This Author Explored the Concept of “Cultish”

Amanda Montell grew up absorbing gripping stories of her father’s teenage years living in Synanon, the infamous cult from which he escaped at 17 years old. Besides the stories of the cult’s abysmal living conditions and medical lab where he grew to love science, her father’s description of the group’s special words and phrases stood out to Montell’s linguistic sensitivity.

Her father recounted Synanon’s use of phrases like “love match” to mean a marriage and “act as if,” to convey a directive that members not question the cult’s norms. While these terms served to conform thinking and stifle independent intellect within Synanon, their history inspired Montell’s life-long curiosity about the central role language plays in perpetuating the power of cults.

“I was always really fascinated with how people wind up in groups like Synanon or Jonestown or just Evangelical Pentecostal Christianity,” Montell said to the FBomb. “I never saw a sharp distinction between any of these … religion, cult, culture, the lines were very permeable to me always.”

Montell explores how language blurs these lines in her new book, Cultish, which provides readers with an explanation of not only how cults gain influence and but how seemingly any innocent person could fall prey to their power: the potency of words.

“Language is the key means by which all degrees of cult-like influence occur,” Montell writes.

The book explores how well-known cults, such as Synanon, Jim Jones’ Peoples Temple, and Heaven’s Gate, as well as more ambiguous groups — from fanatical fitness companies like CrossFit to 3HO, a Sikh-derived alternative religion — use language to gain power over their members. While the latter category of groups may not fit the description of a “full-blown cult,” Montell defines these groups occupying our social media channels and fitness centers as “cultish,” an original term she explained is “a double entendre that at once hints at the idea that the word ‘cult’ really has no hard and fast definition, as it has become so sensationalized and romanticized and subjective. And it's also the name of the language Montell describes in the book, which cult leaders from Jim Jones to Jeff Bezos all use.”

In other words, a group is “cultish” if it has its own unique system of language that leaders consciously leverage to influence their followers’ behavior, according to Montell.

“You can psychologically isolate someone really powerfully with language,” Montell said. According to her research, language is the first thing we are willing to alter about ourselves, opening a gateway for more extreme changes to our behavior and beliefs.

“Cultish language works so efficiently (and invisibly) to mold our worldview … that once it’s embedded, it sticks,” Montell writes. “After you grow your hair out, move back home, delete the app, whatever it is, the special vocabulary is still there.”

Leaders who use cultish language include not only spiritual gurus, but “pyramid schemers, politicians, CEOs of start-ups, online conspiracy theorists, workout instructors, even social media influencers,” Montell writes.

“In both positive ways and shadowy ones, ‘cult language’ is, in fact, something we hear and are swayed by every single day,” Montell writes. “Our speech in regular life — at work, in spin class, on Instagram — is evidence of our varying degrees of ‘cult’ membership. You just have to know what to listen for.”

No matter where or how cultish language appears, a group’s distinct lexicon serves to “morally separate” individuals into an “us versus them” dichotomy, Montell said. By replacing real-world words with language only group members know, leaders consciously convince members of the group that their way of being is somehow superior to outsiders. In cults like Synanon and Peoples Temple, this hierarchy is enforced through “truth telling” activities in which group offenders are held accountable in front of other members. These activities, such as publicly maligning a fellow member, use language as a mechanism to instill fear of retribution among the group. Montell exemplifies this in today’s world by telling the story of a CrossFit member who took great lengths to avoid public shaming on Facebook from fellow members for missing a class. This linguistic tactic, Montell said, can easily turn destructive and deadly.

Montell interviewed ex-cult members for Cultish in the effort to break down the stigma against people who fall for cultish language, whom outsiders may write off as simply “brainwashed.” To Montell, brainwashing is “just a metaphor, often used to morally divide us,” and fails to account for the complexity behind how a person could fall under the influence of notorious cult figures like Jim Jones, the leader of the Peoples Temple who eventually led his followers to commit mass suicide in 1978.

Rather than scrape members’ prefrontal cortex clean, as the term suggests, “insidious, ill-intentioned” leaders prey on people in search of deeper meaning and use cultish linguistic techniques to provide them with solutions to their grievances.

These techniques range from making false promises, love-bombing, which is demonstrating intense attention or affection, and using thought-terminating cliches, a specific linguistic term coined in 1961 by a psychologist named Robert J. Lifton. These cliches are “semantic stop signs” or “catchy stock phrases” that are easily remembered and aimed at “shutting down questioning or independent thinking,” Montell said, adding a few colloquial examples such as “do your research” or “everything happens for a reason.” Leaders customize these cliches to fit the language style of whoever is in front of them, so they feed the potential member’s ego, desire to be seen, and concerns about their life.

“Jim Jones was able to appeal to all these different walks of life because of his rather diabolical use of code-switching,” Montell said. “I talked to [Jonestown survivors] who told me that the first time they ever spoke to Jim Jones, it felt like he was speaking their language and felt like he was on their level. Using language, he was able to create this intimacy with people.”

Thus, the “brainwashing” is actually the listener confirming their prior beliefs, rather than believing anything new, Montell said. They feel affirmed, heard, and validated in their concerns while seeing the solution before their very eyes.

“When a cultish message is delivered in just the right way, it’s not mind controlling us to do something we don't want to do; it's permission for us to do something we already want to do,” Montell explained. “We totally just believe what we want to believe at the end of the day.”

Montell, whose first book, Wordslut, examined the English language through a feminist lens, said that while the book cover doesn’t bear the word “feminist,” she considers this project to be inherently about gender. Because society is conditioned to associate the words of charismatic white men with authority, leaders like Jones have historically capitalized on patriarchy to further gain followers, Montell said.

Female leaders have also manifested patriarchal standards to gain followers’ trust. Take social media influencer Teal Swan, a “spiritual catalyst” who targets the internet’s loneliest users with SEO-driven content about everything from beating addiction to finding one’s third eye. Swan, who has no mental health accreditation, feeds pseudo-science to her “tribe” of followers, and her cultish advice even allegedly led to the suicide of a long-time mentee. Swan, like Jones, is a sex symbol, Montell writes in Cultish, using her siren-like voice and feminine intonation to imbue her messaging to eager, trusting ears.

Just as Swan targeted internet users searching for the solution to loneliness, Jones provided a community for people who weren’t accounted for by popular social movements such as second-wave feminism in the 1970s, Montell said. She went on to cite the work of Black feminist scholar Sikivu Hutchinson, who found that a disproportionate number of Black women died in the Jonestown massacre “not because Black women were somehow easier to fool. It's because they had the most to gain from a promise that turned out to be a lie.”

Montell said amid an increasingly factioned world, her hope is that readers’ main takeaway from the book is to realize how to recognize cultish language — and proceed with caution.

“When you see someone using a mishmash of scientific words that have nothing to do with the field that they studied or their credentials, and they're infusing these words with sort of mystical, metaphysical meanings. That is a cue to proceed with vigilance,” Montell said. She added that once we see why people join cults, it will build empathy for people who aren’t on the same “ideological island” and help us grow aware of our own societal weaknesses.

“I really think it's important to humanize these people, and also to implicate us all in the process and show us that none of us are above cultish influence,” Montell said. “Hopefully now that you’ve read about what causes people to get to that point you can have almost a sense of empathy for those people. My hope is that this knowledge-empowered empathy will be able to mend so many of these rifts in our culture right now.”