Cults

Coercive groups and the long argument about how to think about them, organised by how control actually works rather than by famous massacres. From the Great Disappointment of 1844 and Lifton's study of thought reform to Jonestown, Waco, the Tokyo subway and the courtroom collapse of brainwashing as evidence, alongside the panic that convicted innocent people while looking for hidden coercion.

A chronological documentary of 184 moments spanning 1870–2026 on Loreline.

Curated by Olivier · last updated 2026-08-22

1. 1870 - North front and lawn of the Oneida Mansion House. A stereo card view of the north front of the Mansion House by the photographers Ranger & Austen, from the Robert N. Dennis collection. The library dates the card to roughly 1865-1875, the community's largest years.
2. 1870 - Bird's-eye view of the Oneida home buildings. A stereo card from the series Photographic views of the community, Oneida, N.Y., showing the community's buildings from above. It records the settlement as one connected domain rather than a village of separate households.
3. 1870 - Children and playground at Oneida. A stereo card by Moulton & Dopp showing children and the playground at the Oneida Community in upstate New York. Children there were raised collectively in a children's house rather than by their own parents.
4. 1870 - Community group under the butternut tree. Members of the Oneida Community posed beneath the butternut tree on the community's grounds. Photographs made on site are much of what survives of how a closed settlement chose to picture itself.
5. 1870 - Trout pond and grotto at Oneida. Community members at the trout pond and grotto on the Oneida grounds, in a stereo card by Moulton & Dopp. The community kept its own ponds, workshops and gardens.
6. 1873 - Summer-house on the Oneida grounds, 1873. A stereoscopic view of the summer-house at the Oneida Community, dated 1873 in the Robert N. Dennis collection of stereoscopic views.
7. 1907 - Community Silver advertised in Good Housekeeping. A 1907 magazine advertisement for silverware from Oneida Community, Ltd. The commune founded by John Humphrey Noyes in 1848 dissolved into a joint-stock company in 1881, and the tableware brand outlived the community by more than a century.
8. 1954-08-12 - Bigamy Raid on a 1954 newspaper page. A black and white press photograph headed BIGAMY RAID, from the 12 August 1954 edition of the Nome Nugget. Prosecutions of plural marriage drew heavy coverage in the years after the 1953 state raid on Short Creek, an operation that turned public opinion against the authorities who ordered it.
9. 1967 - Japanese parents organise against the Principle Movement. A 1967 newspaper image of the national parents' association formed in Japan to oppose the Unification Church's Principle Movement. Parents' groups of this kind were the seed of the organised opposition that followed.
10. 1968-04-22 - Charles Manson booking photograph, 1968. A California corrections booking photograph made in April 1968, a year before the killings for which Manson and several followers were convicted. It is a public record document of a convicted leader, kept here as a single anchor rather than a gallery.
11. 1970 - The courthouse scrum, 1970. Unedited press-corps footage from the murder trial that opened on 15 June 1970 and returned guilty verdicts on 25 January 1971. The coverage is the point: the 1969 killings, rather than any mechanism of control, fixed what the public would mean by the word cult for the next fifty years.
12. 1970 - The ranch at Chatsworth. Footage from around 1970 of the disused film ranch north-west of Los Angeles where the Manson group lived. The group was small, itinerant and drug-centred rather than a settled religious community, which is part of why it fits the standard models of coercive organisation poorly.
13. 1973-02-27 - Charles Manson leaving a Los Angeles courtroom. Manson, manacled hand and foot and with his hair cut short, escorted from a Los Angeles courtroom in February 1973, where he had appeared as a witness at another trial.
14. 1974-02-19 - Banners at a march in The Hague. Followers of Sun Myung Moon demonstrating in The Hague on 19 February 1974, carrying banners including pro-Nixon slogans. Public marches were part of the movement's early profile in Europe.
15. 1975-04-03 - Chapel area of the Unified Family centre. The room used as the chapel in the Dutch Unified Family centre, photographed in April 1975 while a kidnapping complaint against the group was in the news. Interiors of movement premises from this period are scarce.
16. 1975-04-03 - Leader of the Dutch Unified Family at the centre. Verheyen, leader of the Dutch Unified Family, photographed at the group's centre in front of a framed portrait during a kidnapping case brought against the organisation in April 1975. Disputes between families and new movements drove the deprogramming conflicts of the decade.
17. 1975 - Handbill for a meeting about leaving the Earth. A flyer posted in San Francisco in the summer of 1975 by the two teachers later known as the founders of Heaven's Gate, advertising a public meeting about a physical departure from the planet. The promise of an imminent departure, deferred again and again, held the group together for more than twenty years.
18. 1976-08-27 - Picket outside a Washington bookstore. Members of the Unification Church picketing a pornography shop on 14th Street NW in Washington, D.C., in August 1976, with placards reading 'Porno kills the soul'. Public morality campaigns were part of the movement's American profile in the 1970s.
19. 1977-01-16 - A city supervisor beside Jim Jones at the hotel protest. San Francisco Supervisor Dorothy von Beroldingen stands next to Jim Jones at the International Hotel anti-eviction rally in January 1977. Jones held a city housing appointment at the time, and proximity to elected officials was part of what kept the Temple clear of scrutiny.
20. 1977-01-16 - Jim Jones at the International Hotel eviction protest. Jim Jones among demonstrators opposing the eviction of elderly tenants from the International Hotel in San Francisco in January 1977. The Temple could deliver large, disciplined turnouts to city causes, and that capacity bought the organisation standing with local government.
21. 1978 - Damaged aircraft photographed by the FBI in Guyana. One of the damaged aircraft recorded by FBI agents in Guyana after 18 November 1978. A visiting congressional delegation was attacked at the airstrip as it tried to leave, and the killing of a sitting US congressman is what turned the settlement into a federal investigation.
