20 Deadly Cults

Ho No Hana or Yorokobi Kazoku no Wa

This 30,000-member Japanese cult is led by a crook. Hogen Fukunaga claims he can see someone’s past and future by looking at their feet, according to the Japan Times.

Guilty of having extorted 150 million yen (US$1.32 million) from 30 followers, Fukunaga diagnosed them with serious illnesses before having them pay for costly treatments that were supposed to cure them. He was sentenced to 12 years in prison.

Scientology

Founded in 1952 by L. Ron Hubbard, Scientology has been accused of fraud. In 2013, a French court upheld a 2009 conviction against the church for taking advantage of vulnerable followers. The group, which is considered a religion in many countries including the United States, has a long list of encounters with the law.

Hare Krishna

Founded in 1966 in New York by A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, the Hare Krishna movement published details of widespread child abuse of children in its boarding schools in the United States and India during the 1970s and ’80s, according to the New York Times.

The article states that “the movement's leadership was first forced to confront the victims of abuse at a meeting in May 1996, when a panel of 10 former Krishna pupils testified that they had been regularly beaten and caned at school, denied medical care, and sexually molested and raped homosexually at knife point.”

Order of the Solar Temple

In 1995, 16 members of the Order of the Solar Temple were found burned on a plateau in the French Alps, reported the Los Angeles Times.

According to the article, the scene closely resembled the deaths of 53 other temple members in October 1994 in Canada and Switzerland.

Rajneesh or Osho cult

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, also known as Osho, began a spiritual movement in 1970 that included “an odd mix of capitalism, meditation, ethnic and dirty jokes, and open sexuality,” according to an article from Slate.

In 1984, from a commune established in Oregon, Rajneesh’s followers tried to take over the Wasco county government by poisoning the entire town, contaminating salad bars in local restaurants. Over 750 people fell ill, including 45 hospitalizations, but their plan didn’t work. The attack remains the first, largest, and worst bioterrorism attack in the United States.

The Children of God

In 1968, David Berg started The Children of God, a cult that was described in an article for the Guardian as “devot[ing] themselves to the worship of Jesus Christ and promiscuous sex.”

A 1974 report from the New York attorney general’s office documented rape, incarceration, kidnapping, and incest inside the group. “Witnesses testified that child rape was used as an excuse to ‘increase the tribe,’ leading to many pregnancies in various communities.”

Unification Church

A self-proclaimed Messiah, Sun Myung Moon claims that on Easter 1935, “Jesus appeared to him and anointed him God’s choice to establish the kingdom of heaven on earth,” according to an article in the New York Times. He established the Unification Church in South Korea in 1954 and began organizing it in the United States in the early 1970s.

The religious movement was notable for its mass weddings and links to vast commercial interests. The article states that, according to David G. Bromley, a professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University, “at least 400 of the church’s flock were abducted by their family members to undergo ‘deprogramming,’” but “the church denied that it had brainwashed its followers, saying members joined and stayed of their own free will.”

The Manson family

Charles Manson gathered his hippie community in 1967, but they were far from pacifists. In 1969, they murdered Sharon Tate, who was eight months pregnant at the time, and several others in Los Angeles, according to an article in the Los Angeles Times.

Convicted of the murders, Charles Manson was sentenced to death, but in 1972 “the death sentences were commuted to life imprisonment when the state Supreme Court abolished the death penalty.” He died in November 2017.

Aum Shinrikyo

This Japanese cult, lead by Shoko Asahara, was responsible for killing 13 people and injuring 6,000 others in a sarin nerve gas attack in the Tokyo subway in 1995, according to an article in the Huffington Post.

Despite its leader, whose real name is Chizuo Matsumoto, being on death row, the cult still has over 1,000 followers, according to the Japan Times.

The Faizrakhmanist movement

In 2012, Russian police discovered a literally underground Islamic sect consisting of 70 individuals, including 27 children, living in a catacomb about 800 km (500 miles) east of Moscow, according to an article in the Telegraph.

The leader, 83-year-old Fayzrakhman Sattarov, had his followers living in “a series of dirty, damp cells on eight different levels underneath a shabby house.” The self-proclaimed “emissary of Allah” had been known to be living at the property for up to 10 years.

