By John W. Morehead
I read an interesting post last week by Kyle Beshears, an evangelical doing some great work on evangelical engagement with the Latter-day Saints. His article “The Rise of the Digital Contra-Cult Movement: How Evangelicals Have Gone from Avoiding ‘Cults’ to Engaging Them Online” was one that touched on prior history as a part of the countercult. For those unfamiliar with the term, it is a self-referential label used by individuals and ministries that respond largely apologetically to “cults” or new religious movements.
Beshears identifies three phases to the movement. Phase One he simply labels “The Counter-cult Movement,” which he identifies as one concerned with protecting evangelicals doctrinally. The seminal figure here was Walter Martin with his text The Kingdom of the Cults. This period reached its heyday in the 1980s with films like The Godmakers, Martin’s Bible Answer Man radio broadcast, and a flood of books in Christian bookstores. Phase Two is “The Post-9/11 Turn Toward Islam” in 2001. This section notes how evangelicals responded to the 9/11 attacks with an interest in Islam. This included some of the countercult. Beshears concludes with Phase Three, “The Rise of the Contra-Cult Movement.” Beshears sees this as a time starting roughly in 2020 when evangelical concerns shifted away from Islam and back to “cults.” He also sees this as a democratized development where the internet provided a way for any number of individuals to put forth their perspectives for everyone to see, coupled with an interest in engaging not only evangelicals, but members of the new religions too.
Beshears describes his essay as descriptive rather than participatory, and he invites conversation on its content. I was all too happy to provide some thoughts by way of extensive commentary in the comments section of his article. What I’ll provide below is an expansion of those comments.
I was a countercult insider in the late 1980s and exited not long after 9/11. I worked for various apologetics organizations, the best-known being Watchman Fellowship, and was on the board for the umbrella organization Evangelical Ministries to New Religions. Given this history and experience, I provide the following feedback on Beshears analysis before concluding on what evangelicals might take away from the evolution in this type of ministry in response to cultural change within evangelicalism and the broader American culture.
I think Beshear’s description and analysis is largely accurate, but I would quibble on some of the details. In Phase One, while there was a strong emphasis on avoidance of the new religions, or alternatively, apologetic boundary maintenance, helping “inoculate” evangelicals from the teachings of the new religions, the movement also had a strong sense of engagement. This often, in my thinking, confused apologetics with evangelism, as if telling someone why their group taught heresy should also be understood as an invitation to embrace the gospel. Beshears is quite correct when he notes that the warning of the dangers of “the cults” was a form of moral panic. I still remember one of Walter Martin’s recorded sermons where he said he felt like Paul Revere warning, “The cults are coming!” As Beshears opines, this was based more on fear and defensiveness rather than love, but again, insiders felt the loving response was to engage in methods that led to insider vs. outsider stances.
There was also vigorous internal debate in the late 1990s and early 2000s related to the suggestion that the countercult might learn something from the critique of scholars like Gordon Melton and Douglas Cowan, as well as lessons that might be learned from missiology where “cults” might more profitably be understood and related to as cultures or subcultures. The scholars were dismissed as “cult apologists,” and countercult members felt they were already doing missions, which was little more than apologetic boundary maintenance done in the name of missiology. The result was a fracture in the movement, which led to the departure of figures like me to pursue my own pathway and methods.
I experienced Beshear’s Phase Two when some in Watchman Fellowship suggested that the organization broaden its focus to include Islam beyond the traditional “Big Three” of perceived threat: Mormonism, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and New Age. That was strongly resisted by organizational leadership, but Beshears is correct that the countercult and other apologetics ministries did respond to this, largely in a war-of-cultures approach that focused on elements within Islam that resulted in violent forms of jihad and terrorism, but failed to consider and understand the diversity and moderate elements within the religion. This echoed sentiments in broader evangelicalism, discussed by Richard Cimino’s great article “’No God in Common:’ American Evangelical Discourse on Islam After 9/11.” Cimino documents the shift in perceptions and approach from Islam as a mission field to Islam as political and civilizational enemy, a stance that remains in our current political climate.
A few other thoughts are worth consideration. The countercult movement has always been decentralized. While it did benefit from a few leading voices and texts, it has tended to function as a host of independent “experts,” many of them former members of various new religions, where experience is assumed to equate with expertise in a tradition or a variety of traditions.[1]
On the use of the term “cult,” I’ve argued for decades that evangelicals should follow the lead of scholars of new religions who find the term ill-defined, pejorative, and counterproductive. Referring to a group that one disagrees with doctrinally—but which members believe is a genuine religion, perhaps even God’s “one true church” or revelation—will shut down conversation and gospel proclamation, not open communication pathways. It also lends itself to casual dismissal of those groups to whom it is applied, contributing to a superficial consideration of various groups, where countercultists seek only enough basic information to qualify a group as heretical, setting up outsider teachings for apologetic refutation.
This brings me to my conclusion about how these developments in the history of the countercult have something to say outside of it to the broader evangelical subculture. This dovetails with
Beshears’ discussion of the “contra-cult.” In my analysis, this seems to be the next step and outgrowth of previous developments. Like its phase predecessors, I view it as ill-prepared and culturally naive, functioning yet again as a form of apologetic boundary maintenance. While those pursuing this approach feel like they are reaching people, both defending the faith and, in some sense, communicating the gospel persuasively, I think it largely functions as a form of faith confirmation and a sense of meaning for the contra-cultist and their audience rather than the potentially persuasive and culturally relevant engagement of outsiders. Call me pessimistic, but I think we evangelicals still have a long way to go in the way we respond to those in the new religions, world religions, and other forms of religion and spirituality in America and the West.
1 For a discussion of the various ways in which evangelical countercultists have approached new religions see my essay in Fuller Interfaith Dialogue Journal: https://fullerstudio.fuller.edu/featured-article-evangelical-approaches-to-new-religions/.
John W. Morehead is the Executive Director of the Foundation for Religious Diplomacy, and the Director of its Evangelical Chapter (Multifaith Matters). You may contact him at johnwmorehead@msn.com .