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It Was Never About the Snakes: Synanon, Cult, and the Devil in Religious Studies
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 February 2025
Abstract
Against historians of religion who have argued that “cult” is just a term for a religion that people do not like, this article argues that “cult” has historical definitions in addition to its normative dimensions. The term’s meaning as a group that “brainwashes” stems in part from the post–World War II rise of groups that blend religion and recovery, and which are promoted by the American judicial system and federal dollars. Synanon, a group that originated the American model of a drug treatment center, allows us a unique entry point into this reassessment. Synanon argued that addiction, as just one of many “life-controlling issues,” required mutual discipline and containment. The article affirms members’ and critics’ description of the group as a cult that incarcerated its members and designed rituals to hurt them. Because of Synanon’s unique relationship to state-sponsored drug rehab, these conditions are not unique to the group. Further, the author’s affirmation of her subjects’ language cannot be separated from the normative valence of “cult.” Counter to the arguments of scholars such as J.Z. Smith, David Chidester, and Robert Orsi, scholars need to do more than describe when religions hurt people. We can also, through historical work, name when religion is designed to abuse, incarcerate, and experiment on people.
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- © The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture
References
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1 Smith, Jonathan Z., Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 111 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Chidester, David, Salvation and Suicide: Jim Jones, the Peoples Temple, and Jonestown (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2003), 46 Google Scholar.
2 Megan Goodwin, “Bombing American Religion to Save It,” The Revealer, September 9, 2021.
3 See especially the claims of law enforcement in the cases relating to MOVE, Koresh’s followers at Waco, and the raid on the FLDS compound in Eldorado, Texas. Evans, Richard Kent, MOVE: An American Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tabor, James D. and Gallagher, Eugene V., Why Waco: Cults and the Battle for Religious Freedom in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Goodwin, Megan, Abusing Religion: Literary Persecution, Sex Scandals, and American Minority Religions (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2020), 101–10Google Scholar.
4 If the Peoples Temple is a religion, religions kill. If the Peoples Temple is a cult, cults kill. We recognize this definitional power because of J.Z. Smith and David Chidester. By calling Peoples Temple a religion, we are forced to humanize those who died, because, unlike with cults, the rest of us belong to religions too. But, weirdly, Smith and Chidester, following CAN, have also made Jonestown the only example that matters. In their attempt to humanize, they did nothing to historicize Jonestown (one of the most perplexing moves of both scholars is to define the Peoples Temple as a religion by comparing it to ancient, geographically disparate examples of religious suicide, violence, and political consciousness). In Tabor and Gallagher’s Why Waco, the authors continue to center Jonestown, but they argue that CAN was wrong because Koresh was nothing like Jones, who thought of himself as both God and Christ. The implication of this argument is that the Branch Davidians are not a cult because they are not like the Peoples Temple (which, by this logic, is the actual cult). This focus on both groups can only get us so far, and it is not a feedback loop that the term “new religious movement” frees us from. It is understandable to me why sociologists would use a term such as NRM, but why historians of religion would accept that some religions should be compared and analyzed through transhistorical categories such as “new” or “high control” befuddles me. Smith, Imagining Religion, 110; Chidester, Salvation and Suicide, 46; Tabor and Gallagher, Why Waco, 169.
5 The term “new religious movement” was created by American scholars of religion to promote the interests of non-Shinto, non-Buddhist groups during the American occupation of Japan; it was then exported to the Anglophone academic world. Thomas, Jolyon Baraka, Faking Liberties: Religious Freedom in American-Occupied Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 233 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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11 “Was Synanon a Cult?”, It’s Time for Morning Meeting: Sharing our Synanon Stories, accessed June 15, 2023, https://synanon.com/2020/08/16/was-synanon-a-cult/.
12 Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth, 7.
13 Miller, J.R., Shingwauk’s Vision: A History of Native Residential Schools (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996);Google Scholar Cote, Jennifer, “‘Habits of Vice:’ The House of the Good Shepherd and Competing Narratives of Female Delinquency in Early Twentieth Century Hartford,” American Catholic Studies 122, no. 4 (2011): 23–45 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Stoddard, Brad, Spiritual Entrepreneurs: Florida’s Faith-Based Prisons and the American Carceral State (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021)Google Scholar.