22. 1978 - Network news reports from Guyana. CBS News coverage broadcast in the days after 18 November 1978, when 918 people connected to the Peoples Temple died across three locations in Guyana. Congressman Leo Ryan, killed at the Port Kaituma airstrip that day, remains the only member of the US Congress killed in the line of duty.
23. 1978 - A staffer's account of the airstrip. An interview recorded in 1978 with a member of Congressman Leo Ryan's delegation who was wounded at Port Kaituma on 18 November. Five people were killed there and eleven injured as the delegation tried to leave with departing members.
24. 1978 - The welcome sign at the Jonestown entrance. The board at the entrance to the Peoples Temple agricultural project in northwest Guyana. The site was reachable only by boat and truck, which is what made the separation work.
25. 1978 - The herbal kitchen at Jonestown. A kitchen building at the Peoples Temple settlement, photographed by FBI agents during the investigation. The project grew and prepared its own food, an isolation that was logistical as much as ideological.
26. 1978 - Cottages at the settlement. Rows of small cottages built for residents at Jonestown, photographed by FBI agents after November 1978. Some nine hundred people were living on the site by that year.
27. 1978 - The playground at Jonestown. Play equipment at the Peoples Temple settlement, photographed during the FBI investigation. Families moved to Guyana expecting a permanent home.
28. 1978 - Former members describe life inside. Interviews recorded in 1978 in which people who had left the Peoples Temple describe the settlement's routine: rehearsed loyalty drills, restricted mail and radio contact, signed blank documents held by the leadership. The accounts are given by role here; the speakers are private individuals.
29. 1978 - Press conference, San Francisco. Unedited footage of a contentious 1978 press conference held in San Francisco after the deaths in Guyana. The Peoples Temple had operated from the city since 1970 and its leader had been appointed to the San Francisco Housing Authority in 1975.
30. 1978 - A tape from the settlement. One of the recordings made routinely inside the Guyana settlement and later released by the FBI. On it the leader reads the day's news to the community and tells them a congressional delegation intends to visit. The tapes are a direct record of how information reaching the commune was filtered.
31. 1978-11-24 - Georgetown interview, November 1978. A long interview recorded in Georgetown on 24 November 1978 with a man who had lived at the settlement and left it that week. The recording is held in the primary-document archive maintained by San Diego State University.
32. 1978-12-06 - Entrance to the Peoples Temple headquarters on Geary Boulevard. The doorway of the Temple's San Francisco headquarters at 1859 Geary Boulevard, photographed in December 1978. The building was the organisation's administrative centre and the base from which it ran its political work in the city.
33. 1979 - The settlement, six months on. A television crew returns to the Peoples Temple settlement in Guyana in May 1979. The commune had been built from 1974 on a lease in the interior, several hours from Georgetown, and was reachable in practice only through the organisation.
34. 1980-11-05 - Dutch television and the courts over a Scientology broadcast. A Dutch press photograph from 5 November 1980, made around a court ruling that allowed a VARA consumer programme to continue after a broadcast about the practices of the Church of Scientology. Litigation against broadcasters was a routine response to coverage.
35. 1981-07-17 - Sannyasins dancing at the Orange Full Moon festival. Followers of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh dancing at an international festival in the Frans Otten Stadion in Amsterdam on 17 July 1981. The uniform red and orange clothing and the wooden mala worn at the neck identified membership on sight.
36. 1982-01-21 - Rajneesh followers living in a former Amsterdam prison. Around eighty followers of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh living in a disused house of detention on the Amstelveenseweg in Amsterdam, photographed in January 1982. The movement housed its European members in large shared buildings of this kind.
37. 1982-07-01 - Mass wedding officiated by Sun Myung Moon. A collective blessing ceremony conducted by Sun Myung Moon of the Unification Church in July 1982. Couples were matched by the founder, and the mass wedding became the movement's most recognisable public form.
38. 1984-05-11 - Scientology and Dianetics premises in Amsterdam. The exterior of the Scientology and Dianetics church on the Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal in Amsterdam, photographed for a Dutch press agency in May 1984, at a time when the organisation's methods were under press scrutiny in the Netherlands.
39. 1984 - Osho cassette sold at Rajneeshpuram. An audio cassette of the movement's discourses, of the kind sold at Rajneeshpuram in 1984, with its copyright notice. Recorded talks were sold to members and visitors alongside the printed books.
40. 1984 - A documentary made on the ranch. A 1984 Oregon television documentary on the commune built by followers of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, filmed while it was still operating and before the county election of that autumn.
41. 1984-11-17 - Two news tapes, November 1984. Two station news items broadcast on 17 and 24 November 1984, transferred from the original tapes by an Oregon historical society. Federal investigators moved on the commune the following year; its leader was arrested in October 1985 and deported on immigration charges.
42. 1985 - The commune's DC-3s in Oregon. Douglas DC-3s belonging to the Rajneesh movement's own airline, parked near Antelope, Oregon, with a light helicopter alongside. The settlement housed more than a thousand followers and ran its own transport, businesses and services; it dissolved within months of this photograph.
43. 1985 - Antelope, Oregon under the name Rajneesh. The small Oregon town of Antelope after commune members took control of its council and renamed it Rajneesh in 1984. The takeover of a neighbouring town's government was the point at which the commune's expansion became the outside world's problem.
44. 1985 - Dedication stone at the commune's reservoir. A stone beside the road into Rajneeshpuram recording the reservoir the commune built: a 44-acre surface, a 36-square-mile catchment and a capacity of 360 million gallons. The work was done by members and the result dedicated to Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh.
45. 1985 - The commune's bus fleet at the ranch. Buses of Rajneesh Buddhafield Transport parked at Rajneeshpuram in 1985. Alongside the buses the commune ran a mall, a restaurant, a state-recognised police force and a small airline.
