What is the anti-cult movement?

The word “cult” is, in the judgment of the scholars who study the movements it is aimed at, a pejorative rather than a category. Legal scholar and sociologist James T. Richardson calls it a “social weapon” [1]. The anti-cult movement is the milieu that keeps the label in use: the activists and campaign organisations that press governments and the public to act against groups they identify as “cults”. Analysing Victoria’s 2025 inquiry, the Australian scholar of religions Bernard Doherty warned that loose ideas with origins in that milieu (chiefly “brainwashing” and “mind control”) were being uncritically absorbed into the popular coercive-control conversation and relayed to the inquiry by witnesses.

From “brainwashing” to “coercive control”

The milieu’s signature ideas are older than today’s vocabulary. Doherty traces them to Cold War-era concerns: he attributes Victoria’s 1963 Anderson inquiry into Scientology partly to “the development of a mythology of ‘brainwashing’” [1]. In their crudest form, he argues, such interpretations rest on “dubious and discredited scholarship”, particularly that of psychologist Margaret T. Singer, who was barred from giving expert testimony in U.S. courts.

Their modern carrier, on Doherty’s account, is “coercive control”: the laws bearing that name have their legal home in the prevention of domestic violence, and their expansion beyond that purpose “risks making them legally ineffective”, dangerous above all “for women and other victims of domestic and family violence, whom these laws are designed to protect”.

In Australia

Inquiries into so-called “cults” have recurred in Australia since at least the 1960s; the prototype is the 1963 Victorian Board of Inquiry into Scientology (the “Anderson Inquiry”), which produced a highly prejudicial report condemning Scientology [2]. In late 2009 Senator Nick Xenophon called, unsuccessfully, for a Royal Commission into the Church of Scientology; both major parties in the Federal Parliament rejected the call. Declining the senate recommendation that followed, the Gillard government’s position in 2010 was that “it is not the Government’s role to interfere with the religious beliefs or practices of individuals, unless they are in breach of Australian laws”.

In the current Victorian inquiry, Doherty’s observation is about who gets heard: as of his writing, no Australian scholar of religion (“let alone an academic specializing in the study of New Religious Movements”) had been invited to appear at the hearings, which had “primarily heard from former members and at least one well-known international anti-cult activist”. Beyond parliament, the Rationalist Society of Australia (vocal in its support of the inquiry) had called on state attorneys general as far back as December 2024 “to prioritise the introduction of coercive control laws that would effectively deal with coercive, harmful and abusive practices within religious cults”.

Anti-cult movement

From “brainwashing” to “coercive control”

In Australia

Further Reading