14 For an excellent summation of the group (which is eminently teachable), with vivid audio recordings (some of which are only available in personal collections accessed by the producers), see Reveal’s podcast American Rehab. I treat historical audio from the podcast as a primary source, and interviews with participants as an oral history. Reveal, “Chapter 3: A Venomous Snake,” American Rehab, podcast, 2020, accessed October 28, 2024, https://revealnews.org/podcast/american-rehab-chapter-three-a-venomous-snake/.
15 Art Berman, “Chuck Dederich: Man with the Golden Touch,” Los Angeles Times, December 3, 1967.
16 Yablonksy, Lewis, The Tunnel Back: Synanon (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1965), 261 Google Scholar. I treat this source (as do other scholars such as Kerwin Kaye) as a primary source. It has the unique benefit of being an ethnography of the group in the mid-1960s and a collection of Dederich’s statements that Dederich authorized as a form of self-promotion. Yablonsky went on to serve on the board of Synanon and was a fierce advocate for Dederich.
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21 Robert Cross, “‘Dammit, We’re Trying to Save Your Life!’” Chicago Tribune, April 10, 1969.
22 Reveal, “Chapter 2: Miracle on the Beach,” American Rehab, podcast, 2020, accessed October 28, 2024, https://revealnews.org/podcast/american-rehab-chapter-two-miracle-on-the-beach/.
23 “Eartha Kitt Jumps at Chance to Play Cured Drug Addict Who Escaped from Web of Crime and Vice to Help Others: Film Tells Sensational Story of ‘Synanon House,’ Where ‘Incurable’ Junkies Find Hope,” Philadelphia Tribune, December 8, 1964; “A Tunnel Back into the Human Race,” LIFE Magazine, March 9, 1962.
24 Speaker 38, in Reveal, “Chapter 2: Miracle on the Beach.”
25 Janzen, The Rise and Fall of Synanon, 14.
26 Robert Lindsey, “Police Are Ordered to Turn Over Synanon Tapes to Court on Coast: A New Religious Posture Morantz Filed Suit of His Own,” New York Times, December 19, 1978.
27 Janzen, The Rise and Fall of Synanon, 17.
28 Kaye, Enforcing Freedom, 88.
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32 Berman, “Chuck Dederich,” B62.
33 Unrestrained by taxes or wages, by the mid-1970s Synanon was doing over $5 million a year in sales. That is about $24 million a year today. Meanwhile, donations kept rolling in. See Reveal, “Chapter 3: A Venomous Snake.”
34 Janzen, The Rise and Fall of Synanon, 44.
35 Recordings of Synanon lawyers show that this was a highly strategic decision: “I also thought that the religions, once they get to a certain point in this country, have enormous survival value. When people come along and say, ‘You can’t keep sitting around in rooms and calling each other motherfuckers,’ and you say, ‘That’s my religion,’ they say, ‘Okay, I understand that.’” “One of the reasons that we’re pushing this thing right now because we may want to shut off our books from inspection by government agencies and people that we don’t like. That would make it a bit more difficult for the IRS to impose taxes upon us. Then we may be able to set up certain walls around Synanon, which make it more difficult to work with us.” Reveal, “Chapter 3: A Venomous Snake.”
36 Gerstel, David U., Paradise, , Incorporated: Synanon (Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1982), 45 Google Scholar.
37 Janzen, The Rise and Fall of Synanon, 126–27, 141, 145.
38 C.A. Wittman, Synanon Kid: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Synanon Cult (self-pub., CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2017); Jollett, Mikel, Hollywood Park: A Memoir (New York: Celadon Books, 2020)Google Scholar.
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40 This critique includes a rich description of encounter groups at Esalen and various nonprofits associated with the Human Potential Movement in the late 1960s. Bruce L. Maliver, “Encounter Groupers up against the Wall,” New York Times, January 3, 1971.
41 Witmann, Synanon Kid, 238–39.
42 Holloman, Regina E., “Ritual Opening and Individual Transformation: Rites of Passage at Esalen,” American Anthropologist 76, no. 2 (1974): 265–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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44 Mark M. Chatfield, “‘This Hurts You Badder than Punchin”: The Troubled Teen Industry and Therapeutic Violence in Group Rehabilitation Programs since World War II,” forthcoming in The Social History of Alcohol and Drugs, 7–8, 4, 3.
45 “Nation: Life at Synanon Is Swinging,” TIME Magazine, December 26, 1977.