46. 1985 - Air Rajneesh aircraft at Big Muddy Ranch. A Convair 240 and a Douglas DC-3 belonging to the commune's own airline at the ranch airstrip. Running an air service was part of operating the settlement as a self-contained city.
47. 1985 - Information kiosk at Zen Crossing, Rajneeshpuram. A visitor collecting information from a kiosk attendant near the shopping mall at Rajneeshpuram in 1985. The commune's incorporated city had its own streets, named crossings and staffed information points.
48. 1985 - A-frame guest housing at the Oregon ranch. Prefabricated A-frames, made in the commune's own factory, used to house visitors at Rajneeshpuram. The settlement manufactured a large part of its own building stock on site.
49. 1985 - City limits sign on the road into Rajneeshpuram. The city limits sign on the approach road to Rajneeshpuram. In 1982 the commune had its ranch in Wasco County incorporated as a city, giving a religious settlement municipal powers - a status Oregon contested in the courts.
50. 1989 - Scientology frontage in San Francisco, 1989. A Scientology building front in San Francisco photographed in September 1989, before the wave of new city-centre openings of the 2000s.
51. 1993-03-01 - Day two outside Mount Carmel. A local evening newscast from 1 March 1993, the day after the ATF raid on the Branch Davidian property outside Waco. Four ATF agents and six Branch Davidians were killed in the raid; the standoff that followed lasted 51 days.
52. 1993-04-19 - Engineering vehicle breaches the dormitory. An FBI Hostage Rescue Team vehicle drives into the men's dormitory at Mount Carmel on the morning of 19 April 1993. The gymnasium behind it had already been demolished by a second vehicle.
53. 1993-04-19 - Mount Carmel burning, 19 April 1993. An aerial photograph of the Branch Davidian buildings alight on the fifty-first day of the siege. The fire ended both the standoff and the settlement.
54. 1993-04-19 - Armour beside the burning buildings. A government photograph, released to the press, showing a tank next to the Branch Davidian buildings as they burn on 19 April 1993. Armoured vehicles had been used that morning to punch holes in the walls and inject gas.
55. 1993-04-19 - Nineteenth of April, as broadcast. National and Texas station coverage of the final day of the siege, 19 April 1993, when 76 Branch Davidians died, among them a number of children given as 20 to 28 in different official sources. How the fire began is disputed: the 2000 Danforth report concluded the Branch Davidians started it; critics point to law-enforcement gunfire and the use of flammable CS rounds.
56. 1993-04-20 - A network special, the day after. An ABC News special broadcast on 20 April 1993, before any inquiry had reported. It shows the account the public was given at the time, which government acknowledgements about pyrotechnic tear-gas rounds later forced open.
57. 1993 - Bullet holes in the front of Mount Carmel. The front entrance of the Branch Davidian residence outside Waco, Texas, after the gun battle with ATF agents on 28 February 1993. Damage is visible around the windows and the double doors.
58. 1993 - Federal machine gun position outside Waco. An FBI M60 position set up inside a house near the Branch Davidian property during the fifty-one day standoff. Photographs like this one show how completely the settlement was ringed before the final assault.
59. 1993 - Burned refrigerator in the concrete vault. A stainless steel refrigerator recovered from the reinforced room the Branch Davidians used for food storage and shelter, photographed by investigators after the April 1993 fire.
60. 1993 - The Mount Carmel Center from the air. An FBI aerial photograph of the Branch Davidian buildings outside Waco, Texas, in 1993. The community lived in one sprawling structure they had built themselves on open land.
61. 1993 - A British report on the siege. A BBC Newsnight report from 1993 on the standoff outside Waco. The Branch Davidians descended from the Davidian Seventh-day Adventists, themselves a schism from Adventism, which grew out of the Millerite movement of the 1840s.
62. 1995-02-15 - Poster for a public evening on Scientology. A 1995 announcement poster for a public meeting in Ottersheim, Rhineland-Palatinate, at which a former Scientologist spoke about the organisation. Talks by ex-members, staged by party youth wings, carried much of the German debate in the 1990s.
63. 1995-03-20 - Detection paper reads positive for sarin. Detection paper showing a positive result for sarin, held during the response on the Tokyo subway on 20 March 1995. Aum Shinrikyo released the nerve agent on five trains during the morning rush.
64. 1995-03-20 - Self-Defense Force units prepare to deploy. Troops report that preparations to depart are complete at the Ichigaya garrison, part of the response to the sarin attack on the Tokyo subway. A chemical unit of the armed forces was sent into the centre of the capital.
65. 1995-03-20 - Decontaminating the subway carriages. Self-Defense Force personnel spraying decontaminant inside contaminated subway carriages after the sarin release of 20 March 1995.
66. 1995 - Campaign poster against Scientology in Lower Saxony. A poster issued by the Junge Union in Lower Saxony reading 'Stoppt Scientology! Rettet unsere Demokratie!', illustrated with dripping blood. German party-political campaigning against the organisation was at its loudest in the 1990s.
67. 1995-11-10 - Sun Myung Moon speaks in Budapest. Sun Myung Moon addressing an audience in Budapest on 10 November 1995 during a world tour on the theme 'The True Family and I'. Tours of this kind carried the movement's teaching into eastern Europe after 1989.
68. 1996-09-08 - Aum buildings at the foot of Mount Fuji. Prefabricated buildings used as religious facilities by Aum Shinrikyo, photographed in September 1996. The group's complex functioned as workshop, dormitory and laboratory at once.
69. 1997-03-27 - Inside the rented house. A network report from 27 March 1997 on the house the group had rented, filmed the day after the deaths were discovered. The group's website had said the comet Hale-Bopp brought closure to its twenty-two years of teaching.
