Religious Cults

This is the story of a Canadian woman who was in the Advanced Training Institute, run by Bill Gothard, for fourteen years. The amazing thing is that she never knew she was in a cult until several years after she was out. That's what happened to Christine in 2014. She has spent the past nine years trying to deprogram and change the way she sees the world. Join her as she navigates the cult, goes through a divorce, finds out she was in a cult and subsequently has to unlearn all she believed to be true.

The Twelve Tribes: Inside America’s Hidden Cult is a chilling, boots-on-the-ground exposé of one of the country’s most elusive religious movements. What began as a humble café in Chattanooga became a network of communal homes, businesses, and self-contained belief systems stretching across continents. Rooted in a theology of submission, purity, and divine order, the Twelve Tribes has quietly shaped the lives of thousands — often behind smiling deli counters and charming farmhouse aesthetics.

While belief in religious supernatural claims is waning throughout the West, evidence suggests belief in nonreligious supernatural claims is on the rise. What explains this contradiction? How can a society with a falling belief in God have a rising belief in ghosts, psychic powers, ancient astronauts, and other supernatural or pseudo-scientific phenomena? Taking the same anthropological approach he employed in his notable studies of religion, atheist author and activist David G. McAfee turns his attention to nonreligious faith-based claims.

Daniel Allen Cox grew up with firm lines around what his religion considered unacceptable: celebrating birthdays and holidays, voting in elections, pursuing higher education, and other forays into independent thought. Their opposition to blood transfusions would have consequences for his mother, just as their stance on homosexuality would for him. But even years after whispers of his sexual orientation reached his congregation’s presiding elder, catalyzing his disassociation, the distinction between “in” and “out” isn’t always clear.

William Branham was an influential Pentecostal minister of the mid-20th century who began a cult following known as The Message. This ground breaking book examines the history of The Message movement in the years after Branham's death.

An indispensable guide, Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies connects the dots and sets the record straight on a host of greedy gurus and murderous messiahs, crepuscular cabals, and suspicious coincidences. Some topics are familiar - the Kennedy assassinations, the Bilderberg Group, the Illuminati, the People's Temple and Heaven's Gate - and some surprising, like Oulipo, a select group of intellectuals who created wild formulas for creating literary masterpieces, and the Chauffeurs, an 18th-century society of French home invaders, who set fire to their victims' feet.

Documenting the life of wandering spirits and their impact on vulnerable human targets, Susan Martinez offers a radical departure from the standard psychological explanations for a host of pathological behaviors - including multiple personality, autism, epilepsy, migraines, obsessive compulsive disorder, depression, schizophrenia, anxiety, PTSD, self-destructive urges, and strange outbursts - and reveals that hallucinations are often true impressions of spirit input.

This is the story of a young man who was raised as a Jehovah's Witness, seemingly destined to spend the rest of his life following the instruction of God's "Spirit Directed Organization". He soon came to discover, however, that things were not as they had first seemed. Following a patch of doubt and subsequent in-depth investigation into the religion, the young man began to realize that the things he had previously accepted without question no longer made sense.

An Everyday Cult follows the arc of Buglion's journey through young motherhood into a group that welcomed her but also captured her mind, her heart, and her money. She shows us how a mind and psyche can be compromised by a controlling leader, using techniques that fly under the radar of human awareness—and she implores listeners to wake up to these ever-present abuses of power. Gerette vividly describes a personal journey that became increasingly treacherous, culminating in tragedy. In the telling of her story, she exposes the impact of cultic manipulation on daily life.

In September 2010, at the beginning of the academic year at Sarah Lawrence College, a sophomore named Talia Ray asked her roommates if her father could stay with them for a while. No one objected. Her father, Larry Ray, was just released from prison, having spent three years behind bars after a conviction during a bitter custody dispute.

