America has a weird relationship with cults where they’re terrified of small cults (or organizations they think are cults) but completely normalized massive cults that hurt many more people (eg: LDS Church, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Amish, Scientology, most Megachurches)
To anybody asking if the Amish are a cult, the answer is yes, very much so.
They’re a high control group that isolate you from society. The cult decides how you dress, how you behave, who you marry and how. They control what you know, blocking all information from the outside world. They control how you feel and what you’re allowed to think with threats of both social and supernatural harm. They’re a cult.
The best method to determine if a group is a cult, in my opinion, is Steven Hassan’s (cult expert and former cult member himself) BITE model.
BITE stands for Behavior Control, Information Control, Thought Control, and Emotional Control.
The more points a group “scores” on the model, the more of a cult it is.
I think this model is the best one for several reasons:
- It’s more nuanced than “cult” or “not cult” and doesn’t make false equivalences between groups
- It’s versatile, applying to groups big and small, and cults of all kinds, religious, political, financial, etc.
- It focuses on what’s important, which is what the cult does to its members, and those members’ experiences, and not on irrelevant details like how uncommon their doctrines are or whether they have a charismatic leader
This is a great example of Thought Control used by cults whenever they’re confronted with criticism.
The creator of the BITE Model considers abusive relationships to be two-person cults.
Yeah, having extended family who are radically religious and badly abuse their kids, I’ve noticed all my life that it’s the same exact thing, and it goes far beyond both cults AND abusive interpersonal relationships.
I mean, think of the core psyop of both: “you should just be grateful that I do so much for someone as unworthy as yourself.” This isn’t just how fundies write their God’s dialog or how my cousins were all raised, but how law enforcement and the justice system respond to criticisms of their non-stop human rights violations. How whole governments characterize their endless war crimes. How the military brainwashes its sacrificial human pawns. How megacorps like disney and billionaire manchildren like trump or musk feel about their supposed benefit to the economy. It’s how countless employers large and small want to interpret their relationship with their workers. How celebrities can frame their “contribution” to popular culture. For that matter it’s how some people even think of their pets. It’s not so much “this is how cults operate” but that this is just simply what the most basic primordial human power tripping innately looks like. Absolutely every facet of human life and society operates on this model depending on who is at the top of it, all the way up the scale from a one-sided friendship to a global ideology. They’re all made of people, and this is what people do when they’re selfish.
