In the United States at the end of the 1970s, brainwashing emerged as a popular theoretical construct around which to understand what appeared to be a sudden rise of new and unfamiliar religious movements during the previous decade, especially those associated with the hippie street-people phenomenon. Most of the new groups were of Asian origin and located on the fringe of the evangelical Christian-based counter cultural movement, the Jesus People, although a few quasi-religious groups such as est and Lifespring were also brought into the controversy. While there had been a few scholars interested in new religious movements over the previous decades, especially in Japan where new religions had flowered in the 1950s, with the sudden appearance of a host of new groups in the United States following the rescission of the Asian Exclusion Act in 1965, a number of new scholars appeared ready to devote a significant amount of their research and writing to the issue of an understanding of the role of new religions in late twentieth century society. The first academic organization to focus research primarily on the many new religious groups was incorporated in 1969.

While these scholars explored with interest the many similarities of the new religions with older religious groupings, both familiar American groups and different groups seen in other lands, in the early 1970s movements appeared to oppose these new religions. The leaders of these groups, primarily parents of young adults who had joined the groups, focused upon the dissimilarities they saw between these new groups and the religions with which they were familiar. They were strange, but more than strange, they were quantitatively different, and their distinctive nature included a sinister element. Through the 1970s, as people struggled to articulate the strangeness they felt from these new religions, the term "brainwashing" became the symbol of the threat they represented.

While many objected to their son or daughter joining any religion different from that in which they had been raised, parents were particularly upset by those new groups who sought the full-time commitment of recruits, accepting them not just into membership but into a career either as an administrator, teacher, or missionary for the group, or a resident of a commune or monastic-like community. The brainwashing idea came as a godsend to parents who had been objecting to their offspring's joining one of the new movements, as it offered what appeared to be a scientific rationale for their son or daughter's actions.

Joining the new religion, at least to all outward appearances, included a radical change in lifestyle, social relationships, and career trajectory. Joining the groups usually included the individuals' assigning religion a significantly higher priority in their lives. Parents were often at a loss to explain what they saw as an unexpected change, though examination of the recruits usually revealed that the visible changes had come only after a period of time in which they had felt some dissatisfaction with their life in general and their religious life in particular.

In reaching out for some reason why a young adult would radically reject the way which parents had prepared for them to fine a successful (and by their standards, normal) life, parents tended to place the blame upon the group that s/he had joined, and increasingly upon the leader of that group. The several organizations founded in the early 1970s drew upon the literature developed primarily by American Evangelical Christian writers that referred to the new religions as "cults." (1) Through the early 1970s, they began to seek the assistance of law enforcement agencies and various professionals, primarily mental health professionals, to intervene in the life of the new believers. Police and courts were generally unable to assist parents whose child had joined a cult, a "cult" being defined as it was in Evangelical literature merely by its espousal of a radically different set of beliefs. The situation changed in the late 1970s largely as a result of (a) the discovery of involuntary deprogramming as a technique that had some positive results in persuading members to drop their affiliations to new religions, (b) the emergence of the concept of brainwashing in the trial of millionaire heiress Patty Hearst, and (c) the death of some 900 people at Jonestown.

First, the original parental groups found a major ally in the person of Theodore "Ted" Patrick who stumbled upon the process of deprogramming after being alerted to the dangers of cults when one of his relatives became briefly associated with the Children of God. In 1976 he authored a popular volume, Let Our Children Go,(2) describing his kidnapping of several people and the application of various forms of physical and emotional stress in an attempt to force them to sever their relationship to the group, be it the Unification Church, the Hare Krishna, The Divine Light Mission of Guru Maharaj Ji, or one of the several new Evangelical Christian groups.

Then, in 1975, media-empire heiress Patty Hearst was kidnapped from her apartment in Berkeley, California, and disappeared into the Symbionese Liberation Army, a self-styled leftist revolutionary political group. Some months later she was photographed carrying a rifle and participating in a bank robbery. When she was finally captured by the police, she was tried for her role in the robbery, and her defense lawyers tried to argue a new concept, that she had been brainwashed by the SLA and having lost her free will was not responsible for her actions during the robbery.