46 Janzen, who studies American religion, was eager to connect the group to other religious groups that share extreme discipline, such as the Bruderhof. To his list of religions who shared Synanon’s practices and beliefs I could add the Shakers, who also separated children from their parents and required the end of childbearing. See Janzen, The Rise and Fall of Synanon; Stein, Stephen J., The Shaker Experience in America: A History of the United Society of Believers (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).Google Scholar
47 Kaye, Enforcing Freedom, 83.
48 Janzen, The Rise and Fall of Synanon, 54–5.
49 Yablonsky, The Tunnel Back, 232.
50 Gerstel’s memoir of his time as a Synanon resident is particularly useful because he tries to reconstruct what was appealing about the community to him initially. He also describes the texture of experience in both work and gaming. Gerstel, Paradise, Incorporated, 120.
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52 Narda Zacchino, “Judge Orders Synanon to Pay Couple $300,000: Couple’s Suit Against Synanon,” Los Angeles Times, September 20, 1978.
53 Clark, The Recovery Revolution, 78.
54 Shoshana Walter, “At Hundreds of Rehabs, Recovery Means Work without Pay,” Reveal, July 7, 2020, accessed June 7, 2022, https://revealnews.org/article/at-hundreds-of-rehabs-recovery-means-work-without-pay/.
55 Reveal, “Chapter 2: Miracle on the Beach.”
56 Yablonsky, The Tunnel Back, 337.
57 This is a sympathy that was not extended to other mid-1960s new religious groups such as ISKCON, and this difference is certainly about race. Urban, New Age, Neopagan, and New Religious Movements, 201–19.
58 The tendency I am resisting here is to describe Synanon as an NRM and focus on its most obviously religious components, despite the fact that it shared many of the key features of esoteric religious movements in the twentieth century. As Hugh Urban’s work on Theosophists and the Church of Scientology demonstrates, many groups described as NRMs share a tradition that has its own history and theology. L.R. Hubbard’s interest in secrecy, for example, shared with Madame Blavatsky’s movement an understanding of truth as a thing that can only be accessed through tiered ascendence, and which required an intermediary of special mediums (such as herself or Hubbard). Hugh B. Urban, Secrecy: Silence, Power, and Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021).
59 Gates and Bourdette, “The Synanon Alternative,” 234.
60 Yablonsky, The Tunnel Back, 77.
61 Gertrude Samuel, “Where Junkies Learn to Hang Tough,” New York Times, May 9, 1965.
62 Melley, Timothy, Secrecy, , Fiction, and the National Security State (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), 47 Google Scholar.
63 Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws, The Effect of Red China Communes on the United States: Hearing before the Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, Eighty-Sixth Congress, First Session: Testimony of Edward Hunter (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1959), 20–24.
64 Melley, Secrecy, Fiction, 55.
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67 John Lardas Modern shows how the idea of telepathy, which similarly received government research funding, was central to L.R. Hubbard’s hopes for the mind in Scientology. Modern, John Lardas, Neuromatic: Or, A Particular History of Religion and the Brain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), 271 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
68 Yablonksky, The Tunnel Back, 102.
69 Bruce Gilbert, “Brainwashed,” audio recording, accessed June 6, 2022, https://soundcloud.com/synanon-music/sets/the-synanon-music-of-bruce.
70 Kaye, Enforcing Freedom, 27.
71 Yablonksky, The Tunnel Back, 381.
72 Lindee, M. Susan, Rational Fog: Science and Technology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020), 162 Google Scholar.
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74 Yablonsky, The Tunnel Back, 56, 141.
75 Lindee, Rational Fog, 173.
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83 See, for example, the Cornell Peru experiment that treated a native community as a laboratory for modernization. Lindee, Rational Fog, 167.
