This dissertation tells a story of American religion and politics since the 1960s in which the fringe helps illuminate the center. In it, I explore the role of new religious movements (NRMs)—also known pejoratively as cults—in American politics, alongside intertwined issues of political realignment, the family as a site of ideological contestation, and questions of what constituted faith. In the 1970s and 1980s, the left-wing Peoples Temple (of Jonestown infamy) and the conservative Unification Church (referred to derisively as Moonies) achieved legitimacy and influence within the Democratic and Republican parties, respectively. In this same period, the notion that cults presented a threat to the American family, and society in general, gained currency and publicity. In the 1970s, NRM members, families, politicians, courts, and the media participated in tense debates over what constituted a legitimate religion as well as a legitimate family. Collectively, these conflicts are known as the “cult wars.” In the 1970s, the cult wars were importantly bipartisan and multifaith, as Jews, Christians, and secular activists banded together to address the so-called “cult problem.” The Unification Church found itself at the center of these early cult wars, while Jim Jones and Peoples Temple rose to prominence within the liberal/left spectrum in California.
After the Jonestown tragedy in November 1978, which coincided with the rise of a newly vocal and visible Christian right, the cult wars turned partisan. Jonestown occasioned a tense debate over minority religions and religious freedom, and left an opening for the Unification Church to make a successful claim to legitimate churchdom as well as to align itself politically with the anticommunist, pro-family agenda of the Republican Party. Questions raised in the cult wars of the 1970s—what was a religion? what was family?—got answered in narrow, conservative terms in the context of the culture wars of the 1980s, in which conservatives fought against a progressive vision of America that had become increasingly mainstream since the 1960s. During this period, the struggle against cults took on a Christian tone, as NRMs associated with the occult or New Age came under special scrutiny, culminating in the Satanic Panic of the mid- and late-1980s. I argue that the “cult wars” that began in the 1970s set the terms of the culture wars of the 1980s by politicizing questions of family and faith and promoting normative, conservative definitions of what constituted acceptable modes of worship and belonging.