As the story of her life in the SLA was revealed, it became obvious that during the weeks immediately after her capture that she had undergone a horrible ordeal that included being locked for long periods in a closet, physical rape, and a period of indoctrination into the political theories of the SLA. Overtime, she began to identify with her captors and eventually became a convert to the SLA cause. At her trial, several people came forward to testify on her behalf, most prominently, Louis J. West and Robert J. Lifton. However, one more-obscure expert, Dr. Margaret Thaler Singer (though she did not testify on brainwashing at this time), would later emerge as the key figure in the brainwashing debate.(3) While the jury turned back any leniency for Hearst based on the brainwashing argument (in spite of her case bearing some analogy to the situation of the Korean prisoners of war), other juries were found to be more attuned to the concept.

At the time of the Hearst case, the parental movement against the new religions seemed to be running out of steam and was splintered into a variety of independently minded local organizations. However, in November 1978, an event in a small South American country would change everything. Jim Jones was the pastor of the Peoples Temple, a large California congregation of the prominent liberal Protestant denomination, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). Jones had become an advocate of a radical form of Marxist liberation theology, then a popular perspective in liberal Protestantism. However, while he was praised within his denomination and other Protestant churches, for his social outlook and work on racial harmony, he was not without his harsh critics. In 1977, he moved with hundreds of his church members, mostly African Americans, to Guyana, where the church had previously established a small agricultural colony.

In Guyana, a communal lifestyle emerged, and the group considered suicide as one alternative to the public's lack of acceptance of their Marxist ideology. Then in November 1978, Congressman Leo Ryan visited as a response to the controversy stirred by the church. Though seemingly completing his visit on a highly positive note, he and his party were brutally murdered just before they were to catch their plane back to the United States. Several hours later, almost all of the residents of Jonestown were dead, some committed suicide, others were murdered. Overnight, the Peoples Temple emerged as the epitome of the "cult." (4) The parental groups, divided and possessed of intense local loyalties to their group, found themselves unable to make a response at the level they believed that the Jonestown event demanded. However, over the next few years, they hammered out an national organization originally known as the Citizens Freedom Foundation (the name of an early group in California) and eventually assumed the name, Cult Awareness Network (CAN).

CAN emerged in the early 1980s prepared to fight the cults. It was equipped with a program to help parents who had lost a son or daughter into a cult (i.e., deprogramming) and what appeared to be a secular scientific understanding of the danger that cults posed (i.e., brainwashing). While CAN assumed the activist role serving families who desired the disassociation of one of their family members from a new religion, a sister group, the American Family Foundation (AFF) emerged to carry on an educational and research program designed to alert the public to the threat posed to the social order by the cults and the danger of cult life to its members. AFF leadership was largely constituted by professionals-with mental health professionals and lawyers constituting the largest segment. While pursuing separate roles, the efforts of the two organizations were coordinated by interlocking boards and the active role many people assumed in both CAN and AFF, and through the mid-1980s, professionals would largely replace parents on CAN's board By the end of decade, both organizations consisted of a small number of professionals leading a constituency of parents, anti-cult activists, and lay people concerned about the cult issue.

The Brainwashing Controversy

The idea of brainwashing came out of the misunderstanding of the Chinese indoctrination program directed at American Armed Forces prisoners during the Korean War. Many Americans were offended that some of their soldier prisoners had made anti-American statements during their prison days and that a few had even chosen to remain behind when prisoners were liberated at the end of hostilities. In the context of the public's coming to grips with the insult of the prisoners' actions, a journalist, Edward Hunter (later revealed to have been a undercover CIA agent), proposed that a new process of indoctrination had been developed by the Chinese Communists, that they had discovered an intense manipulative process that has insidious power to actually alter the mental outlook of those who fell victim to it.(5)

As soon as the Armistice was signed, a team of psychiatrists and psychologists were dispatched to Korea to interview the returning prisoners. Prominent among the group were Robert J. Lifton and Edgar Schein, and several years later the results of their research began to appear.(6) They concluded that in many ways the experience of the prison camps did not really test Hunter's accusations, as the prisoners were not really subjected to a systematic re-education program. Prisoners were subjected to pressures to engage in collaborative behavior rather than appeals to convert to Communism. Lifton and Schein noted that the thought control process occurred in the context of the prisoners physical confinement under the harshest of conditions, conditions in which necessities such as food and warm clothing were scarce. Positive results in the process were most often pulled out of prisoners who had faced severe deprivation and were offered such things as more comfortable sleeping quarters, better food, a sweater, or a blanket. They also noted that the process, in spite of the publicity given several prisoners who had made "unamerican" statements, was actually quite ineffective in changing any basic attitudes.(7) In spite of these results, the term "brainwashing" entered the public consciousness, and many people adopted Hunter's original perspective as truth.

