It's In the Code Ep. 99: “Why Not Call It A Cult”

Straight White American Jesus

Axis Mundi Media: Bradley Onishi + Daniel Miller

News, Politics

4.7 • 2K Ratings

🗓️ 15 May 2024

⏱️ 22 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Subscribe for $5.99 a month to get full access to this episode, bonus content most Mondays, bonus episodes every month, ad-free listening, access to the entire 500-episode archive, Discord access, and more: https://axismundi.supercast.com/ While the term “cult” still has a broad popular usage, it’s a term of analysis that has virtually disappeared from the field of Religious Studies. It also isn’t a word that people will hear often when listening to Straight White American Jesus. Instead, they’ll hear a lot about “high control religion.” But what is the relation between these ideas? If “high control religion” names the same things people have in mind when they think of “cults,” why not just call it a “cult?” Why set aside a term that makes so much intuitive sense to so many people? Dan explores these issues in this week’s episode, and explains why the concept of high control religion allows us to examine the American religious landscape with fresh eyes. Linktree: https://linktr.ee/StraightWhiteJC Order Brad's book: https://bookshop.org/a/95982/9781506482163 Buy Matthew Taylor's book, The Violent Take It By Force: https://icjs.org/the-violent-take-it-by-force/ Subscribe to Miss Information: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/miss-information/id1745590655 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Axis Mundi You're going to. Welcome to It's in the code. A it's in the code. A series as part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus. My name is Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought, at Lamar College, your host and glad to be with you as always want to thank all of you who
0:44.4	listen all of you reach out and can urge you to continue doing so Daniel
0:48.4	Miller swage Daniel Miller SW AJ at gmail.com is the way to reach me.
0:53.8	Continue to value your insights, your questions,
0:56.9	your comments to, you know, for upcoming episodes,
1:00.2	responses to episodes that have posted.
1:03.0	I am as always behind in the emails, but I am going to catch up on them as I do periodically.
1:10.0	My academic semester is now over, which means that one of my things on my to-do list is to work through
1:16.9	the mountain of emails that I have from folks. So look forward to doing that, but I do look forward, I do look forward to doing that but I do look forward I do look forward to hearing them I value
1:25.1	your insights so much and today diving into a question that I received some some time ago periodically from from different people I say some time
1:35.3	ago you know got some emails about this but it's also a question that comes up from
1:39.5	students it comes up from sort of people out in the world, whether we're talking about the
1:44.0	podcast or it's just people who find out that I'm in the field of religious studies.
1:49.3	And the question is basically this, okay?
1:52.4	In a couple, a couple different kinds of context. The first is that somebody
1:57.3	will say something about cults, right? Whether or not I study cults and so forth. So like let's say that I'm I don't know I'm at a summer
2:06.2	cookout or I'm at a holiday party or something and you know you meet somebody and you give your
2:10.8	name and what do you do?'m a professor oh what do you
2:13.8	specialize in I do religious studies and somebody will say oh do you study
2:18.0	cults do you know anything about cults do you talk about cults or in the work that I do through straight white American Jesus and the work that I do
2:26.9	with the Center for Trauma Resolution and Recovery, somebody will hear references to
2:31.7	high control religion. I will use that language or they'll maybe have come across it somewhere else or they hear us talking about on the podcast or something like that.
	...

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