Cult Wars on Capitol Hill

Dire warnings, and First Amendment pleas

The Moonies were out in force on Capitol Hill last week. Outside the Russell Building the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's disciples had a band oompahing in protest; inside, they packed the gallery, unleashing standing ovations, boos and shouts of "Liar!" as they thought the testimony warranted. The occasion was an unofficial hearing on "cults," presided over by Republican Senator Robert Dole.

The cults issue was thrust into harsh focus by last November's carnage at the Peoples Temple commune in Jonestown, Guyana. The most dramatic moments of the four-hour hearing came from Jackie Speier, a legislative counsel who accompanied the late Congressman Leo Ryan on his fatal visit to the Rev. Jim Jones' headquarters and survived gunshot wounds. Speier stated that there are 10 million cult members in the U.S. and warned: "The most important fact about Jonestown is, it can happen again!"

As an afterthought, Dole included several witnesses who held, in line with First Amendment principles, that Government should not crack down on religious organizations unless they break the law. The bulk of the witnesses were anticult, however, and though they were openly, and understandably, hostile to the Moonies and other groups under discussion, they were unable to offer hard evidence of criminality, much less Jones-type mass murder. Nor did they define precisely what distinguishes a "cult" from an acceptable religion.

The main academics in the anticult lineup were Harvard Psychiatry Professor John Clark and University of Washington Law Professor Richard Delgado. Clark raised frightening specters of suicide, "uncontrolled violence," trances and total loss of memory, even distorted sense of smell (unexplained), among cultists. He made it clear that he saw the cultists as mindless zombies who pose a clear threat to democratic societies. "There are armies of willing, perfectly controlled soldiers," he told the assorted Senators and Representatives. "The level of public nuisance is so high that Government must act before it is too late."

But act how? Delgado offered five proposals: 1) laws forcing proselytizers always to identify their organizations; 2) a required "cooling-off period" before deciding whether to convert; 3) spiritual "living wills" to forestall future conversion; 4) licensing of high-pressure recruiters; and 5) as a last resort, court-ordered psychiatry for converts.

Jeremiah Gutman of the American Civil Liberties Union called this "impossible constitutionally." In his view the Government simply cannot monitor voluntary private conversations aimed at persuading people to change their beliefs, or attempt to control what religions people adopt. He said that "forced psychotherapy" to attack unwanted belief is "precisely what is going on in the Soviet Union today and precisely what Ted Patrick does on a smaller scale. It is already against the law."

Patrick, of course, is the creator of "deprogramming" for cult converts, and he was on hand also. He works with family members to abduct converts and subject them to nonstop ranting by teams of operatives until they renounce their new faith. Warning that "there is a conspiracy to turn [the U.S.] into a totalitarian state," he stated that he has personally deprogrammed 1,600 people, ranging in age from 13 to 81. In a forthcoming Playboy interview, Patrick includes First Sister Ruth Carter Stapleton, a neoPentecostal "memory healer," on his list of cult leaders who bear watching. Another witness, Author Flo Conway, stated that deprogramming should be "recognized as a new and valuable form of mental health therapy."

In the S.R.O. audience was Paul Pasquarosa, a devotee of "The Way," a zealous anti-Trinitarian group, who says that Patrick slashed at him repeatedly with a straight-edged razor at a December deprogramming in Massachusetts. As a result, Patrick, who has served time elsewhere, has been charged with assault with a dangerous weapon.

Another listener was Cynthia Slaughter, 27, a star witness at a similar hearing on cults held by Dole in 1976, who asked if she could testify again but was turned down. Slaughter, baptized into the Disciples of Christ as a youth, became a Moonie in 1975 and was deprogrammed by Patrick, then joined him and others in deprogramming work and giving dozens of anti-Moon speeches across the nation. She also wrote a first-person 1976 article in TIME. Now Slaughter, who would seem to be a highly suggestible sort, has reconverted.

Slaughter contends that the anticult network in which she was so active is itself a kind of "cult" and that Patrick's technique is psychologically "destructive." She said that it "scarred me," stirred up resentment and violent dreams, and that an anticult psychiatrist told her she came close to a psychotic break during her deprogramming. She freely admits that Moonies use high-pressure indoctrination methods, but she compares them to Zen-like spiritual disciplines. She also denies Patrick's theory that converts are "brainwashed."

It is unclear whether Senator Dole will pursue his cult hearings any further. Nor has Congress given any clue as to whether it will consider legislation to attack either the questionable religious groups, or the strong-arm tactics being used against them. There is always that little problem of squaring any such attacks with the First Amendment.

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