70. 1997 - Rancho Santa Fe, March 1997. News coverage from March 1997, when 39 members of Heaven's Gate died at a house in Rancho Santa Fe, California. Autopsies indicate the deaths occurred over three successive days beginning 22 or 23 March; sources differ on the final day, and the bodies were found on 26 March.
71. 2000-03-17 - An address on doomsday groups. Robert Jay Lifton speaking on 17 March 2000 about apocalyptic violence, drawing on his work on Aum Shinrikyo alongside his earlier studies of Hiroshima survivors and Nazi doctors.
72. 2000-04-19 - Picket at the Supreme Court on the anniversary. A demonstrator outside the United States Supreme Court on 19 April 2000, seven years to the day after the fire at Mount Carmel. Dispute over the federal handling of the siege continued in the courts and in Congress long afterwards.
73. 2004-05-30 - Plaque at the Antelope post office. A plaque at the base of the flagpole outside the post office in Antelope, Oregon, dedicated to residents who resisted the Rajneesh movement's takeover of the town between 1981 and 1985. It was photographed two decades after the commune disbanded.
74. 2004-09-12 - Wanted notice for Aum fugitives, 2004. A Japanese police wanted notice for Aum Shinrikyo members still at large in 2004, nine years after the Tokyo subway sarin attack. The last of the fugitives sought on posters of this kind was arrested in 2012.
75. 2005 - The FLDS temple at Eldorado. The white limestone temple at the YFZ Ranch outside Eldorado, Texas, built after the church bought the property in 2003. The ranch was a new closed settlement several hundred miles from the older base at Short Creek.
76. 2005-10-17 - Universal Peace Federation launch in Kyrgyzstan. Sun Myung Moon speaking at the inauguration of the Universal Peace Federation in Kyrgyzstan in October 2005. The federation is one of a number of affiliated bodies through which the movement operates publicly.
77. 2006-04-04 - 'Free personality testing' sign, San Francisco. A Scientology sign offering free personality testing on Howard Street in San Francisco, April 2006. The phrasing is the standard invitation used to bring passers-by into the testing routine.
78. 2006-05-17 - New Era Publications headquarters, Copenhagen. The Copenhagen offices of New Era Publications International, which publishes and distributes the movement's books and recordings outside the United States. The Continental Liaison Office for Europe stands directly behind it.
79. 2006-05-17 - A Copenhagen building bought for an Ideal Org. The building at Nytorv 11 in Copenhagen in 2006, before its conversion into an Ideal Org. Under that programme local members are expected to raise the purchase and renovation money for a large central building before it opens.
80. 2006-05-20 - Covered windows on the Edmonton building. A Scientology building on 97 Street in Edmonton, Alberta, in May 2006. The photographer noted that the eight upper-floor windows had been boarded over; blank frontages are one small piece of the apparatus that keeps an interior private.
81. 2006-12-27 - Warren Jeffs's house in Colorado City. The home of FLDS president Warren Jeffs in Colorado City, Arizona, photographed in December 2006, months after his arrest. He was convicted in Texas in 2011.
82. 2007-03-30 - Dianetics demonstration at Union Station. Scientologists running a Dianetics demonstration at Union Station in Washington, D.C., March 2007. Stations and shopping streets are the usual settings for this kind of outreach.
83. 2007-04-20 - The Toronto org on Yonge Street. The Church of Scientology of Toronto at 696-700 Yonge Street, photographed in April 2007. A central-city org is the standard unit of the organisation's property network.
84. 2007-06-02 - Scientology office in Coyoacan, Mexico City. A Scientology office in the Coyoacan district of Mexico City in 2007; the photographer's note records the stress-test stand outside. The same street-level approach is used worldwide.
85. 2007 - Scientology building in Amsterdam. The Church of Scientology's Amsterdam premises photographed in December 2007. City-centre buildings are the most visible part of the organisation's property holdings in Europe.
86. 2007-09-25 - A verdict in Utah, later overturned. Courtroom video of the 25 September 2007 verdict convicting Warren Jeffs, president of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, on two counts as an accomplice to rape. The Utah Supreme Court overturned it on 27 July 2010 over deficient jury instructions.
87. 2008-02-10 - Salvation Ahead, Pay At Counter. A hand-lettered sign at the same Minneapolis demonstration, aimed at the fees charged for courses and auditing. Cost was the critics' most persistent line of attack.
88. 2008-02-10 - Placard about the Sea Organization at a London protest. A sign at a London protest in February 2008 repeating an allegation, made in a sworn affidavit by a former member, that women in Scientology's Sea Organization were pressured into ending pregnancies. The church has consistently denied it.
89. 2008-02-10 - Placard at a Minneapolis picket. A protester's sign at a February 2008 demonstration against the Church of Scientology in Minneapolis, directing readers to a long-running critics' website. It was one of scores of simultaneous pickets held that day.
90. 2008-02-10 - Anti-Scientology protest in Seattle. Demonstrators outside a Scientology building in Seattle on 10 February 2008, the first coordinated day of the online-organised campaign known as Project Chanology. Pickets took place in dozens of cities the same day.
91. 2008-02-16 - The street in Kamiosaki where a notary was seized. The spot in Kamiosaki, Shinagawa, where Aum Shinrikyo members abducted a Tokyo notary in late February 1995 after a relative of his left the group. Photographed thirteen years later.
92. 2008-03-15 - Placard carrying a critics' web address, London. A protester in London on 15 March 2008 holding a sign for xenu.net, the address of Operation Clambake, a Norwegian-run archive of Scientology documents. The URL served as the campaign's shorthand and its distribution point.
