The Decline of Cults and the Rise of Subcultures

Should we be worried about the
decline of cults in American life? In The New York
Times, Ross Douthat
notes that both the media and the public have moved on,
and now “the cult phenomenon feels increasingly
antique, like lava lamps and bell bottoms.“ But
the loss of cult fervor has come at a cost, he
suggests: “The decline of cults, while good news
for anxious parents of potential devotees, might actually be a
worrying sign for Western culture, an indicator not only of
religious stagnation but of declining creativity writ
large.“

It’s a provocative case, drawing from essays by Philip Jenkin
and Peter Thiel. Jenkins is focused on cults as a religious
indicator: “A wild fringe, he suggests, is often a sign of a
healthy, vital center, and a religious culture that lacks for
charismatic weirdos may lack ‘a solid core of spiritual activism
and inquiry’ as well.” Thiel, not surprisingly, is more focused on
productivity and invention: “Not only religious vitality but the
entirety of human innovation, he argues, depends on the belief that
there are major secrets left to be uncovered, insights that
existing institutions have failed to unlock (or perhaps forgotten),
better ways of living that a small group might successfully
embrace.”

There’s something to this, I think, but it also understates the
ways in which semi-cult-like behavior has come to infuse daily life
and mainstream culture: Yes, there are probably fewer cults in the
aliens-and-messiahs sense, but there are more subcultures, in a
wider variety, than ever before, more regimented lifestyle trends
and minority beliefs about how to improve personal productivity or
fitness, about how to become a better person and live a purer, more
interesting, more connected and compelling life.

Some of these subcultures remain distinctly fringe
(dumpster-diving freegans, gently
quirky
bronies, furry fans), while
others are embraced, to varying degrees, by the mainstream: At its
height, Occupy Wall Street was as much an alternative lifestyle and
belief community as a political movement. What is Crossfit if not a
ritualized system that offers its highly dedicated, tightly-knit
cells of followers a better and more meaningful existence? None of
these are cults in the specific sense that Douthat describes, with
gated compounds and secret songs, but they are all experiments in
behavior, taste, and belief intended to help adherents find meaning
and connection in their lives.

So while we don’t, and generally shouldn’t, think of these sorts
of affinity groups and social movements and lifestyle choices as
cults, they can and do play a similar role in culture, allowing for
small-scale experiments in quasi-radicalism.

But the profusion of subcultures, and the way they have emerged
as everyday parts of so many lives, makes it easy to forget that
they have taken on this role. Part of the reason we don’t think of
subcultures like cults is because even though some of them still
have what might be described as mythologies, they lack the same
sort of mystical allure and apocalyptic tendencies.

But another part of the reason is that over the past two
decades, participation in niche culture has become ordinary and
even mainstream. Almost everyone—from Burning
Man-attendees to the steampunk hackers to the
scrapbooking-convention obsessives to the home brewing aficionados
and the toe-shoe-wearing obstacle-race junkies, many of whom also
maintain lives as lawyers and engineers and elementary school
administrators—is part of some subculture now, and it’s not
questioned or noticed because it’s not unusual.

Indeed, whether they know it or not, most people take part
in multiple subcultures, or portions of them,
mixing and matching and discarding parts and pieces as they please.
The Internet, which, with its fragmented and unlimited information
flows, has hastened the transformation of all of culture into
subculture, has helped make this possible, by making niche
interests and identities both accessible and malleable to the
masses.

Which is probably another reason we take less notice of
subcultures than of cults: Many have communal aspects, but they are
individualized and custom-tailored, and while many have founders
who design and sometimes help maintain the systems, they lack the
sort of domineering cult-leader figures of decades past.
Subcultures now are atomized and personalized, crossbred and
constantly evolving.

Worries about the decline of cults are in some sense a form of
nostalgia for an older order, with more clearly delineated lines
between the mainstream and the fringe, with radicalism easy to
recognize and define and, if necessary, shun. That those days are
largely over (at least in the U.S.) isn’t a sign that our culture
has lost its capacity for lifestyle creativity, its desire for
secret knowledge and methods. It’s a sign that the creativity is
happening elsewhere now, in the blur between the boundaries, in the
scrambling of the systems, in the subculture collage.