Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism

Amanda Montell’s Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism analyzes the history of American cults, looking at how these cults use the power of language to shape the reality of their members. The book investigates the linguistic principles employed by different types of cults and how these principles are increasingly being leveraged by other communities, like multi-level marketing companies (MLMs), fitness-product leaderboards, and social-media groups. What emerges from this research pursuit is a shared language—what Montell calls the fanatical language of “cultish.”

This guide refers to the 2021 HarperCollins hardcover edition.

Content Warning: This book contains references to and depictions of suicide, homicide, racial issues, political issues, kidnapping, harm to children, gun violence, body shaming, sexual abuse, and rape.

Summary

Part 1: “Repeat After Me” examines the language around cults, including the evolution of the word and its connotations and associations over time. Montell dispels some common myths about cults—like the idea that all followers are brainwashed—while sharing the details of her life that drove her to investigate cultish language. Montell’s father was forced into a cult called Syanon as a teenager, and this experience shaped her family’s skepticism of rhetoric that sounds too good to be true. Additionally, Montell notes a general human interest in cults that has little to do with personal experience or perverse intrigue; rather, people want to understand what drives cult leaders and followers to behave the way they do.

Part 2: Congratulations—"You Have Been Chosen to Join the Next Evolutionary Level Above Human” analyzes the most notorious suicide cults, including Jonestown and Heaven’s Gate. Jonestown, a cult famous for the horrific deaths of its members after their mass consumption of a cyanide-and-Kool-Aid-esque cocktail in Guyana, was founded by Jim Jones, who was a progressive integrationist and member of the first couple to adopt an interracial child in Indiana. He spoke eloquently and found it easy to connect with people. His intelligence and charisma, along with his methodical targeting of idealists who supported the elevation of the Black community and integration in the 1970s, garnered him a massive following as he worked to build his vision of a socialist paradise in Guyana.

Upon arriving in Jonestown, many of his followers realized something was amiss and wrote home, prompting a congressman to visit the site in response to the distress calls. The congressman was killed by Jim Jones’s paramilitary after asking too many questions, and Jones then ordered his followers to drink a cyanide cocktail or be shot. The only surviving members hid or were away from camp that day.

Similarly, Heaven’s Gate offered followers a beautiful promise in response to the corruption of the world, but this cult also ended in suicide, with each member ingesting a lethal concoction and placing a plastic bag over their heads, wearing matching Nike shoes with toll money in their pockets.

These infamous suicide cults of the 1970s reflected the turbulence of the time, particularly as it related to distrust of the government and institutions while people sought more togetherness. These examples have firmly established a negative connotation for the term “cult” whenever it is used. They also raise unsettling questions about how a person could become so entrenched in a cult ideology that they’d take their own life over it.

Part 3: “Even YOU Can Learn to Speak in Tongues” describes the nature of controversial religious cults like Scientology and the Children of God. In this section, Montell shares her experience with Scientology and testimonies from members who have left the religion. She sheds light on how these seemingly outrageous groups manage to lure optimistic, idealistic people with piecemeal information until they are submerged in the group without realizing it, following the traditional toxic pattern of conversion through love-bombing, conditioning through rituals, and coercion through mind games, shaming, and other language-based tactics that make followers question themselves and their understanding of reality when they fall out of line with the group.

Part 4: “Do You Wanna Be a #BossBabe?” demonstrates how multi-level marketing schemes, which operate like pyramids, adopt cult strategies and language to benefit those at the top. Montell offers a detailed portrait of one of the largest MLMs, Amway, which has stood up to legal scrutiny and paved the way for many other MLMs to follow. However, there are still trials ahead for companies like LuLaRoe and Optavia. MLMs operate through a structure of continuous recruiting and bombard people with overly positive rhetoric to make them feel like creative entrepreneurs in control of their financial freedom.

Part 5: “This Hour Is Going to Change Your Life…and Make You LOOK AWESOME” is about fitness cults, like SoulCycle and CrossFit. Although these groups differ greatly in actual practices and ideological beliefs, they do share a common thread: making fitness about a blend of physical and spiritual wellness. Many of these groups can be extremely positive and empowering, for example using affirmations and mantras to inspire exercisers only for the duration of class while allowing them to maintain their whole identity. However, others are more complicated. CrossFit, for example, encourages and expects that participants will injure themselves; in their community, it is seen as a badge of honor. If someone complains about their injuries, then the community pushes the blame on the participant for taking things too far, even though CrossFit’s chaotic, intense culture enables these behaviors.

Likewise, SoulCycle can be a problematic fitness cult because it practices unsafe sharing of emotional and traumatic experiences at points of physical weakness. Despite the problems that have arisen with fitness cults, from leaders being deposed due to sexual-assault allegations to social-media backlashes, many of these cults are successful because they can exist beyond their leader. There is also the concept of micro-cults, in which participants can be intensely loyal to individual class leaders rather than to the brand itself, and each class leader can have a totally different style/approach to the brand. Many cultlike fitness groups can be motivational, but participants should be wary and look out for signs of cultlike behavior if a group begins to consume time outside of designated workouts.

Part 6: “Follow for Follow” discusses social-media gurus and influencers. Social media itself is a kind of cult that shapes people’s identities and beliefs through algorithms and curation. Ultimately, this section concludes the book with the acknowledgment that cults aren’t inherently good or bad—and are unavoidable in the era of the internet.