25AR30-15

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AR 30:15 - The New Yorker's Easter attack on Christianity

In this issue:

HISTORY OF CULTISM - four diverse views

MORMONISM - BYU study examines "toxic perfectionism" among LDS youth

NEW TESTAMENT REVISIONISM - attempting to "dismantle the idea of Christianity as a faith forged in suffering"

Apologia Report 30:15 (1,704)
May 2, 2025

HISTORY OF CULTISM

"How Have Cults Shaped American History?" (History Today, 75:3 March 2025) -- Might this be described as a collage approach?

   Susan-Mary Grant (Professor, American History, Newcastle University) begins with "The idea of the cult represents the very core of the American Dream" -- "Describe something as a cult to a modern audience and what will most likely spring to mind is the Manson Family murders (1969), the 900 Jonestown murder-suicides (1978), the Branch Davidian murders and mass suicides (Waco, 1993), or the Heaven's Gate suicides (1997). These examples are extremes, the dramatic and therefore visible tip of an iceberg of some 10,000 cults that exist in America. ... The modern cult is, as popularly portrayed, about mind control and, in its worst manifestation, murder. ...

   "Yet there is more to the idea of the cult than this. Frequently grounded in an apocalyptic ideology, the modern American cult is in many ways a concentration, and a corruption, of the utopian impulses that formed the nation itself."

   As Grant sees it, "the secessionist impulses that informed the first European settlements in North America in the 17th century shaped the nature of the nation eventually created there, the emotional drivers at its heart. Such was the nature of utopia as Thomas More first conceived of it in 1516.... In the desire to be distinctive, different, and better, the city on a hill, separate from but visible to the people around it, became an ideal to which they might aspire, but also a community from which they were excluded. The idea of the cult, in short, represents the very core of the American Dream."

   Joshua Paddison (author, Unholy Sensations: A Story of Sex, Scandal, and California's First Cult Scare) <www.tinyurl.com/23ysdp2p> adds that "in the early 1890s, American newspapers started using cult to refer to small religious movements outside the Christian mainstream. ... 

   "Drawing on traditions of anti-Catholicism, anti-Islam, and anti-Mormonism, cults were demonised as not just strange, but dangerously un-American. By the mid-1890s Protestant ministers had joined journalists in denouncing the threat that cults represented to morality and democracy. Religious movements such as spiritualism, Christian Science, and Theosophy were described as cults. ...

   "The idea of the cult took hold at the turn of the century because it encapsulated fears held by Americans during an era defined by industrialisation and immigration."

   Megan Goodwin (author of Abusing Religion: Literary Persecution, Sex Scandals, and American Minority Religions) <www.tinyurl.com/25fkctb4> reports: "Less well known is the Immigration Act of 1965, without which none of these movements might have landed in the US.

   "The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act repealed quotas set by the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) and the 1924 Immigration Act, both of which had severely curtailed Asian immigration to the US. Passed by Lyndon B. Johnson, the Act facilitated a surge of Asian immigration, and an influx of 'eastern' religions such as Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, and Korean Christianity, as well as new movements, such as Hare Krishnas, that were influenced by them. Respectable parents were horrified that their children were embracing 'cults' that rejected traditional values. This 'cult scare' resulted in multiple high-profile lawsuits against the new movements – in 1989 the George family sued the International Society For Krishna Consciousness Of California, winning an initial $32.5 million (later reduced) – as well as a boom in the 'deprogramming' industry (which removed people, often forcibly, from 'cults') and a broad dismissal of 'cult' members as irrational, coerced, or both. The moral panic culminated in the 1978 Jonestown massacre, widely remembered today as brainwashed mass suicide (and cheap punchline) rather than a devastating example of anti-Black violence – the majority of its victims were Black women – perpetuated against a community hoping to create a fairer world."

   Edd Graham-Hyde (Associate Lecturer of Humanities, University of Central Lancashire) reports: "It is fair to say the [Church of Scientology] has not responded favourably to scrutiny. In 1973 the Guardian's Office (GO) of the CoS began 'Operation Snow White' against the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and other government agencies.... In 1974 the GO successfully planted listening devices in IRS offices, and thereby learned of an imminent audit. By 1975 it had acquired 30,000 pages of IRS documents. It was not until 1977 that the FBI discovered the operation and raided the GO. ...

   "In retaliation to the FBI raids, the CoS 'declared war' on the federal government with continuous lawsuits and other legal challenges, arguing that it should be afforded the same rights as other religions. ... When the IRS recognised the CoS as tax exempt in 1993, David Miscavige, leader of the CoS since 1986, declared that the 'war is over'.

