The following is a transcript of a live chat with Prof. David Rodier.
Prof. David Rodier
— Six years after federal agents raided the Branch Davidian compound at Waco, Texas, the controversy surrounding the cult and leader David Koresh lingers....
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Moderator at 1:57pm ET
Welcome Prof. Rodier.
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Kara from berlex.com at 1:57pm ET
Could you list items that would indicate a religious sect is in fact a cult?
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Prof. David Rodier at 2:01pm ET
In the field of religious studies, we generally don't like to use the word "cult." To brand a religion as a cult, at least in popular usage, is to say that it is an illegitimate group and ought not to be allowed to function freely in the society. According to our Constitution, we have free exercise of religion, and that means that no religious belief can be criminal as such or forbidden by the government. Religious groups, and members of religious groups, may well be guilty of criminal acts and those acts are of course subject to prosecution like any other criminal activities. But the religion cannot itself be banned. There are a lot of dissident religious groups that seem to be very far out of the mainstream, and we may not like them -- we may disapprove of them -- but given our country's commitment to religious freedom, we must tolerate them.
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Mike from greenwich.com at 2:01pm ET
How does a cult get started? Is the key ingredient a highly charismatic individual like a Manson, Jones, or Koresh?
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Prof. David Rodier at 2:03pm ET
Most new religions or nontraditional religions do have a charismatic leader. So do most new political and social movements. So, yes, they tend to have a charismatic individual as a leader. But charismatic religious leadership is not peculiar to these religious groups.
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Jon from Maine from proxy.aol.com at 2:04pm ET
With all the new government laws and regulations coming out concerning health and safety where the government feels it is acting in the best interest of the citizens (i.e. smoking, gun control etc) are laws regulating religions foreseeable?
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Prof. David Rodier at 2:09pm ET
Not unless we change the First Amendment. The courts have, over the past several decades, been very careful in cases involving any religious group to make a distinction between religious beliefs and religious practices and activities, which can be regulated by law. The free exercise clause of the First Amendment has generally been taken as forbidding the government from making any laws specifying permitted or non-permitted religious beliefs. The courts have, in general, held that only overriding social need permits the regulation of religious practice. Instances of this have been requiring the Amish to put reflective brightly-colored decals on their black buggies and requiring mass inoculation of students at a Christian Science school when there was a local epidemic.
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Elan from cae.wisc.edu at 2:09pm ET
Why is the fear of cults so prevalent in American society?
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Prof. David Rodier at 2:11pm ET
I think, basically, it's the general fear of anything strange or different. We're not sure how the members of a group that we see as radically different are going to behave ... and so, we tend to fear them. Most nontraditional religious groups have beliefs and patterns of behavior which are out of the mainstream ... and so, we tend to fear them. It might also be the case that if we reject firm religious commitments ourselves, we may feel a little guilty and hostile when we come in contact with individuals whose lives are governed by their religious beliefs.
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Chris From Chicago from mvn1.interaccess.com at 2:13pm ET
The Branch Davidians stood out in part because of their storage and anticipated use of weapons. There were, and are, other religious groups that are similar in this way. Did the combination of religion and guns motivate us to confront the Branch Davidians?
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Prof. David Rodier at 2:15pm ET
The reports about the Branch Davidians and their guns seems to be a bit ambiguous. Apparently, the local sheriff's office had already investigated and been allowed in to check out the compound and had had no sever problems with the alleged storage of weapons. So, I'm not sure that the combination of guns and religion is necessarily a problem. Personally, I'd rather see religious groups in a society advocating only harmony and peaceful coexistence. But lots of religions have a different view of the world.
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Paul from MD from bcbsblue.com at 2:15pm ET
It seems like we only hear about the extreme religious groups. Which gives them a bad rap. Are there groups out there that are acceptable?
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Prof. David Rodier at 2:18pm ET
Well I'd hope that any religious group that doesn't engage directly in criminal activity would be acceptable. Certainly there are a lot of non-traditional minority religions, which have joined the religious mainstream. About 150 years ago, the Mormons were considered an extreme religious group -- and in the 1870s, the federal government even suppressed their corporate charter. But in 1952, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir was honored performers at President Eisenhower's inauguration. So, what are seen as extreme religious groups can, and often are, accepted into the broad spectrum of accepted religions.
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Prof. David Rodier at 2:19pm ET
By the way, extreme religious beliefs might be "extreme" in a number of different directions. The Amish are, after all, rather extreme in their beliefs about non-violence and absence of electrical equipment.
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Peter in Utah from discoverbrokerage.com at 2:20pm ET
Religion has become a way to control the weak minded. We need to stop people like Koresh before they get a chance to get started, wouldn't you agree?
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Prof. David Rodier at 2:24pm ET
Emphatically NO. I do not agree. I think it's very dangerous for any individual -- and especially for the government -- to prescribe for an individual what they may or may not believe and what groups they may or may not join. Obviously we have people who need to be institutionalized because they are not able to run their own lives, because of physical or mental problems. But we have very strict legal standards, which must be satisfied, before we rule a person as incompetent. I certainly would not like to see these standards weakened, and some group either governmental or regulatory suddenly deciding that large numbers of people must not be allowed to make decisions about their most basic values and commitments. Nor am I happy with the thought that either the government or some private group would be given the power to decide what religions are permitted.
