Hello, I wrote my undergrad thesis on scholarship of new religious movements. I share your fascination with cults, and was curious why the study of New Religious Movements- NRMs- was essentially such a mess.

First question is who should study them and through which lens? Should sociologists study them dispassionately? Should psychologists look at them as manifestations or exploitations of quirks in our wiring? Should Religious Studies just dive in to their universes and study them within the context of their own truth claims? And of course, historians can contextualize these human movements too.

Cults are real, a lot of people are in them, even if it’s just two or three people in the thrall of some charismatic in an upstate farmhouse (my personal belief of what most “cults” look like). Having said that they’re real- what are cults anyway? I don’t personally know, and there’s no real consensus. Calling them NRMs at least somewhat accounts for intent. Personally, I think that a living charismatic leader claiming exclusive divine providence and guidance makes a movement a cult, but this is only one opinion.

Blasphemy is certainly an issue for a lot of studiers of religion, for obvious reasons many if not most of the people studying “religion” right now are doing so within the context of that religion- rabbis, imams, monks whatever. Accordingly, for the historically established religions, most of the scholarship will be from within that religion’s tradition. As a primary source, it’s still pretty easy to contextualize the scholarship with the truth claims of the religion and still take real value from it.

The problem with studying contemporary NRMs in the same way, or even trying to study their claims accepting the context of their own beliefs, and this is becoming my opinion on the body of scholarship as a whole- is that no serious scholar of religion wants to appear to be signing off on the next deathcult.

I realize that took a severe turn- but Jonestown was the deadliest day for American civilians up until 9/11– around 900 people, including a congressman. Suddenly- any academic work about Jonestown/ Jim Jones that wasn’t a warning siren was seen as apologetically legitimizing a sociopath’s death cult.

You don’t really run that risk as a scholar of, say, Judaism, and that’s led to a pretty different standard applied to NRMs, and scholars of NRMs wind up being pretty marginalized.

The only safe bet on that front really is coming in ex post facto as a historian.

Coming back around to your question then, I think that whatever exactly that legitimating process actually is (there is no consensus on how NRMs or cults can grow into real religions), blasphemy is a concern that only applies to movements that are past it, and for this and other reasons there’s less of the type of scholarship that you’re asking about in mainstream academia than you might hope.

However, the LDS Church (Mormonism), at least in the western world, occupies a pretty unique space in the no man’s land between NRMs and religions. Many people study the movement from inside and outside its tradition.

I would recommend Fawn Brodie’s biography of Joseph Smith- No Man Knows My History- as an example of a book that asks the kind of questions you’re curious about on this subject.