The North American Anticult Movement
Anson Shupe · Oxford University Press eBooks · 2016
The modern North American anti-cult movement (hereafter ACM), a counter- movement, has been researched both conceptually and historically/organizationally. My purpose here is not to trace all the historical and sociological trivia and varieties of the ACM in North American during its thirty five-year heyday of growth, maturity, and then relative morbidity. Rather, I wish to accomplish two tasks: first, to place the understanding of counter-movements such as the modern ACM in a sociological social movement context (foreign as that may have seemed to its activists during the 1960s-90s); and second, to provide an overview of this current incarnation of a very old social movement theme in American history. Regarding the subject of counter-movements, Tahi Mottl correctly claimed thirty years ago that it was a relatively neglected one. Things are becoming slightly better today.