The Victoria "Cults" Inquiry: A Grounded Overview

Victoria’s Inquiry into the Recruitment Methods and Impacts of Cults and Organized Fringe Groups has drawn sustained concern from Australian faith communities and religious-liberty scholars. This overview draws together what several prominent critics — among them the religions scholar Bernard Doherty, the legal scholar Keith Thompson, and Freedom for Faith’s Mike Southon — have argued about what the Inquiry is, where it comes from, and why faith communities well beyond the “unpopular few” are concerned.

What the Inquiry is

In late April 2025 the Parliament of Victoria announced it would establish an Inquiry into the Recruitment Methods and Impacts of Cults and Organized Fringe Groups, under the Legal and Social Issues Committee and chaired by Australian Labor Party member Ella George. Its chair has framed it carefully: the inquiry, George has said, is “not about judging or questioning anyone’s beliefs,” and is “focused on the actions, not the beliefs behind them.”

The immediate impetus appears to have been the popularity of the podcast series Secrets We Keep: Pray Harder, produced by journalist Richard Baker, which began in late October 2024. Much of the early attention fell on the Geelong Revival Centre, a small Pentecostal church in Geelong that has run since the late 1950s; on the first day of public hearings it was Baker and two former members of that church who appeared. Politically, the probe was pushed by the Labor member for Geelong, Christine Couzens, alongside Victorian Attorney-General Sonya Kilkenny, and as far back as December 2024 the Rationalist Society of Australia had called on attorneys-general in every Australian state to prioritise coercive-control laws aimed at “religious cults.”

One early feature drew scholarly criticism: no Australian scholar of religion — let alone a specialist in new religious movements — had been invited to appear at the hearings, which instead heard mainly from former members and at least one well-known international anti-cult activist.

Not the first time

Despite media descriptions of an “Australia-first” inquiry, this is not new ground. As religions scholar Bernard Doherty has documented, inquiries into so-called “cults” have recurred in Australia since at least the 1960s. The prototype was the 1963 Victorian Board of Inquiry into Scientology — the “Anderson Inquiry” — which Doherty attributes partly to Cold War “brainwashing” mythology and to controversy over a rogue Scientologist’s attempt to infiltrate the Victorian branch of the Labor Party in the early 1960s.

That earlier wave left a lasting legal mark. In 1983 the Church of the New Faith — the name Scientology had adopted in Victoria after being forbidden to use its own — won a case before the full bench of the High Court of Australia that became the benchmark for how religion is defined in Australian case law. In late 2009, Senator Nick Xenophon unsuccessfully called for a Royal Commission into the Church of Scientology; the call was rejected by both major parties but supported by the Greens, who wanted it expanded to take in the Exclusive Brethren. And when a Senate committee later made a modest recommendation in the area, the Gillard government declined it — Prime Minister Gillard noting in 2010 that it is not the government’s role to interfere with individuals’ religious beliefs or practices unless they breach Australian law.

The problem with “cult”

The deepest objection the Inquiry faces is definitional. Doherty argues that no empirical or legal distinction can be drawn that separates a “cult” from a “religion.” He points to the historian of religion Philip Jenkins, who wrote in 2001 that “cult” is “a pejorative term used only by enemies or critics of the movement concerned,” and to the legal scholar and sociologist James T. Richardson, who called the word a “social weapon.”

Mike Southon, Executive Director of the Christian legal think tank Freedom for Faith, frames the same trap practically: try to define a cult, he argues, and you end up with something either so narrow that nothing qualifies, or so broad that any church you dislike does. He notes that the Inquiry’s own guidance note conceded it could not really define a cult, then listed factors — the vast majority of which describe things every church does, such as evangelism and promising salvation. Freedom for Faith warned that the Guidance Note’s proposed definition is so broad it could take in almost every mainline Christian denomination in Australia, as well as sectors of the Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist, and Hindu communities.

Coercion, “brainwashing,” and borrowed ideas

Much of the Inquiry’s language turns on “coercive control.” Doherty warns that stretching coercive-control ideas beyond their origin in the study of intimate-partner violence risks making the resulting laws legally ineffective — and is dangerous above all for the women those laws were designed to protect. He traces part of the intellectual lineage to discredited scholarship, noting that the psychologist Margaret T. Singer, whose coercive-persuasion theories he regards as unsound, was barred from giving expert testimony in U.S. courts. The result, he argues, is that loose anti-cult notions of “brainwashing” and “mind control” are being uncritically absorbed into the coercive-control space and then relayed to the Inquiry by witnesses. A parallel critique, popular among Australian scholars of religion writing in a feminist paradigm, chiefly targets male headship and complementarianism in evangelical and Pentecostal churches.

