New Religious Movements following the Jonestown MassacreThe article that I selected for this field report is “Religious Movements: Cult and AnticultSince Jonestown,” a meta-analysis of studies conducted from 1978 to 1986. The analysis, published in the Annual Review of Sociology (1986), hypothesizes that the widespreadmisunderstanding of the Jonestown Massacre lead to new religious movements, herein referredto as NRM’s, to be characterized as “cults”. It further posits that Jonestown is responsible for thecontemporary image of behavior within NRM’s.First, Barker’s review of the literature indicates the level of notoriety which theJonestown Massacre reached. A month following the event, a Gallup poll found that 98% of theUS public had heard of the Jonestown Massacre. The pollsters surmised that this level of saturation in to the public consciousness was matched only by the attacks of Pearl Harbor, andthe detonation of the atomic bomb (Barker, 330). This level of notoriety, coupled with the public’s lack of familiarity and misunderstanding of the structure and creation of an organizationsuch as the People’s Temple, lead to misconceptions about what exactly had happened. Whatresulted was a public very aware of a concept that they did not understand clearly; consequentlymisinformation, and anticult hysteria, was able to take hold.Barker highlighted an interesting methodology implemented by Albert Gollin in hisJanuary 1979 study, which illustrated post-Jonestown anticult mentality. Gollin gave respondentsthe opportunity to indicate their perceptions of several NRM’s. Two of the NRM’s, the HareKrishna and the Unification Church, were real movements; a third, however, was a so-called“spoof cult”. The study found that one in ten respondents claimed to have heard of thisnonexistent cult, and over a quarter of those respondents indicated an unfavorable dispositiontowards it (Barker, 330). It is impossible to say for certain this anticult hysteria was not present
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