I like being infamous. I think it is safe being a cult.
Adam Ant
What’s a cult? It just means not enough people to make a minority.
Robert Altman
The story of cult activity drawing the ire and aggression of federal forces is a thread that runs through the 1990s. Previous articles have detailed the confrontations at Ruby Ridge and Waco in detail. A future article will tell the story of the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995.
This events have clear connections to each other. There were the cults and militias that gained our attention in the 90s. Thirty years later we watched the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, flex ties ready for use and hands on the shoulder of the one ahead of them marching up the steps of the Capitol. These delusionists supported Donald Trump in his desperation that afternoon in 2021. They put on a kinda sorta military display in answer to the President’s unambiguous “Will be wild” invitation to the rally cum insurgency two weeks before his surrender. The most inflamed militias had their wet dream opportunity to play revolutionary for an afternoon, and they put on a show for the cameras, and the law.
If you looked closely you could see a straight line between them and their antecedents from the waning days of the last century. They failed, but at this moment one cannot say with certainty that the combination of the Department of Justice and the course of political events will consign the American militia movement to the dustbin of history.
That is not so much the question here. What is central to this whole series of articles is unravelling the Gordian knot of events which has brought America to the brink of failure in the last sixty years. Are the cults and the militias drivers combining with other singular events and people in this sorry saga? Or are they oddballs - a peripheral but painful part of the American tableau - serious in and of themselves, but not a part of the larger story in any substantive way?
That question at least can be answered directly. They are illustrative of the stealthy atomization of Americans and concomitant breakdown of community, but too small to be a driver. Despite the outrage that clings to the long gone and unlamented Timothy McVeigh, the big picture contains those events which affect the broadest array of Americans. These are:
financial inequality at a level unmatched by any comparable country,
endemic race-related problems,
a growing indifference to community spirit and belonging and concomitant cult of individual empowerment,
the proliferation of guns in America,
the abrupt explosion in technological advances which has brought to us a revolution in the American economy and how individuals communicate with one another and,
the deepening polarization of the country in its political affiliations
The above are the “tentpole” changes which have flung Americans apart from one another over the last half a century. Each contributed a partial reason on its own. But when they happened simultaneously, we can identify secondary effects over time, building on the malaise that Americans suffer from. At the moment we wait to see if there will be some sort of permanent breakdown in the union that is America. We don’t know yet whether January 6 2021 was an omen or an aberration.
But back to the cults and militias and the extreme nature of their confrontations. How exactly do they fit into the picture?
A Distinction
First of all we need to draw a line. Religious cults in this time period came before organized militias. Why did cults come about in the late Eighties and Nineties and organized militias very soon afterward?
Cults first. There is a widely accepted theory among sociologists who study cultural aberrations which posits a reason as to why cults came to the forefront in the 1990s. It holds that the events of the Sixties and Seventies were profoundly destabilizing for America. Once people detached themselves from the fights for civil rights and against Vietnam, there was a turn inward by people in the Seventies. Hence the pejorative label of the Seventies as the “Me Generation”. As this group came of age or emerged from the Sixties, there was a sea change in the direction they took. They began to seek fulfillment, even transcendence, in personalized movements and religions. Naturally organized religions took a beating during this period.
The seeds were planted in the Seventies. The Eighties was a kind of gestation period for the millions of Americans who were now wandering from one new way of life to the next. Most came through this marked in some way - disillusioned or somewhat abashed, but with both feet in the real world. But some met a leader charismatic to hold them long enough for conversion. Bit by bit some cults and movements arose. Each had a strongly avowed purpose. Each was a stew of simmering anger. That the world was coming closer with each passing day to a new millennium was another factor - believers put deep store in the idea that the year 2000 had huge religious significance. Then, or around that time, God would make his return to earth. Then would come the final battle followed by the Rapture promised in Revelations.
Militias formed following the major events that the cults invited. They shared the hatred of the federal government that the cults had. But they were not formed for religious purposes. Militias saw what had happened at Ruby Ridge and Waco and were convinced that the government was progressively becoming anti-white and anti-gun.
They wanted to avenge the slaughter (as they saw it) of Randy Weaver and David Koresh and scores of followers. But also they feared that America was deviating from its original principles of self-reliance, individual liberty and their view of what justice should look like. It is not a coincidence that a majority of the militias formed in America’s west. They romanticized the frontier and what they saw as its purer way of life. They intended to replicate it themselves and make sure there was no further slippage in America. They saw themselves as America’s last line of defence.