The Language of Destructive Cults

Abstract

Destructive cults are the most notable damaging religious groups in society where leaders convince their followers to engage in destructive acts. Examples of such cults include Peoples Temple led by Jim Jones and Heaven’s Gate led by Marshall Applewhite who convinced their followers to commit mass suicide. Previous research into destructive cults has mainly focused on their social-psychological development. This research breaks new ground by examining the patterns of linguistic features in the sermons of destructive cults indicating the characteristics of their language using keyness analyses. The main data sets are the sermons of Jim Jones and the sermons of Marshall Applewhite in the period leading to mass suicide. As a benchmark, these sermons were compared to the sermons of Billy Graham and the sermons of Rick Warren, leaders of mainstream religious groups. The findings show that the language of destructive cults based on the sermons of the leaders upholds extreme non-religious ideologies that cannot be found in the sermons of mainstream religious groups. The styles of their language focus on othering, intensifying, elaborating, and negating with the aim of controlling their followers. The results may allow destructive cults to be identified before damaging events occur.

Distinguishing the Language of Destructive Cults from the Language of Mainstream Religion: Corpus Analyses of Sermons

“…Also, the findings specifically on the language of destructive cults may provide a warning system before the religious groups with suspicious characteristics can perform damaging activities. Finally, the overall results of this study verify the findings of Palayon et al (2020) on the common linguistic characteristics in the sermons of destructive cults and shed light further on the language of destructive cults from a multidimensional analysis perspective.…”

“…In this study, the lists of key linguistic features with their relative frequencies showing keyness for each corpus were generated, and we employed log-likelihood (LL) as a keyness statistic to show the frequencies of these features. LL is a probability statistic normally used in a study that aims to characterize the register in a corpus (see Biber, 1995, for the meaning of register; see Palayon et al, 2020;Pojanapunya & Watson Todd, 2018;Rayson & Garside, 2000, for the use of LL), and we found this statistic appropriate in this paper based on its research goal and purpose which is showing a characterization of the language in the sermons to differentiate the characteristics between the constructive religious groups and destructive religious groups. We are aware of the recent theoretical criticisms on the use of LL such as the sensitivity of the probability values based on the item frequency and corpus sizes (see Gabrielatos, 2018, for further details); however, the principles of this statistic and its comprehensive applicability based on the previous studies (e.g.…”

“…We are aware of the recent theoretical criticisms on the use of LL such as the sensitivity of the probability values based on the item frequency and corpus sizes (see Gabrielatos, 2018, for further details); however, the principles of this statistic and its comprehensive applicability based on the previous studies (e.g. Palayon et al, 2020;Pojanapunya, 2017;Pojanapunya & Watson Todd, 2018) allow us to use LL to examine the keyness of sermons.…”

“…Later, they transform into cults by acquiring new belief systems and identifying the main leaders as godlike figures which differ markedly from the belief systems of mainstream religious groups and sects (Beaman, 1990). In the long run, these cults develop into destructive cults as they engage in damaging acts (Palayon et al, 2020).…”

The Application of Psychological Operation (PSYOP): A Case Study on The Siege of Sauk

“…Security forces conducted research and investigation prior to executing the PSYOP series, contributing to a strong in-depth knowledge of TA. They investigated the group's identity, characteristics, plans, and intent; observing parallels between the group's characteristics and cult group features described by Gajewski (2020) and Palayon et al (2020). According to the results, some of the characteristics include extremely authoritarian leadership, manipulation of information, identity and personality, as well as pedagogy of beliefs, convictions, and commitments.…”