93. 2008-03-15 - Hand-made cult sign at a Toronto protest. A hand-lettered sign at a Toronto protest on 15 March 2008. Applying the word in the street was the object of the exercise; the organisation rejects it and has litigated over its use.
94. 2008-03-15 - Protest outside the New York org. Demonstrators outside the Church of Scientology building in New York on 15 March 2008, one of the monthly protests organised that year. Campaigns against a group are part of the record, not a footnote to it.
95. 2008-03-29 - The salsa bar at a restaurant in The Dalles. A self-service salsa counter in a restaurant in The Dalles, Oregon. Open bars like this one were contaminated with Salmonella by members of the Rajneesh commune in September 1984, in an attempt to keep local voters away from the polls in a county election.
96. 2008-05-10 - A protest sign using the word cult, London. A placard at a London demonstration in May 2008. Whether the word applies is the argument itself: most sociologists of religion dropped it in favour of new religious movement from the late 1970s, while critics hold that the replacement launders documented harm.
97. 2008-06-14 - Critics watch a protest arrive in Toronto. Long-standing critics of Scientology look on as masked demonstrators reach the Toronto org in June 2008. The 2008 protests brought an older generation of critics together with an online one.
98. 2008 - The Los Angeles building used by Peoples Temple. The Los Angeles premises of Peoples Temple, photographed for the Jonestown Institute's report series. The Temple ran churches in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Redwood Valley, and moved members and money between them, before the Guyana settlement.
99. 2008-06-28 - Anonymous at San Francisco Pride. Masked demonstrators from Anonymous in the San Francisco Pride parade in June 2008, protesting the Church of Scientology. Chanology pickets frequently joined marches already taking place.
100. 2008-07-12 - Anti-psychiatry display inside a Clearwater building. A display about psychiatry inside the Coachman Building in Clearwater, Florida, photographed in 2008. Opposition to psychiatry is a doctrinal position of the church and the subject of its own permanent and touring exhibitions.
101. 2008-08-13 - The schoolhouse at Colorado City. The schoolhouse in Colorado City, Arizona, formerly the Short Creek community, photographed in 2008. The schools, the utilities and the town marshals in the twin settlements were largely in the hands of church members, which is much of what kept the place closed.
102. 2008-09-13 - Picket at the San Francisco building. Protesters outside the entrance of the Church of Scientology's San Francisco premises in September 2008.
103. 2008-09-13 - Masked demonstrators at a Washington protest. Protesters at a demonstration against the Church of Scientology in Washington, D.C. on 13 September 2008. Monthly pickets continued in the city for years after the campaign began that February.
104. 2008-10-04 - Volunteer Ministers tent in Sweden. A Scientology Volunteer Ministers tent carrying the slogan 'Something can be done about it', Sweden, October 2008. The photographer recorded that no assists or tests were being given inside; books were being sold.
105. 2009-04-11 - Two signs outside a Scientology mission in Virginia. Protesters outside the Scientology mission in Richmond, Virginia in April 2009. One placard repeats allegations about the Sea Organization; the other applies the word cult, which the church rejects.
106. 2009 - District council notice outside the Berlin headquarters. A poster erected by the Charlottenburg district council in front of the German headquarters of the Church of Scientology on Otto-Suhr-Allee, Berlin, in 2009. German authorities have long treated the organisation as a commercial and political body rather than a religion.
107. 2009-08-21 - Church of Scientology building, Montreal. The Montreal church, photographed in August 2009.
108. 2009-10-10 - Chalk message on a Washington sidewalk. A chalked slogan on the pavement outside a Scientology building in Washington, D.C. in October 2009, referring to allegations about children in the Sea Organization. Chalk left a message that could be photographed and then washed away.
109. 2010-01-23 - Churches of Scientology for Europe, Brussels. The organisation's European office building in Brussels on the day it opened, 23 January 2010. Acquiring premises in capital cities has been a steady feature of its expansion.
110. 2010-04-17 - Masked demonstrator in Washington. A protester holds up a placard during an Anonymous demonstration against the Church of Scientology in Washington, DC, in April 2010, two years into the campaign known as Project Chanology.
111. 2010-09-25 - Two founding critics meet in Toronto. Gerry Armstrong and Nan McLean, among the earliest people to speak publicly against Scientology in Canada, at lunch in Toronto in September 2010. Former members who go on the record are the origin of most independent information about closed organisations.
112. 2011-03-19 - Masked protesters on Abbey Street, Dublin. Demonstrators in Guy Fawkes masks outside Scientology premises in Dublin on 19 March 2011. The mask, taken from a comic and its film adaptation, became the standard face covering of the Anonymous protests and a way of protesting anonymously against an organisation known for litigation.
113. 2011-04-03 - Scientology church in Munich. The Munich premises, photographed in 2011. Germany has generally treated the organisation as a commercial enterprise rather than a religion, and several state constitutional-protection offices have kept it under observation.
114. 2011-05-29 - Memorial service in Oakland, 2011. A memorial service at Evergreen Cemetery in Oakland on 29 May 2011, when the panels naming everyone who died at Jonestown were dedicated. The memorial was the outcome of years of work by relatives and former members.
115. 2011-06-07 - The building recorded as Jim Jones's first church. A building recorded on Wikimedia Commons as the site of Jim Jones's first church, photographed in 2011. Peoples Temple began in Indianapolis in the 1950s, more than two decades before Guyana.
116. 2011-08-10 - Life sentence in Texas. Warren Jeffs was convicted in Texas on 9 August 2011 on two counts of sexual assault of a child and sentenced to life, with parole eligibility in 2038. The 2008 raid on the group's Texas ranch that produced the evidence also placed 416 children in state custody, most of whom Texas courts later ordered returned.