84 Reveal, “Chapter 2: Miracle on the Beach.”
85 Yablonksy, The Tunnel Back, 57.
86 Gaston, K. Healan, Imagining Judeo-Christian America: Religion, Secularism, and the Redefinition of Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 155 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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88 I see a sharp distinction here between AA and Synanon’s use of ritual, despite both defining addiction treatment in the post–World War II landscape. There is a significant difference between creating a ritual structure using containment as the precondition of resocialization and AA’s model of coming and going. After thinking within Synanon’s construct, AA’s foundational emphasis on living in two worlds—one’s pre-existing context and the context of recovery—is astounding. In contrast to Synanon and Cold War fantasies of resocialization, AA developed a ritual framework that allowed for a transient kinship between people struggling with addiction and mutual aid that did not require control over one another or much bureaucratic infrastructure. I acknowledge that AA has also been incorporated into court-mandated care and thus now participates in the world of forced rehabilitation; but AA, unlike Synanon, theorized ritual as a thing you do with strangers who gather and then disperse with minimal communal disciplinary functions. For a history of AA, see Kurtz, Ernest, Not-God: A History of Alcoholics Anonymous (Center City, MN: Hazelden Educational Services, 1979)Google Scholar.
89 Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Testimony of Edward Hunter, 20.
90 Goodwin, Megan, “Unpacking the Bunker: Sex, Abuse, and Apocalypticism in ‘Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,’” CrossCurrents 68, no. 2 (June 2018): 244 Google Scholar.
91 Synanon’s invocation of Emerson along a host of other religious leaders and texts is very much in line with the tradition of American Spirituality that comes directly from Emerson and his ilk. Schmidt, Leigh Eric, Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 228 Google Scholar.
92 Reveal, “Chapter 4: Cowboy Conman,” American Rehab, 2020, accessed October 28, 2024, https://revealnews.org/podcast/american-rehab-chapter-4-cowboy-conman/.
93 Clark, The Recovery Revolution, 78.
94 Sugarman, “The Therapeutic Community,” 78.
95 Rachel Aviv, “The Shadow Penal System for Struggling Kids,” New Yorker, October 18, 2021, 32.
96 Louise Story, “A Business Built on the Troubles of Teenagers; Schools Are Popping Up to Deal with Drug and Behavior Issues,” New York Times, August 17, 2005.
97 Kaye, Enforcing Freedom, 87.
98 This is, for example, what the authors of The Cult of We mean by the cult of WeWork. They mean that the company’s growth was based on an overvaluation of Adam Neumann’s charisma. Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell, The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion (New York: Crown, 2021), 391. In terms of Synanon specifically, I disagree with Jordan Mylet’s argument that ritualized containment was not a central idea within Synanon and was only a later declension of its principles. Mylet, Jordan, “How to Treat an Addict: Institutional Confinement, Mutual Aid, and Self Realization in Postwar Los Angeles,” Australia New Zealand American Studies Association 40, no. 2 (December 2021): 5–48 Google Scholar.
99 Kaye, Enforcing Freedom, 83–86; Clark, The Recovery Revolution, 171, 177, 181.
100 Clark, The Recovery Revolution, 196.
101 Clark, The Recovery Revolution, 200, 188.
102 Aviv, “The Shadow Penal System,” 35, 32.
103 Robbins, Thomas and Anthony, Dick, “The Limits of ‘Coercive Persuasion’ as an Explanation for Conversion to Authoritarian Sects,” Political Psychology 2, no. 2 (Summer 1980): 27 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
104 For a discussion of how brainwashing became medicalized and its fundamental logical fallacies, see Thomas Robbins and Dick Anthony, “Deprogramming, Brainwashing and the Medicalization of Deviant Religious Groups,” Social Problems 29, no. 3 (1982): 283–97.
105 Witmann, Synanon Kid, 238–39.
106 Dederich’s deification of “the social” has much in common with what John Lardas Modern calls “the neuromatic,” or a conception of the brain as the ultimate sacred force. Modern, Neuromatic, 55.
107 For an example of another cult experience that is distinctive from the Synanon model of therapeutic containment and resocialization away from the family, one might look at the 2023 documentary Shiny Happy People on Bill Gothard’s teachings, in which people who grew up in Christian Reconstructionist homes describe Gothard as turning “every father into a cult leader.” There is a useful history to be written about patriarchal authoritarianism as a fantasy of communist and fascist coercive power put into praxis by white American evangelical leaders. For the strategic implementation of authoritarian patriarchy in post–World War II American white evangelicalism, see Du Mez, Kristin Kobes, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (New York: Liveright, 2020)Google Scholar.