Who is in the firing line

The concern is not abstract. During the hearings, witnesses named the Australian Christian Churches (ACC) — which Southon notes is the second-biggest grouping of Christians in Australia behind the Catholic Church, and the country’s largest Pentecostal denomination — as a cult. Doherty observes that the groups named so far are mostly small minority religious communities, many socially conservative, with strict behavioural standards, traditional gender roles, and stated beliefs about gender and sexuality that diverge from the progressive side of Australian politics. The Pentecostal profile is not incidental: Scott Morrison, Australia’s first Pentecostal Prime Minister, served between 2018 and 2022.

There have been reassuring moments. When Southon pushed back against witnesses who had called the ACC a cult, the Inquiry’s chair responded that inviting witnesses does not mean the committee agrees with what they say — “we invite all sorts of people here; that doesn’t mean we agree with what they believe.”

The religious-liberty stakes

For the legal scholars, the stakes reach past this one inquiry. Keith Thompson argues that by redefining harm so that any personal slight becomes actionable in law, the Inquiry seeks to subvert the framework of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966). He grounds the concern in the 1983 High Court judgment, where Chief Justice Mason and his eventual successor held that it is not appropriate for a court or a government to focus on the truth or falsity of religious doctrines, and that the chief function of a legal definition of religion is to mark out an area within which a person is free to believe and act on that belief without restraint. The Court warned that the section 116 constitutional guarantees would lose their character as a bastion of freedom if religion were defined so as to exclude minority religions outside the mainstream. Thompson reaches further back still, to Thomas Jefferson — who drafted Virginia’s Statute for Religious Freedom in 1777 and held that the legitimate powers of government extend only to acts injurious to others, since a neighbour professing twenty gods or none “neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”

Thompson also argues that Victoria has “form.” He cites the 2014 Cobaw decision against the Exclusive Brethren, in which the Court of Appeal majority disregarded religious-freedom precedent; the prosecution of Cardinal Pell, whose Court of Appeal conviction was unanimously overturned by the High Court; and Premier Dan Andrews’ Covid lockdowns, which he describes as among the most intrusive in the world in their curtailment of religious practice. Doherty adds Victoria’s Change or Suppression (Conversion) Practices Prohibition Act 2021 as an example of the state pushing activist-driven legislation over religious objection.

What the critics advise

None of the four argues that genuinely harmful conduct should go unpunished — the disagreement is about method. Southon’s advice to the Victorian government is direct: do not try to create a legal definition of a cult, and legislate against individual behaviour rather than against what a community thinks, says, or does. He draws an analogy to the child-sexual-abuse Royal Commission: abuse occurring in churches was a reason to educate and prevent, not to ban the churches. He presses the definitional point to its logical end — banning organisations of passionate commitment would, taken seriously, require banning unions, environmental groups, and every political party — and suggests dropping the word “cult” altogether in favour of “group-based coercion,” which, he concedes, still cannot be defined for a legal context. He is also alert to the danger of an inquiry as a stage: a Greens MP, he notes, used parliamentary privilege to accuse a large evangelical church of failing to disclose child sexual abuse, even though the Child Guardian’s office had found the church acted appropriately.

The through-line across all four is a single warning: an inquiry that cannot define its central term, but legislates around it anyway, is likely to capture far more than the handful of groups it was aimed at.

Further reading

The primary sources this overview synthesises are republished in full on this site:

• The Victoria, Australia, Inquiry on “Cults.” 1. The Australian Context — Bernard Doherty
• The Victoria, Australia, Inquiry on “Cults.” 2. Dangerous for All Religions — Bernard Doherty
• The Victoria, Australia, Inquiry into “Cults”: Why Christians Are Concerned — Alex Woolnough interviewing Mike Southon
• The Victoria, Australia, Anti-Cult Inquiry: Interview with Professor Keith Thompson — Marco Respinti interviewing Keith Thompson