The Branch Davidians

In 1981, David Koresh, born Vernon Wayne Howell, went to Waco, Texas, to join the Branch Davidians, and by 1990 had become their leader, according to a biography by PBS.

The cult built a compound at Mount Carmel, outside of Waco, and, in 1993, it was raided by the FBI and other federal agencies. According to an article in the Los Angeles Times, 86 people, including Koresh, died when the compound was burned to the ground—a fire reportedly set after federal agents smashed into the walls with an armored vehicle.

The People’s Temple

Baptist preacher Jim Jones developed his church throughout the United States and enraptured crowds with his purported “faith healings,” according to CNN.

In 1977, the group completed a lengthy relocation to an agricultural settlement in Guyana, a small South American country, renamed Jonestown. His former followers report that the leader encouraged physical fighting, spying, and the use of fear.

It all came to a tragic end on November 18, 1978, when American Congressman Leo Ryan and some journalists were murdered for trying to help a few disenfranchised members return to the United States. That evening, Jones convinced all his followers and their children, totaling over 900 people, to drink cyanide-laced punch or else the Guyana military would come and take their children away. Rolling Stone states that, “until the September 11th attacks, the tragedy in Jonestown on November 18th, 1978, represented the largest number of American civilian casualties in a single non-natural event.”

Nxivm

With its headquarters in Albany, New York, this sect, pronounced Nex-e-um, claims to be a self-help organization. Many people have taken its courses, but some have become followers of its leader, Keith Raniere, known to them as “Vanguard.”

An article in the New York Times explains that women would endure an initiation ceremony to a “secret sisterhood” that included lying naked on a massage table while they were branded with a two-inch square symbol below their hip.

Tree of life

This sect was founded in Russia before expanding throughout the world under other names (Church of the Body of Christ, Church of the Covenant, Calvary Chapel). The organization forbids its followers from informing themselves through the media.

Numerous people have died because they weren’t allowed to see a doctor or go to a hospital.

Church of Euthanasia

This cult, created in 1992 by DJ and software developer Chris Korda, advocates death, encouraging people to kill themselves. In 1995, Korda created a “Suicide Assistance Hot-Line” to help Americans kill themselves. She also encourages abortion and cannibalism, reports Vice.

The Church of Euthanasia has a single, underlying commandment: “Thou shalt not procreate.”

Boko Haram

This Islamic sect was formed by Mohammed Yusuf in 2002 when he set up a religious complex, including a mosque and an Islamic school, reports the BBC.

In 2013, it was designated a terrorist organization as it had developed links with al-Qaeda and other Islamic extremist organizations. It began to carry out more audacious attacks in Nigeria, including bombing churches, bars, and even police and UN headquarters in the capital of Abuja.

Its most infamous attack was the abducting of more than 200 schoolgirls from the town of Chibok, saying it would “treat them as slaves and marry them off.” The sect has formally pledged its allegiance to the Islamic State (ISIS).

ISIS

ISIS, also known as Daesh, was founded in 2006 in Iraq by Islamic militias and is a new form of sect.

According to CNN, ISIS is similar to al-Qaeda, but “has proven to be more brutal and more effective at controlling territory it has seized.” The group directs and inspires acts of terrorism around the world, with more than 2,000 people having been killed in the various attacks.

Al-Qaeda

According to an article in the Guardian, the Islamic extremist sect was founded in August 1988 by Osama bin Laden, among others, bringing together “extraordinary Saudi wealth, the expertise of a lifetime Egyptian militant, and a philosophical foundation for jihad from a Cairo intellectual.”

Al-Qaeda was rooted in religious belief as a pretext to violence, without ideas of territorial conquest. Acts like the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center put it in the category of a cult.

Heaven’s Gate

According to an article on Salon.com, all 39 members of Heaven’s Gate committed suicide.

After their deaths, their bodies were supposed to be transported to a UFO traveling in the tail of the Hale-Bopp comet. Their leader, Marshall Applewhite, indicated that it was time to discard their attachments to the world and their human bodies.

Ansar Dine

In the same league as other sects that purport to want to reclaim Islam, Ansar Dine perpetrates mass killings. According to an article in Newsweek, the group is led by Iyad Ag Ghaly and was set up after he was rejected for a leadership position in the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA).

After a military coup against President Touré, Ansar Dine and other Islamist groups seized control of northern Mali, instituting a strict version of Shariah law.