117. 2011-08-20 - Out of prison after eighteen years. Damien Echols, Jessie Misskelley Jr. and Jason Baldwin left prison on 19 August 2011 after entering Alford pleas. Prosecutors had told the 1994 jury the killings of three eight-year-old boys were part of a satanic ritual. An Alford plea is not an exoneration: the three remain legally convicted while asserting innocence.
118. 2011-10-15 - Jonestown memorial at Evergreen Cemetery, Oakland. The Oakland memorial for those who died at Jonestown in 1978 and whose remains were never claimed, photographed in 2011. Granite panels carrying the names were installed that year after a long campaign by relatives and former members.
119. 2011-12-27 - A lecture on new religious movements. A professor of religious studies gives the standard academic account of what a new religious movement is. One historian of religion noted that in 1970 the researchers working on new religions could be counted on one's hands, before the field's rapid growth after the controversies of the early 1970s.
120. 2012-01-07 - Oneida Community Mansion House from the street. The brick Mansion House at Oneida, New York, photographed in 2012. Built from 1862 onwards, it held the whole community under one roof, with shared sleeping quarters, a communal hall and a common nursery.
121. 2012-04-17 - Scientology leaflet left on a bicycle. A Swedish-language Scientology flyer tucked into a bicycle in 2012. Leaflets are the most common form the organisation's printed language takes in public.
122. 2012-09-03 - Relatives at parliament. Relatives of those who died at Kanungu camped outside Uganda's parliament in 2012 seeking compensation. Twelve years on there had been no prosecution and no settled account of how many died.
123. 2012-10-16 - Former Latter-day Saints chapel on 16th Street. The Unification Church building at 2810 16th Street NW in Washington, D.C., built in 1931-33 as the Washington Chapel of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Buying established church buildings is a visible part of the movement's property record.
124. 2013-07-21 - Scientology stand at Potsdamer Platz. A Scientology promotion stand on Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, July 2013. Germany has treated the organisation as a commercial enterprise rather than a religion, and its street stands there are watched accordingly.
125. 2013-07-29 - The former Scientology headquarters in Oslo. The Norwegian church's old headquarters in Grunerlokka, Oslo, photographed in 2013. The organisation later left the building, which was demolished to make way for housing.
126. 2014-03-10 - Anatomy of a panic. A newspaper documentary on how accusations at a California preschool in 1983 spread nationally. Expert review found the children's interviews improper, coercive and directive. The trials ran seven years and cost about fifteen million dollars, the longest and most expensive criminal proceedings in American history at the time.
127. 2014-04-03 - Still looking for the founders. Ugandan police revisit reports that Joseph Kibwetere, who founded the movement with Credonia Mwerinde, was alive outside the country. Ugandan authorities concluded the deaths were mass murder; other commentators have argued otherwise, and an anthropologist has argued the bodies found in pits were earlier malaria burials unconnected to the fire.
128. 2014-08-05 - Thirty years after the preschool case. A local report revisiting the McMartin preschool prosecutions. Arrests came on 22 March 1984 on 115 counts, later expanded to 321; two trials ran from 1987 to 1990 and produced no convictions. The defendants were acquitted private citizens and are not named here.
129. 2014-12-24 - From abduction to consent. An account of how intervention practice moved from forcible deprogramming, which involved abducting and confining adults, to voluntary exit counselling that the person can end at any point. Anti-cult organisations began distancing themselves from coercive methods in the late 1970s.
130. 2015 - A documentary on the church's finances. The 2015 documentary adapted from Lawrence Wright's book, built on former officials' accounts and archive footage. Its central documented event is the Internal Revenue Service's grant of tax exemption in 1993, which ended a quarter-century dispute over roughly a billion dollars in claimed liabilities.
131. 2015-07-02 - Chapel inside the Amsterdam church. The chapel of the Scientology church in Amsterdam, photographed in July 2015. Purpose-fitted congregational rooms are part of how the organisation presents itself as a church in Europe.
132. 2015-07-28 - Salad bars in The Dalles. Between 29 August and 10 October 1984, restaurant salad bars in The Dalles, Oregon were deliberately contaminated with salmonella to suppress turnout in a county election. 751 people fell ill and 45 were hospitalised; nobody died. It remains the largest bioterrorist attack recorded in the United States.
133. 2016-03-18 - Scientology building in Shinjuku, Tokyo. The organisation's premises in Shinjuku, Tokyo, photographed in March 2016. The property network extends well beyond the countries where the church has legal recognition as a religion.
134. 2016-04-02 - The Big Hall inside the Mansion House. The central assembly room of the Oneida Community Mansion House, where members gathered in the evenings for meetings and mutual criticism. The community occupied the building from 1848 until it dissolved in 1881; the photograph was made in 2016.
135. 2016 - The psychiatrist who named thought reform. Robert Jay Lifton explains the model he published in 1961 in Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, built on interviews with 25 American servicemen held in the Korean War and 15 Chinese nationals who had left after university indoctrination. The model describes state coercion in Maoist China; applying it to voluntary religious groups is an extension, and that extension is what the field argues about.
136. 2017-01-21 - An auditing demonstration with an E-meter. A demonstration of Scientology auditing at the Auckland org in 2017: an auditor, a person being audited and a Mark 8 Ultra electropsychometer between them. The vocabulary of the session - auditor, preclear, E-meter - belongs entirely to the group.
137. 2017-01-21 - E-meter reading at the Auckland church. An E-meter, the galvanometer used during Scientology auditing, in use at the Auckland church in January 2017. The device and the vocabulary built around it are specific to the group.
138. 2017-02-18 - Church of Scientology, Rue Legendre, Paris. The Paris church on Rue Legendre in February 2017. French courts convicted the organisation's Celebrity Centre and its bookshop of organised fraud in 2009, a conviction upheld on appeal.
