Strange Gods: The Great American Cult Scare

David G. Bromley and Anson D. Shupe are sociologists of religion, and this Beacon Press book is their scholarly study of the American anti-cult movement of the 1970s and early 1980s, examining the movement's own claims, tactics such as deprogramming, and its portrayal of new religious movements. Its strength is that it is peer informed sociological scholarship analyzing the anti-cult movement itself as a social phenomenon, rather than simply repeating its claims about the groups it targeted. Its limit is its age and period focus: it documents the anti-cult movement as it stood by the early 1980s, so a claim about later developments in either new religious movements or the countermovement against them needs more recent scholarship.