Do pseudo-religious cults reflect the times in which they develop? Or does popular culture make the various cults the symbols of the times?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I’m sure there’s an online sociologist or philosopher, somewhere, who has thought this before – feel free to point them out – but what the heck.\u00a0 It’s my blog, I’ll derive if I want to. <\/p>\n
Think about the major cults that’ve made news over the past five or six decades:<\/p>\n
The Manson Family formed in the Sixties – communal pseudo-hippies, living on LSD, intertwined with California popular culture – and in some ways marked the end of the Sixties. <\/p>\n
The Peoples Temple – like an EST seminar run amok?\u00a0 All about the seventies.\u00a0 <\/p>\n
Heavens Gate?\u00a0 Even though it ended with a mass suicide in ’97, it flourished (after a fashion) in the eighties, for reasons that seemed to match the decade.\u00a0 <\/p>\n
The Branch Davidians?\u00a0\u00a0 Synonymous with the ’90s – in a decade of groups that fought the law and the law won, they were the big kahuna of them all.\u00a0 <\/p>\n
The 2000s?\u00a0\u00a0 My theory breaks down a little here, unless you count militant Wahhabi Islam which, conveniently for my theory, dominated American culture more than any cult in history.\u00a0 <\/p>\n
And with the war over and lost, we can go back to normal…<\/p>\n
…well, not “normal”.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n