139. 2017-03-18 - The case nobody closed. Ugandan television marks seventeen years since the Kanungu fire. Commonly cited totals run from 778 to over a thousand, which would exceed Jonestown; the record is thinner and the numbers less settled because far less investigative attention was paid.
140. 2017-06-07 - Scientology information centre in Los Angeles. A public information centre operated by the Church of Scientology in Los Angeles, photographed in June 2017.
141. 2018-01-05 - How the raid began. A 2018 network documentary segment reconstructing the ATF raid of 28 February 1993, including an account from a man who was inside the building. Ten people died that day: four federal agents and six Branch Davidians.
142. 2018-04-12 - Security agency inspection of an Aum facility. Officers of Japan's Public Security Intelligence Agency entering a facility used by Aum Shinrikyo in April 2018. Successor organisations remain subject to an observation law passed after the subway attack.
143. 2018-06-22 - A Scientology mission on an industrial estate in Vitoria. The mission at Vitoria-Gasteiz occupies a remote corner of the Gamarra industrial estate, photographed in 2018. Not every property is a restored city-centre landmark.
144. 2018-07-06 - Executions in Japan, 2018. News report on 6 July 2018, when Aum Shinrikyo's founder Shoko Asahara and six senior members were executed; thirteen members sentenced to death were all executed that July. The 20 March 1995 sarin release on five Tokyo subway trains killed fourteen people. Injury figures vary widely between sources, from roughly a thousand seriously hurt to several thousand who sought treatment.
145. 2018-10-30 - Eighteen years, ten of them alone. Damien Echols describes the years he spent imprisoned, including a decade in solitary confinement, after a conviction that rested on the prosecution's satanic-ritual theory. DNA testing in 2007 found none of the genetic material recovered at the scene attributable to any of the three convicted men.
146. 2018-11-18 - An author on Hubbard's science fiction years. Alec Nevala-Lee discussing Astounding, his history of the editor John W. Campbell and the writers around him including L. Ron Hubbard, at a public library in Oak Park, Illinois.
147. 2019-05-30 - Eight criteria for totalism. A summary of Lifton's eight criteria: milieu control, mystical manipulation, demand for purity, confession, sacred science, loading the language, doctrine over person, and dispensing of existence. They describe mechanisms rather than beliefs, which is why they organise this archive.
148. 2019-06-02 - Free stress test stand at a book convention. An E-meter set up for free stress tests at BookCon in 2019. The street-level stress test is the standard first contact and the opening of a course sequence that is paid for step by step.
149. 2019-06-19 - The prosecutor speaks after the verdict. The United States Attorney addresses reporters after the conviction of Keith Raniere in June 2019. He was sentenced on 27 October 2020 to 120 years and fined 1.75 million dollars; five co-defendants were convicted separately.
150. 2019-06-20 - Verdict in Brooklyn. On 19 June 2019 a federal jury in the Eastern District of New York convicted Keith Raniere on all counts, including racketeering and sex trafficking. The organisation he founded in 1998 sold executive coaching courses and had no theology at all, which is why it is the clearest evidence that coercive control is a structure rather than a belief.
151. 2020-01-08 - Totalism outside the compound. Lifton discusses his book Losing Reality and the question of whether a model built from closed institutions can describe political movements. The extension is contested; the conversation is with an author who is himself contested in the academy.
152. 2020-02-20 - Twentieth of March, 1995. A documentary account of the coordinated sarin release on the Tokyo subway during the morning rush of 20 March 1995, which killed fourteen people. A smaller sarin attack at Matsumoto in June 1994 had been treated as an isolated crime, and a local resident was wrongly suspected of it.
153. 2020-03-02 - An apology in Gapyeong. Lee Man-hee, founder of the Shincheonji Church of Jesus, apologised publicly on 2 March 2020 as South Korea linked much of its February caseload to a congregation in Daegu. He was later acquitted of the epidemic-obstruction charges by the Suwon District Court in January 2021, and convicted of embezzlement instead.
154. 2020-03-03 - Seoul sues the church. The mayor of Seoul announced legal action against the church's leadership in March 2020 over the spread of the virus. The state pursued the epidemic allegation and lost: the January 2021 acquittal on those charges was affirmed by the Supreme Court in 2022.
155. 2020-03-23 - What the church actually teaches. A Korean newspaper explains the church's doctrine, its recruitment through personal contacts, and why its meeting practices spread infection quickly. It is called a cult chiefly by rival Korean Protestant churches, which is a theological competitor's designation rather than a finding.
156. 2020-10-07 - A platform bans the movement. Facebook announced a ban on QAnon content across its platforms in October 2020. The movement has no leader present to obey and no premises; researchers describe it as a decentralised network whose followers generate their own variants from cryptic posts.
157. 2021-01-22 - The storm that never came. A former follower describes what happened to belief when the predicted date passed without event. The pattern is old: the Millerites expected the Second Advent on 22 October 1844, and the movement metabolised the failure rather than dissolving.
158. 2021-02-03 - Inspectors at an Aleph site. A Public Security Intelligence Agency inspection of premises believed to be in use by Aleph, one of the successor bodies to Aum Shinrikyo, in February 2021.
159. 2021-03-13 - Kanungu, twenty-one years on. Ugandan television returns to Kanungu, where a church fire on 17 March 2000 killed members of the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God. The toll is genuinely unsettled: accounts of the fire itself range from about 300 to more than 500, with over 400 further bodies found at other compounds.
160. 2021-10-06 - When the milieu is an algorithm. A computer scientist explains how recommendation systems carried conspiracy movements from fringe boards into general use. Every classical model of coercive control presumes a group, a leader and a place; this is the open question of what happens when there is none of that.
