Religion under Suspicion: Cold War Cultbusters in California

Southern California was a key location for the emergence of the modern anticult movement in the mid-twentieth century. The movement, which began as a loose network of parent support groups that opposed new religious movements they called "cults," was part of a larger debate about the future of religious freedom in the West, and the nation more broadly. California’s history of religious experimentation had fostered a religious diversity that many wanted to continue and expand. Yet, by the mid-twentieth century, the Cold War context and the migration to of the defense industry to California, gave rise to the religious and political conservatism that marked new groups as dangerous. As the anticult movement worked to exclude new religions from constitutional protections, it advanced the project of American Empire building and exemplified the long-standing dialectic between acceptance and opposition in the history of religion in the American West.