Belief and Belonging: The Draw of Cultic Groups

In the late 1970s, Russell Bradshaw ’70 joined an Eastern meditation group that combined spiritual values with a sense of community and purpose. He could not have predicted that decades later, members of this community would call his family up at 3 a.m. threatening violence. “Some people can be in cult-like groups and, not knowing what goes on behind closed doors, say, ‘It wasn’t that bad,’” Bradshaw says. “Meanwhile, we had a death threat, and they wanted to kill our son.”

Bradshaw, a longtime education professor at Lehman College, has spent more than a decade sharing his experiences after leaving the group. He hopes he can help others understand how cultic groups can hijack humans’ basic needs, sweeping up intelligent, well-intentioned people—forget easy caricatures of individuals who are mentally impaired or troubled by severe psychological issues—into abusive situations. “It’s idealistic people who are willing to take risks in order to improve themselves, improve society, and to work for change—those are the ones that cults want,” Bradshaw says.

Raised in an old Quaker family, Bradshaw continued his spiritual search through his anthropology and religion studies at Wesleyan and a doctorate at Harvard. Bradshaw struggled to find work after his educational studies. At the same time, a relative slowly and subtly recruited Bradshaw and his wife into a group centered around a guru who preached an ideology of love, devotion, and surrender from an ashram in Queens. Bradshaw resisted initially, but after his wife visited the guru and vowed to become a disciple, he followed suit and moved into the ashram. “The beginning was very energizing,” Bradshaw says. “I felt as if I had found a spiritual home.”

Bradshaw and the rest of the fellowship spent hours each day meditating and furthering the guru’s message, pairing their spiritual progress with group marathon runs and mandates for celibacy and sobriety. Bradshaw had a special dispensation to pursue his teaching career; his wife, however, was constrained by etiquette that required her to be a housewife and homeschool their son, despite her having an advanced university education. Over time, their son grew resentful of the hypocrisies he increasingly saw in the group’s conduct, including allegations of the guru’s sexual improprieties with female disciples. “It was a gradual gnawing away at the edges—things that did not jive with the espoused ideology and belief system, hearing rumors and stories of [women and] girls we know and so forth,” Bradshaw says.

His son published online testimonials from these victims and left the group, spurring a years-long wave of death threats and other reprisals. Meanwhile, as other lapsed members reported on the abuse within the organization, Bradshaw and his wife carefully drifted away in the mid-2000s. They were afflicted with panic attacks and other symptoms of complex post-traumatic stress disorder after they left the group.

“My goal is to reduce suffering as much as I can in the world,” Bradshaw says. “This was an experience that almost destroyed our family, so I made this my mission, and I’ve kept it up. I hope I can help prevent some people from unknowingly joining a cultic group and having to experience the suffering and trauma.”

Bradshaw connected with the International Cultic Studies Association (ICSA), a Georgia-based organization providing education and resources on cultic groups, and began delivering lectures for audiences as far-flung as Sweden, France, England, Belgium, and the United States to explain how, essentially, cultic groups and narcissistic leaders hijack humans’ natural psychological needs. “I call it the B & B model: our need for belonging and belief/understanding,” Bradshaw says. “We’re evolutionarily programmed to want to belong, and we also have existential needs to understand.” Unfortunately, unscrupulous, narcissistic leaders take advantage of these needs.

Bradshaw prefers the phrase “cultic groups” to “cults”: The latter carries baggage that both marginalizes victims and obscures the idea that cultic groups function using the same social influence principles evident in gangs, in political movements, in psychotherapy groups, even in businesses and marketing. Personal crises and life transitions—graduating college, divorce, job loss—tend to make people more susceptible to the techniques and processes that may lead to joining these groups, particularly ones led by charismatic leaders. “It’s the true believers, who go in and really try to change themselves and the world, who get hurt the most.”

Perhaps the most shocking insight Bradshaw experienced in this group was that even famous and highly respected religious and spiritual leaders often have a well-concealed dark side—that they had not overcome certain human weaknesses. But, he adds, there were true highs as well as traumatic lows: One of the most enduring gains from his family’s time in a cultic group was developing a group of friends who shared their serious spiritual values. “Many of them had also sacrificed much in the outer, materialistic society in order to pursue their idealistic goals,” Bradshaw says. “We all shared a core belief that individuals who achieve true inner peace can eventually help achieve outer peace in our troubled world.” They traveled together on annual “pilgrimages” to places such as Borobudur (Java), Angkor Wat (Cambodia), Kamakura (Japan), and many more.

Many of those friendships and mutually experienced events and insights endure more than 40 years later. These days, Bradshaw is retired and living in Stockholm with his wife, now a Swedish Lutheran minister; their relationship with their son is still affected by their earlier cultic involvement, he says. Meanwhile, he sees other cultic groups—religious sects, political parties—taking hold of people close to him. Our hardwired psychology makes it difficult and perhaps impossible to eliminate these groups, although educational outreach and growing cultural awareness help, he says. The best thing we can do is demonstrate our concern and care for our loved ones. “Your life,” Bradshaw says, “has to be the example.”