole “righteous,” the group, shall survive.

(c) 2003, 2016, 2023 Lee Ann B. Marino. All rights reserved.