161. 2022-03-12 - A timetable for every hour. A network documentary segment on how Heaven's Gate organised its members' days under Marshall Applewhite: hours of lectures, assigned partners for every task, and set times for meals and washing. The group was founded in 1974 by Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles, who died in 1985.
162. 2022-04-11 - Behaviour, information, thought, emotion. Steven Hassan sets out the BITE model, first presented in his 2012 book Freedom of Mind and widely misdated to his 1988 debut. It is contested: sociologists have argued it generalises particular manipulative leaders into a universal ideology, and a critic from within the anti-cult field has questioned whether its counselling steers people to predetermined conclusions.
163. 2022-05-31 - The church rebuilt on the site. A small Branch Davidian church put up on the ground where the Mount Carmel Center stood, photographed in 2022. A remnant congregation has continued to meet at the site.
164. 2022-05-31 - Basement remains at the Mount Carmel Center. Concrete remains of a below-ground room at the Mount Carmel Center outside Waco, Texas, photographed in 2022. The Branch Davidian settlement stood here until the 51-day siege and the fire of 19 April 1993; the sunken structures are among the few physical traces left on the site.
165. 2022-05-31 - Stone sign at the entrance to Mount Carmel. A stone marker at the entrance to the site of the Mount Carmel Center near Waco, Texas, photographed in 2022.
166. 2022-05-31 - Remains of a basement room. What is left of a below-ground room at the Mount Carmel Center, photographed in 2022 on the cleared site.
167. 2022-09-29 - Japanese headquarters of the Family Federation. The Japanese headquarters of the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification in Tokyo, photographed in September 2022, as the church's donation practices in Japan came under national scrutiny.
168. 2023-03-13 - The business behind the group. A report on how Aum Shinrikyo financed itself: computer shops, restaurants, a members' labour force and the legal advantages of registration as a religious corporation in Japan. The money is what paid for the chemistry.
169. 2023-08-30 - Washington Family Church on Columbia Road. The Unification Church facility at 1610 Columbia Road NW in Washington, D.C., photographed in August 2023.
170. 2023-08-30 - Sign of the Washington Family Church. The sign at 1610 Columbia Road NW in Washington, D.C., giving the site's name as the Washington Family Church National Cathedral. What a movement calls its buildings is part of how it positions itself.
171. 2023-10-18 - Clinicians without the training. A discussion of how few social workers and therapists have any training in high-demand group dynamics, and what continuing-education courses for them cover. Most people leave such groups on their own; the difficulty is afterwards.
172. 2023-12-30 - Thought reform back where it started. A researcher re-applies Lifton's 1961 framework to contemporary state re-education in China, returning the model to the setting it was built from rather than to religious groups.
173. 2024-02-02 - The United Effort Plan building at Short Creek. The office of the United Effort Plan in Short Creek, Utah. The trust held members' homes and land communally, so leaving the church could mean losing the house you lived in; a Utah court placed it under outside control in 2005.
174. 2024-05-15 - The former NXIVM offices outside Albany. An office block in the Karner Woods Office Park in Colonie, New York, leased by NXIVM while it sold personal-development courses at graduated prices. The organisation collapsed after its founder's federal conviction in 2019; this photograph was taken in 2024.
175. 2025-02-13 - A legal model for undue influence. A law professor sets out a proposed causation model for coercive control that removes the vulnerability element from undue-influence doctrine. Courts have been the field's hardest problem since United States v. Fishman in 1990 ruled brainwashing testimony inadmissible as expert evidence.
176. 2025-02-23 - How Western scholars sort Japanese movements. A religious-studies researcher introduces his book on new religious movements in Japan and the taxonomic problems Western scholarship brings to them. Sociologists of religion largely abandoned the word cult by the late 1970s in favour of new religious movement; anti-cult organisations argue the replacement launders documented harm.
177. 2025-03-17 - Thirty years of claims. Japanese television reports that bereaved families are still pursuing Aleph, the successor organisation to Aum Shinrikyo, over compensation. The organisation remains under state surveillance decades after the attack.
178. 2025-06-15 - An Oregon station reports, 1983-84. Reports broadcast by a Portland station across 1983 and 1984 on the commune founded in 1981 at the Big Muddy Ranch in Wasco County, its buses, its land-use disputes and its takeover of the nearby town council.
179. 2025-07-31 - Twenty years of one broadcaster's reporting. An Australian current-affairs anthology collecting segments filmed between 2005 and 2023 on the Church of Scientology. The organisation holds US tax-exempt religious status and was recognised as a religion by the UK Supreme Court in 2013; it also carries federal criminal convictions of eleven officials from 1979-80 and a French organised-fraud conviction upheld on appeal.
180. 2025-10-12 - Raised inside the organisation. An interview with a woman who was raised in the church's staff order from childhood and later wrote about it. She describes signing a billion-year staff contract as a child and the auditing sessions that followed. Her account is her own and is not a court finding.
181. 2025-10-22 - David Koresh's business card. A business card carrying the name Vernon Howell adopted, David Koresh, with a Pomona address, on display at a museum in Savannah, Georgia. The name joins the biblical King David to Koresh, the Hebrew form of Cyrus.
182. 2026-02-23 - Recovery takes longer than people expect. A conversation between a counsellor and a marriage and family therapist who works in cult recovery, on why reintegration is slow. The evidence supports ordinary interventions, trauma-informed therapy, peer support, housing, documents and qualifications, rather than dramatic rescues.
183. 2026-05-30 - Family church in Shiga Prefecture. A Family Federation for World Peace and Unification church in Shiga Prefecture, photographed on 30 May 2026, at a time when the organisation's legal status in Japan was the subject of court proceedings.
184. 2026-06-28 - Free stress tests on Princes Street. A gazebo on Princes Street in Edinburgh offering free Dianetics stress tests, June 2026. The free test remains the entry point to a sequence of paid courses.

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