Interview with Stuart Wright on the Theme of "Cults"

Stuart Wright is an American sociologist, professor of sociology and director of research at Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas. He has studied religious movements for some thirty years, beginning with doctoral research on how and why members leave the movements that were most controversial in the United States at the time. He wrote a book on the 1993 federal standoff at Waco, published by the University of Chicago Press, and he appeared before the congressional hearings that re-examined the government’s handling of the incident. In this interview with CICNS he discusses attrition and apostasy in new religious movements, the role of anti-cult networks, and his critique of the federal operation against the Branch Davidians.

CICNS interview. (English translation of the interview published on the CICNS YouTube channel on 3 July 2009. The video carries a French voice-over dub of remarks Stuart Wright delivered in English; this text is translated from that French dub, so the wording should not be treated as the speaker’s original English. The French transcript was machine-transcribed from the video and cleaned before translation; passages the machine could not reliably hear are marked [inaudible].)

[Wright]: I am Stuart Wright, director of research in the Office of Research and professor of sociology at Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas, about an hour and a half west of Houston. I have been studying religious movements for about 30 years.

I began asking questions about religious movements when I began developing a doctoral thesis. There was a great deal of public discussion and controversy around the belief that converts to religious movements were somehow crushed, that they were mentally captured by these groups, and that it was difficult, if not impossible, to leave. I decided to do a study on leaving, on how people got out.

And I quickly realized that the attrition rates, or the leaving rates, were very, very high. In fact, I found that the advantage of the waiting time in one of these religious movements, and I concentrated my studies on Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church, on the Children of God and Hare Krishna, which, at the time, were probably the three most controversial groups in the United States. And what I found is that they did not retain their members well at all. In fact, they were leaving at much higher rates.

And so, the media focused on these young people, these youth movements, who were arriving at the door, so to speak, and saying: “You know, the members of these groups must be moving away at a rate of 10,000 members.” But they were not aware of the fact that they were going out the door after 18 months or 24 months. And the members of these groups were never very large, because they had very high attention rates. And so, my study put the attention on that.

First of all, I think it was quite important to trigger this argument of mental captivity, which did not last under empirical research. And the second point of concern was to look at the social and psychological processes involved in moving away.

I began doing research on intimate relationships, for example by looking at the literature on marriage and divorce. And what I realized is that many of these symptoms (the cult-induced symptoms, the symptoms they claimed were unique to people who had problems after leaving one of these new religious movements, what they call post-cult syndrome) were not so different from those of people who leave intimate relationships, such as divorce or separation. If you look at the divorce literature, there is a student who stated that 40% of women who have had 10 years of separation are still angry about their previous marriage. And so, if you looked more and more closely (perhaps they will not go public with that) but I think the responses, the feelings and the emotions are quite similar in some cases.

And I would also say that what my research suggests, and many other studies as well, is that apostates do not represent the larger population of deputies. In fact, I think they are quite unique. You could probably reduce them to 5% or less of the whole population of people who leave these groups. The majority of people who leave these groups do not have these terrible stories. So, I think you have to look at why some people decide to make it their life’s mission to destroy the groups they come out of, or why they had bad experiences. But I think you make a mistake in generalizing to the larger population of deputies, that it is common or uniform.

In some cases, we found that apostates are people who were forcibly suppressed by deprogrammings or by some kind of coherent intervention. And then, they were socialized, or they were told, it was communicated to them, that their participation in these groups was the result of this manipulation. They adopted the explanation of their deprogrammers. The people who appear to have vocal protests or oppositions to these groups seem almost always to have an affiliation with these anti-cult organizations. That is true in the United States and in France.

Susan and I have a book contract with Oxford University Press. We are here for a month to visit the communities and to interview human rights activists and deputies and leaders of these religious communities that have been the targets of government attacks. It is a transnational study. We have identified 38 attacks.

There is a global and international organization and a network of anti-cult organizations that are probably in the process of improving or exaggerating the threat that is perceived by the public from these groups. They generally make allegations that correspond only to reality. They regard them as the most dangerous terrorists when, in fact, they are often violated by the religious movements, or non-existent.

I would say that over the last 15 to 18 years, I have concentrated most of my research on the relationship between violence and religions. I published a book on Waco. Because I live in Texas, I was within distance of Waco. I drove to Waco during that 51-day delay, after the American army of tobacco and alcohol made the first attack on the Branch Davidians. There was a debate, and four ATF agents and six Branch Davidians were killed. The Branch Davidians were killed. The American army went in with its stair team. There was a 51-day delay. You probably remember that at the end of those 51 days, the American army decided to go in with weapons and tanks and set off the building. Everything exploded in a conflagration and 76 people were killed. It was a delay and an extraordinary event in American history and in the American army. So there were many questions to ask.

During the 51-day delay, I was a member of the board of the Scientific Council for the Study of Religion, which represents about 2,500 international writers who study religion. The council wrote and sent it to President Clinton and the Administrate-General Janet Reno at the time, offering our services, as some of us were experts on some of these new religious movements. We thought we could help them to secure the peace. They told us they had their own experts. When everything blew up in their heads and they were terribly angry, they said there was nothing to be done. It was the way of ending the suicide of those who had committed suicides.

We thought differently. I tried to improve the experts they should have spoken to, and I produced this book with the University of Chicago press. Two years later, Timothy McVeigh took a wheel car with the United States. The Council therefore began holding meetings to look further at Waco. I worked with the subcommittees of Congress and the Senate Judiciary Committee. I was a witness at the meetings of the first day, which lasted two weeks. The subtitle of my book was “Critical Responses to the Branch Davidian Incident.” We tried to explain what happened to the government.

At that time, popular opinion sat with the government, thinking that Branch Davidian had done this to themselves and that the government could not have done otherwise. We tried to change that opinion, because we thought the government could have obtained a guide-book, or a manual, by which hostile barricade incidents are conducted.

The government of 1976 started its own school at Quantico, in Virginia, on hostile barricade incidents. That is very good. It is based on very solid research on communication, and what is funny is that they did not take their own book. They did not follow their own rules. I identified 17 violations of their own protocols and how they conducted the stand-off at Waco. That led me to believe that they had no intention of bringing this to a peaceful solution. I even accused them of a massacre. It was a logical conclusion. They did not believe in the incident, or in the negotiation, or in the accident. They did not follow their own rules. But I do not think you can explain the 17 violations.

We are now 16 years out from the incident. Public opinion has changed completely against the government. There are people who vindicate us. I am very pleased that we were able to have a role in moving opinion in the other direction.