108 Philip Deslippe shows that this non-pejorative use was at work in the 1990s, but it was also true throughout the twentieth century. Deslippe, Philip, “Past the Pejorative: Understanding the Word ‘Cult’ through Its Use in American Newspapers during the Nineties,” Implicit Religion 24, no. 2 (2021): 195–217 Google Scholar. See also Sheilah Graham, “Hollywood Today: Garbo Cancels Order for Three Evening Gowns Because ‘No One Wants to Take Me Out Now’—Gary Cooper Grouching Because Walter Brennan Steals ‘The Westerner,’” Hartford Courant, January 30, 1940; Irma Phorylles, “Give Me Your Hand,” Seventeen, May 1945; Jesse Walker, “The Big Controversy over ‘Blues For Mr. Charlie,’” New York Amsterdam News, June 6, 1964.
109 “Former Adherent’s Objections to Eddyism,” The Interior 41, no. 2071 (February 3, 1910): 137–38; Prince, Alexandra, “‘Driven Insane by Eddyism’: Christian Science, Popular Psychopathology, and a Turn-of-the-Century Contest over Faith and Madness,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 31, no. 3 (2021): 379–418 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Green-Hayes, Ahmad, “‘A Very Queer Case’: Clementine Barnabet and the Erotics of a Sensationalized Voodoo Religion,” Nova Religio 26, no. 4 (2023), 66 Google Scholar.
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112 Graham-Hyde, Edward, “From Bad to Worse: The Evolving Nature of ‘Cult’ Rhetoric in the Wake of Covid-19 and QAnon,” Implicit Religion 24, no. 2 (2021): 136 Google Scholar.
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114 In Cultish, the popular book that shows “cultishness” is defined by insider language, Amanda Montell shows that culty language is a particular tick of lifestyle brands such as SoulCycle, and that anyone could find themselves vulnerable to this mode of belonging. The current embrace of the word outside of religious contexts as a form of immanent critique can have the odd effect of making capitalism’s evils feel timeless, much like the image of primitive religion that the word “cult” invokes. Montell, Amanda, Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism (New York: HarperCollins, 2021).Google Scholar
115 Goodwin, Abusing Religion, 7, 14. A recent issue of Implicit Religion also warns against using cult as an analytic because of its tendency to reinscribe good religion/bad religion assumptions: Thomas, Aled and Graham-Hyde, Edward, “Introduction: The Return of the ‘Cult,’” Implicit Religion 24, no. 2 (2021): 129–34Google Scholar.
116 Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth, 182.
117 Thomas, Faking Liberties, 225.
118 Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth, 188, 179.
119 One of James Tabor and Eugene Gallaghar’s central arguments in Why Waco? is that giving the Branch Davidians the authority of real religion would, in fact, have shielded them from violence. This might be true in that case, but, in the case of MOVE or the Nation of Islam, this assessment sidesteps the question of what it would take to root out the white supremacist reactions to these groups.
120 In recollections by members who recall it fondly, I have found none that describe it as religious.
121 McCrary, Charles, Sincerely Held: American Secularism and Its Believers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022), 206–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
122 Carina Ray and Jordan Mylet, “A Forgotten Approach to Drug Addiction Recovery May Yield Results Today,” The Washington Post (Online), January 9, 2022, accessed October 28, 2024, https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/01/09/forgotten-approach-drug-addiction-recovery-may-yield-results-today/.
123 Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth, 7.
124 Orsi, “The Study of Religion.”
125 The posture of suspicion is not superior; it is curious and diligent. Empiricism is a posture of “surprise me!”—an openness to the ironic twists and turns that have led to normalized notions of self, other, and the social. This work is often normative in the sense of working towards justice. For example, in the critical history of mass incarceration, empirical studies work towards the ethical goal of prison abolition. Thompson, Heather Ann, “Why Mass Incarceration Matters: Rethinking Crisis, Decline, and Transformation in Postwar American History,” Journal of American History 97, no. 3 (December 2010): 703–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
126 “Splitting: One Perspective,” It’s Time for Morning Meeting: Sharing our Synanon Stories, accessed June 15, 2023, https://synanon.com/2021/09/11/splitting-part-1/.
127 David Gerstel, “Remembering Chris Benton,” It’s Time for Morning Meeting: Sharing our Synanon Stories, accessed June 15, 2023, https://synanon.com/2023/01/29/remembering-chris-benton/.
128 Wittman, Synanon Kid, 97.
129 Orsi, Robert, History and Presence (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016), 218–19, 233 Google Scholar.
130 Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth, 203.