   "Whether or not the IRS should be arbitrators of deciding what is, or is not, a religion in US law, Scientology was declared one. The CoS' conspiratorial thinking and shady operations had, to an extent, been justified." <www.tinyurl.com/3kx8ca83>

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MORMONISM

"BYU study examines 'toxic perfectionism' in the LDS church" by M.J. Jewkes (ABC4 News, Mar 10 '25) -- "Over the past eight years researchers from Brigham Young University have studied perfectionism in young people and its impact on religiosity and mental health, revealing some surprising results.

   "Scholars define perfectionism as a tendency to strive for perfection, intolerance for mistakes, and being overly critical of oneself or others. Led by Dr. Justin Dyer, BYU's team of researchers aimed to understand how this could affect religious and non-religious youth.

   "The team's research began by focusing on young people between the ages of 12 to 14. The team followed their growth and change until the group reached the ages of 20 to 22. Half of the group was made up of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, while the other half came from various other religious backgrounds and affiliations. ...

   "Scholars have previously noted <www.tinyurl.com/552783vm> that perfectionism is likely elevated among members of the Utah-based church."

   But - contrary to previous research - "the team's data showed that just 12% of Latter-day Saint youth experienced high levels of perfectionism, while 20% of atheist and agnostic youth experienced the same.

   "Dyer says this unexpected finding is due to a distinction among many Latter-day Saints between perfectionism and high standards. ...

   "It's about how you feel about yourself when you don't meet those standards," Dyer said.

   "However, data also showed that former members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints experienced high levels of perfectionism more than any other group with 27% of youth having perfectionist traits." <www.tinyurl.com/jppfam2t>

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NEW TESTAMENT REVISIONISM

"We're Still Not Done with Jesus" by Adam Gopnik  (New Yorker, Mar 24 '25) -- This may as well have been titled "I'm Still Not Done with Jesus." A secular humanist, Gopnik has been "celebrated for his long tenure as a staff writer at The New Yorker." <www.tinyurl.com/bdd5pjk3> Here he begins by reviewing the career of controversial Princeton professor emeritus Elaine Pagels, "who has written many imposing and engrossing books on early Christianity," to which he adds his own opinions. Then he discusses her recent release: Miracles and Wonder (just in time for Easter) <www.tinyurl.com/4yjdudad> which Gopnik sees as an update to her corpus.

   After this, Gopnik engages with the work of four other lesser-known critics of the New Testament. Introducing the first: "Indeed, the Gospels don't even present themselves as history, the way other chronicles of the time did. 'Whether one considers the collection of early Christian gospels, the various apostolic acta, the assortment of apocalypses, or the burgeoning stock of hagiographa,' Richard C. Miller argues in his 2015 study, 'Resurrection and Reception in Early Christianity,' the reader finds 'nothing deserving of the genus 'historiography.'" <www.tinyurl.com/ydvwhkux> Gopnik also notes that Miller "approvingly cites Derrida - with its skepticism toward 'foundationalist' thought."

   Next up: "The most accessible statement of this new paradigm may come from Robyn Faith Walsh, a professor at the University of Miami. ... Walsh argues in her 2021 book, 'The Origins of Early Christian Literature,' that the Gospels, whatever else they may be, are, first and foremost, Greek literature."

   This is followed by: "At the extreme edge of this revisionism is the work of Richard Carrier, whose book 'On the Historicity of Jesus' (2014) forcefully presents the 'mythicist' view - the argument that no historical Jesus ever existed. ...

   "Neither Miller nor Walsh would describe themselves as mythicists; indeed, both keep a wary if friendly distance from Carrier. (Neither mentions him in their bibliographies, but both have made peaceable references to him in interviews.) They could instead be described as postmodernists - Walsh regularly cites [Pierre] Bourdieu, as Miller cites Derrida."

   Christian intolerance was not simply a response to persecution, contends Notre Dame professor Candida Moss in "The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom" (2013). "Her book, as the title suggests, attempts to dismantle the idea of Christianity as a faith forged in suffering. She argues, instead, that it constructed a cult of victimhood while stamping out dissent and violently opposing any pluralism of thought." 

   However, it is Gopnik who set the tone for the entire feature, when he writes scornfully of accounts of Christ's resurrection: "Elvis, for one, was seen by many in the years following his death, with a newspaper report of a sighting in Kalamazoo at least as reliable as the spotty accounts shared by fervent [Christian] believers two millennia ago." <www.tinyurl.com/4nv7en28> (Ironically published in the print edition of the March 31, 2025, issue, with the headline "Do You Know Jesus?.")

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