However, soon after the Armistice, the Chinese government also began to release a number of prisoners, Americans and other foreigners (missionaries, students, doctors, businessmen) caught in China when the Korean War began, as well as a few Chinese who had not been arrested but had been encouraged to attend "voluntarily" one of the thought reform institutions set up throughout this period. When they emerged from captivity into freedom in Hong Kong, several made public statements to the effect that they had been American spies, that their arrest and detention was just, and that they deserved any punishment they had received. Given the seeming falsity of the statements they were making, possibly they were true victims of what Hunter had called brainwashing, that the sophisticated Pavlovian process of thought reform utilized by the Chinese was so effective that the victims subjected to it had become little more than a puppet or robot. Thus Schein, Lifton and their colleagues began a new round of research. While some such as William Sargent (8) and Joost Merloo (9) initially accepted Hunter's perspective, Lifton's (10) and Schein's (11) careful analysis of the prisoners accounts led them to reject Hunter's view.

Lifton, Schein, and their colleagues concluded that in fact coercive persuasion, in which a mixture of social, psychological and physical pressures are applied to produce changes in an individual's self-perception, beliefs and attitudes, does occur. However, they also concluded that a necessary condition of its occurring was the physical element-confinement or its equivalent, As Schein put it, "... the coercive element in coercive persuasion is paramount (forcing the individual into a situation in which he must, in order to survive physically and psychologically, expose himself to persuasive attempts)." (12) They also concluded that it was successful only on a minority of those subjected to it and its end result was very unstable, the individuals so coerced tending to revert to their previous condition soon after the coercive force was removed. (13)

By the time of the Hearst case, a popular anti-cult movement had been energized by the practice of deprogramming, an activity that included the forceful detention (and occasionally an actual kidnapping) of a member of a new religion and the subsequent application of pressure for the member to withdraw and return to a "normal" life. When legal authorities failed to respond to their requests, deprogramming offered parents one way to intervene in their offspring's life and hopefully end their foray in a new religious group. During the 1970s, parents also placed their hope in a second, closely associated, tactic, the placing of their child under a court conservatorship during which time pressure for their leaving the group could be applied without the questionable coercive activity involved with deprogramming.

In the years immediately after the Hearst case, several psychiatrists, most notably UCLA Professor Louis J. West and Massachusetts psychiatrist John Clark, were active in applying theories of brainwashing to new religious movements, however, it was Margaret T. Singer, a clinical psychologist in Berkeley, California, who became the leading theoretician and the most prominent exponent of the theory in court situations. Her position was initially established in several articles, most notably "Coming Out of the Cults," that appeared in Psychology Today, a widely circulated newsstand periodical designed to convey psychological insights to a popular audience.

Much of the article was devoted to discussing the harm suffered by the ex-members of several of the new religions. Symptoms included depression, indecisiveness, the blurring of mental acuity, uncritical passivity, and fear. The discussion of the mental health of group members would be a continuing theme in the literature. However, slipped into the discussion was the more important theme of coercive persuasion which Singer admitted needed a "long and sophisticated explanation of social and psychological coercion, influence and control procedures." (14) However, she did accuse the "cults" of maintaining the loyalty of their members through the use of "social and psychological pressures and practices that, intentionally or not, amount to conditioning techniques that constrict attention, limit personal relationships, and devalue reasoning.(15) She also noted that even trained therapists "may fail to be aware of the sophisticated high-pressure recruitment tactics and intense influence procedures the cults use to attract and keep members," and may rather see in the symptoms signs of a long-standing psychopathology originating in the days prior to cult involvement.(16)

In several subsequent articles, Singer would develop more completely her idea of "conditioning techniques." For example, in 1980, in an article co-authored with Louis J. West, she noted that cults use drastic techniques of control:

Further she added that the use of these techniques led members to become incapable of complex, rational thought, responses to questions become stereotyped, and the ability to make decisions difficult. Much that was asserted in articles such as th