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Tina from [216.161.38.1] at 2:25pm ET
What's your opinion of "deprogramming"? I've heard of a number of instances where it appeared that someone's parents simply didn't approve of their child's non-mainstream religious beliefs. "Cult" wasn't the real issue.
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Prof. David Rodier at 2:29pm ET
There have been a number of court cases involving self-described "deprogrammers," and usually the persons who have been the subjects of the "deprogramming" have won damages. The basic concept behind "deprogramming" is a rather loose version of "brainwashing." It's not at all clear that any religious group has done anything like the alleged brainwashing, which is supposed to have happened to American prisoners in the Korean and Vietnam wars. The usual activities which new converts to many different religions (either mainstream or non-traditional) engage in hardly constitute "brainwashing." I don't find the idea of either brainwashing or deprogramming very helpful in understanding religious commitment.
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Denise from [158.72.82.92] at 2:29pm ET
Why do you think nontraditional religions are now becoming more and more popular?
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Prof. David Rodier at 2:31pm ET
I'm not sure that they are becoming more and more popular. I think that we are noticing them a lot more than we have in the past. But the statistical studies which have been done since the 1970s seem to suggest that the percentage of people involved in such groups is fairly constant.
And historians of religion in the U.S. seem to think that the figures from the 1970s on probably reflect the patterns of religious commitment for at least most of the 19th century and 20th century as well.
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Mike from greenwich.com at 2:32pm ET
Are there any particular "millennium cults" out there that we should know about? 1999 seems like prime recruitment time for anyone preaching "End of the World" scenarios.
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Prof. David Rodier at 2:39pm ET
It's certainly true that people who use our calendar seem to be very excited about "the new millennium." We should remember that there are a number of different calendars out there, which don't see next year as anything special. However, for those of us using the Western/Christian calendar, the new millennium does mark a major psychological milestone and there certainly are a lot of religious fears which seem also to be a Y2K phenomenon.
End-of-the-world cults have been a fairly regular phenomenon in European and American history, since at least the middle of the 1300s. In the U.S., in 1848-49, many people thought that the world was coming to an end and did all sorts of eccentric things like selling off all their possessions, dressing in white robes, and standing on top of hills waiting for the world to come to end. The U.S. survived these eccentric end-of-the-worlders .. and so, I think we can probably survive other end-of-the-world/millennium religious groups. Personally, I think that there's no need to compound Y2K problems by introducing religious panic on top of everything else.
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J Cooper from [208.25.126.3], at 2:39pm ET
What do you think should be done about religious practices that endanger the lives of children. A specific example would be refusal of blood transfusions by Jehovah's Witnesses. JW children are often allowed to die because of this belief. Yet if a child is beaten to death because 'the devil was in him' or malnourished (both of these examples have happened) for religious reasons, it isn't tolerated. This seems inconsistent to me.
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Prof. David Rodier at 2:45pm ET
I think it is inconsistent, but the whole area of parental rights is one that we have not had any social consensus on. When we talk about the health of children, and the right of the government to override parental decisions about health care, we can construe this in a very narrow way to allow intervention only in cases of severe medical emergency. Or we can give a much looser construction and decide that anything in the child's environment which might be considered as affecting physical and mental wellbeing are subject to government regulation. Neither the courts nor the general population seems to be comfortable in deciding exactly where the line should be drawn. Jehovah's Witnesses have been successfully prosecuted for refusing blood transfusions and have been unsuccessfully prosecuted for the same kind of action. There is, as yet, no general agreement on what should or shouldn't be done about these kind of actions and the religious motivation for making decisions about children's care is only part of a general discussion of parental rights which is still going on.
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Kerrith from [206.190.35.147] at 2:45pm ET
What do you think Waco's long-term impact has been/will be on religious tolerance in this country, particularly for groups with extreme right-wing beliefs?
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Prof. David Rodier at 2:51pm ET
I would hope that a tragedy like Waco would make all of us -- both individuals and governmental authorities -- much more sensitive to the dangers of religious confrontation. Religious beliefs are a fundamental part of a person's sense of self-identity. We cannot change or compromise our religious beliefs without feeling that we have become a quite different person. Since this is the case, any confrontation over religious beliefs -- whether these are right wing, or left wing, or centrist -- has the potential for violence, either on the part of the believers or on the part of those who deny the legitimacy of the religious beliefs. During the Waco confrontation, a number of religious experts within the academic community told the government that the situation was being handled in a way that was virtually guaranteed to have a tragic outcome and that such a confrontation was not necessary, even if the government's belief about the members of the Branch Davidian were accurate. That the desired investigation could have been conducted in a way, which was respectful of the Branch Davidian's belief, was clearly possible. Although some people may see the anniversary of the Waco tragedy as a time to gut the First Amendment's protections of all religious beliefs, I would hope that more of us would see the message of this anniversary to be the need for greater understanding and tolerance of religious diversity in our country.
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Moderator at 2:53pm ET
Thank you very much for joining us today Prof. Rodier.
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