In the middle of the Ozzie and Harriet 1950s, the birth control pill became available and a maverick psychoanalytic institute, the Sullivan Institute for Research in Psychoanalysis, opened its doors in New York City. Its founders wanted to start a revolution, one grounded in ideals of creative expression, sexual liberation, and freedom from societal norms, and the revolution needed to begin at home.

The Latter Rain Movement of the late 1940s and 1950s created a new breed of Pentecostalism that dramatically impacted Christianity in the United States, as well as many other countries around the world. Initially viewed as a movement by God, a number of well-respected men and women participated in the movement during its early years.

At age 14, Wendy Gossard was drawn by the tranquil blue eyes and personal magnetism of a man known as Yahowah, leader of a spiritual group called the Source Family. Fleeing her own family and becoming a fugitive from justice in the state of California, Wendy followed the 1970s cult group across settlements in California and Hawaii on a quest for spiritual direction, communal harmony, and basic survival. Growing up, the teenager, called Mushroom by Yahowah, had questions about her pregnancy, relationships, and place in the universe.

In 1981, ambitious young Ma Anand Sheela transported the Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh to the United States to fulfill his dream of creating a utopia for his thousands of disciples. Four years later, the incendiary Rajneeshpuram commune in Oregon collapsed under the weight of audacious criminal conspiracies hatched in its inner sanctum, including the largest bioterrorism attack in US history, an unprecedented election fraud scheme, and multiple attempted murders. Rajneeshpuram explores how this extraordinary spiritual community went so wrong.

Something terrible has happened in the snowbound village of Kingdom Come, Wyoming, where 12 eerily identical houses stand dark and abandoned. Meals remain untouched on dining room tables, cars are still in garages, and the town's residents have vanished into thin air. This is the disturbing setting where vacationing medical examiner Maura Isles and her traveling companions find themselves trapped during a ferocious snowstorm.

For the first time in thirty years, more than a dozen former ATF agents who participated in the initial February 28, 1993, raid speak on the record about the poor decisions of their commanders that led to this deadly confrontation. Revelations in this book include why the FBI chose to end the siege with the use of CS gas; how both ATF and FBI officials tried and failed to cover up their agencies’ mistakes; where David Koresh plagiarized his infamous prophecies; and direct links between the Branch Davidian tragedy and the modern militia movement in America.

At the age of six, Tim Guest was taken by his mother to a commune modeled on the teachings of the notorious Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. Tim and his mother were given Sanskrit names, dressed entirely in orange, and encouraged to surrender themselves into their new family. In 1985, the movement collapsed amid allegations of mass poisonings, attempted murder, and tax evasion, and Yogesh was once again Tim. In this extraordinary memoir, Tim Guest chronicles the heartbreaking experience of being left alone on earth while his mother hunted heaven.

This audiobook compares Christianity with the false religions of the world today that are based on the accuracy of fulfilled Bible prophecy. No other religion has used prophecy fulfilled in our lifetime to prove its authority, except the Bible. With more than 50 prophecies fulfilled since AD 1948 and Jesus’ teaching that he is the only way to salvation, we can conclude that we must be a Christian to gain eternal life. Jesus declares you must follow his teachings in order to obtain eternal life.

Africa may have given rise to the first human beings, and Egypt probably gave rise to the first great civilizations, which continue to fascinate modern societies across the globe nearly 5,000 years later. From the Library and Lighthouse of Alexandria to the Great Pyramid at Giza, the Ancient Egyptians produced several wonders of the world, revolutionized architecture and construction, created some of the world’s first systems of mathematics and medicine, and established language and art that spread across the known world.

Despite their centuries-old history and traditions, witchcraft and magic are still very much a part of modern Anglo-American culture. In Lucifer Ascending, Bill Ellis looks at modern practices that are universally defined as "occult," from commonplace habits such as carrying a rabbit's foot for good luck or using a Ouija board, to more esoteric traditions, such as the use of spell books. In particular, Ellis shows how the occult has been a common element in youth culture for hundreds of years.