Not Your Dad’s Cult: A Field Guide to the “Totally Normal” Devotion We Pretend Not to See

When politics becomes identity, and disagreement becomes a threat to the self

America loves a cult story the way it loves a true-crime podcast, preferably somewhere else, preferably involving matching outfits, preferably with a compound you can spot from space. In the popular mythology, cult followers are slack-jawed innocents who got tricked by a guy with a thousand-yard stare and a bookshelf full of prophecy. Cult leaders are cartoon villains, charisma as a superpower, manipulation as a hobby, and reality as an optional accessory. It’s a comforting story because it keeps the scary stuff quarantined. Cults are over there. We are over here, posting tasteful takes and pretending we’re immune to social gravity.

But the psychology that makes cults work isn’t exotic. It’s basic human hardware; belonging, meaning, fear, status, love, shame. High-control groups don’t succeed because they found the one weird trick that melts brains. They succeed because they lean hard, on the same levers that shape ordinary life. That’s why researchers and clinicians often define “cults” less by their theology than by their methods, how they attempt to influence behavior, narrow information, reshape thought, and manage emotion. Steven Hassan’s BITE model, Behavior, Information, Thought, Emotion control, is one well-known framework for naming those levers. Robert Jay Lifton’s classic “thought reform” criteria similarly catalogs patterns like milieu control and loaded language, ways groups compress reality until it fits on a bumper sticker.

Once you start looking for levers instead of robes, you notice something uncomfortable, modern politics, especially American politics, has started to borrow the same machinery.