Cults

Cultish - The Language of Fanaticism by Amanda Montell & The Girls by Emma Cline

This week I want to talk about two books I read a few years ago and just revisited. They pair well like the chocolate and peanut butter of cult-related writing from the past decade. Emma Cline’s stunning debut novel, The Girls, and the equally enthralling nonfiction work by Amanda Montell, Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism.

I’ll admit it, I’m into cults. I’d never join one (I hope), but they fascinate me. My partner and I will fall into rabbit holes from time to time where we watch tv documentaries about cults and discuss the absurd fascination our society (ourselves included) has with them. We’ll wonder what defines a cult and why they continue to crop up, even post-internet, where you’d assume everyone would’ve learned to avoid them.

Montell discusses our attraction to these shows by recalling how psychologists describe rubbernecking as a physiological response. You enter fight or flight mode even though you weren’t in the accident. You see the carnage, and your brain kicks into gear. It’s the same with cult documentaries (and their obscenely popular serial killer cousins). There’s a morbid fascination not only in wondering what drove those people to wind up in a cult but in considering if you, too, could’ve followed the same path.

This is part of the enchantment that comes with reading The Girls. Cline is very clever in the way she yo-yos you back and forth between the cult – a fictionalized version of the Manson family – and the bland suburbia of the 70s. I think if her novel had been complete immersion, taking place from the perspective of a full-blown cult devote, it would’ve become oversaturated. She would’ve had to constantly up the stakes regarding violence and sexual depravity to keep the reader enthralled.

Instead, Cline juxtaposes the reality of California in the 70s with the cult. She shows the mundane life that Evie, Cline’s teenage narrator, has outside the cult. Her parent’s divorce and their desperate attempts at relationships post-marriage, her girlhood friend who turns on her over a boy, the brilliant descriptions of banal domesticity. Even with Cline’s genuinely excellent writing, the reader doesn’t want to spend time there. You want to return to the cult, so you understand why Evie longs for the same thing.

The draw for Evie is something that Montell discusses in her book, loneliness. She’s a young girl cast adrift by her parent's divorce and her childhood friend’s abandonment. The novel is framed so that a middle-aged Evie is thinking back on her summer spent in the orbit of this cult, and when we’re with this adult version of our narrator, she’s still adrift. Still searching for something, a connection, a sense of belonging.

Cultish discusses how the rise of cults in the 70s coincided with what some now call the Fourth Great Awakening. There was a marked rise in the late 60s and early 70s in megachurches and evangelicalism in the United States, which is mostly what this term is used for. But there was also a concurrent rise in less mainstream forms of spiritualism. Some were eastern religions or fitness trends, but others were cults. Montell points out that these moments where people turn to spiritual gurus typically coincide with unrest. The Fourth Great Awakening had social and political turmoil to feed on; it could use this uncertainty to draw in followers.

That tumultuous world is Evie’s world.

The Girls briefly touches on Vietnam and the constant worry that young men have of being drafted, sent overseas, and coming back changed. It’s a way to remind the reader of the time and place while showing how men have entrenched communities to guide them. I’m not saying that going to Vietnam was a positive experience, but Cline seems to be making a corollary between Evie falling in with a cult and young men being sent off to war. Specifically, that war.

This is emphasized by the way the novel is framed. A still lost middle-aged woman looking back on these events feels eerily similar to the way movies often deal with Vietnam veterans. The haunted past that you can never truly escape. A scar that never leaves you. The cult is that for Evie.

Montell’s book primarily focuses on the language cults use and how it has spread throughout our society. She shows how Midlevel Marketing companies, fitness brands, and social media influencers have learned and adopted their strategies from cults. It's hard to read either of these two books and not think we are living through another awakening. I don’t know if scholars will consider this the Fifth Great Awakening, but it certainly feels like something is happening. We have all the markers – the turmoil, the uncertainty, the longing to be led combined with a distrust (or downright hatred) of our leaders.  

We have the bland, corporate, late-stage capitalism version of cults. No, we shouldn’t glamorize something like The Manson family (even though people do), but there was something different about them. There was a defiance, a separation from mainstream society. They were subversive. Also, there were drugs and sex and all that which people glamorize.

Today, we have people worshipping at the altar of Lululemon and Mary Kay, and I have to say I’m disappointed in us all. It's just another example of the boring dystopia that we seem to live in.

I don’t want the cults of the 60s and 70s to return. I find the way we glorify them to be nauseating and the way we trivialize them (Jonestown is essentially a punchline at this point despite almost a thousand people losing their lives) to be troubling. The old maxim that history repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as farce, is on display here. Though perhaps instead of farce, the modern repetition, in this case, is just boring and depressing.

Would Charles Manson be the CEO of a start-up or a social media influencer these days? Would Squeaky Fromme be selling Mary Kay or overpriced leggings on Facebook? It’s hard to say, but it seems possible.

I highly recommend both books. They deal with a wide array of issues I haven’t touched on here. Once you read about cult language, you start to see it everywhere. Sometimes it's comical; other times troubling. And Cline’s book is a beautiful piece of historical fiction that grows timelier with every passing year. They’re both excellent and, as I said before, they pair well together.

As always, if you know someone who might like this, please tell them about my substack, website, or both. It would be a great help to me. Thanks for reading!