Devotions with Daniella: Are We Hardwired to Worship? A Reading from "The Culting of America"

Added: 2026-05-28

[00:00:00]Today for devotions with Daniella, we're reading from the second book of Daniella, The Culting of America. This is the road to deification or the process of becoming deified, a god-like person or leader. And I've already read some of it, so you'll have to go back and read the prior snippet.

[00:00:18]It can be argued that our attitude toward the charismatic leader has come nearly full circle to be religious once again. The term charismatic leader came from someone, Max Weber, secularizing the term for god-given gifts.

[00:00:36]This worshipful, unquestioning relationship to leadership is culturally ingrained in those of us raised in the Western Judeo-Christian world, which itself has been defined by millennia of hierarchical, patriarchal, spiritual traditions.

[00:00:51]If you look outside business, politics, and religion to the lower-stakes world of pop culture, you even see this holy/royal tendency in our seemingly harmless, female-centric cultural icons.

[00:01:04]Saint Dolly Parton, Queen B Beyoncé, not to mention the influential influential Taylor Swift fandom, who rarely questions her, fiercely defends her online, and quickly mobilizes against perceived threats, whether or not she weighs in.

[00:01:20]Americans love to worship, whether it's a pop music star who makes them feel empowered and understood, a CEO who will lead them to abundance, a religious leader who will teach them how to be righteous and give them a ticket to heaven, or a politician who will help them take their country back.

[00:01:38]According to Max Weber, authority can only be exercised when followers recognize and accept it. And just like in ancient times, when seasons of disaster sent people rushing back to their gods, today's social turmoil drives us to demand guidance from charismatic leaders in our organizations and groups.

[00:01:58]The actual process of deification, becoming god-like to a group of followers, hasn't changed. Charismatic leaders who love to think of themselves as unique actually set predictable enough patterns that they appear to have all attended the same Messiah school, according to renowned cult expert Dr. Janja Lalich.

[00:02:18]It starts innocently enough, usually with a big idea to change the world.

[00:02:23]Though if we look back to cult leaders' childhoods, there are usually signs that should have been concerning.

[00:02:29]Jim Jones had always been manipulative, deceitful, and willing to do whatever it took to make people follow him. While David Berg of the Children of God, which I wrote my first book about, was already was over-controlled and abused by his parents and was already a sexual deviant at a young age.

[00:02:50]Elizabeth Holmes, the CEO of Theranos and an emotionally withdrawn child of a once-illustrious family, being driven by a jealous mother who wanted her daughter to make a name for herself, declared to her father, a vice president at Enron, at the age of nine that all she really wanted out of life was to discover something new, something that mankind didn't know was possible to do.

[00:03:13]Adam Neumann's parents split early, leading to a turbulent childhood. This is the guy who founded WeWork.

[00:03:20]Uh during which he lived in 13 places before moving to the US at 22. Life on a kibbutz as a teen, however, stood out as a positive experience, thanks to the close bonds he formed there.

[00:03:32]In retrospect, it is perhaps unsurprising that a kid whose early life was so fractured grew up to found a company that wanted to change the world with the power of community.

[00:03:42]Cult expert Dr. Steven Hassan once told me that he thinks all cult leaders grew up in cults. That is to say, situations of complete coercive control and culty dynamics.

[00:03:53]While we'll probably never be able to confirm that, it is an intriguing concept.

[00:03:58]I'm not saying, of course, that any of these things mean the child in question was predetermined to grow up to be a cult leader.

[00:04:04]Plenty of children have divorced parents, are ambitious from a young age, or move around a lot. But cult leaders are often people with significant experience in in childhood that forced them to develop skills of manipulation, turning them into somewhat of an on genu of charisma who desires to recreate those manipulative patterns.

[00:04:25]It's not always a bad thing if they don't make bad choices. Jim Jones, for instance, initially built a reputation by accomplishing what investigative journalist and Jones biographer Jeff Guinn called absolutely magnificent things.

[00:04:39]In a Vice interview, Guinn explained, "If Jim Jones had been hit by a car and killed somewhere toward the end of the 1950s, he'd be remembered today as one of the great leaders in the early civil rights movement, and he would have earned that reputation.

[00:04:55]That makes what happened to him even sadder and actually more tragic.

[00:04:59]He had the ability to do great things, and instead, he used his talent for provocation, for manipulation, and as a result, he's remembered today as a terrible person. Frankly, he earned that."

[00:05:12]It is a pattern we see often.

[00:05:14]Charismatic leaders use their talents to build something that most people would agree is good. But at some point in their accumulation of power, a kind of switch gets flipped, and they begin to weaponize the control they hold over their followers.

[00:05:29]In Jones's case, years of amphetamine and barbiturate abuse was were certainly exacerbating, but more than anything, he had become intoxicated by his own power.

[00:05:39]Just as nobody ever knowingly joins a cult, few people set out to actually start one, I would argue.

[00:05:45]The problem is that these leaders inevitably drink their own Kool-Aid.

[00:05:49]Being deified by their followers gives them increasing proof that they are God, and they start to believe it.

[00:05:55]Same same for generals and admirals in the US military.

[00:05:58]This desire to acquire followers often becomes apparent in the early adulthood of charismatic leader on the road to deification, punctuated with a series of attempts and failures to build themselves something, anything, with a following.

[00:06:13]David Berg was nothing but a failed Pentecostal preacher and wildly successful alcoholic before finding his calling by saving lost souls searching for meaning among the hippies gathering in California, according to Lauren Huff, a fellow survivor of the Children of God and author of Leaving Isn't the Hardest Thing.

[00:06:31]Adam Neumann experimented with multiple product ideas, launched a company that failed before finding his initial success with Green Desk, and later exploded onto the entrepreneurial scene with WeWork.

[00:06:43]Elizabeth Holmes had mediocre grades before she got into Stanford through a back door, but ultimately dropped out anyway. She only got investment for Theranos because of strings her father could pull and an over-reliance on her charisma and famous ancestors.

[00:06:58]Keith Raniere was involved in starting a myriad of companies before finding success with NXIVM.

[00:07:05]Their stories all ring with a familiar note. These individuals needed to build something. What it was wasn't important as long as it came with followers. And I want to emphasize just having developed these skills of influence in childhood and being an ingenue of charisma, as maybe I am too, does not mean you're predestined to become a cult leader.

[00:07:27]When people ask me, "How do you build a group that's not a cult?" my answer is easy. Don't choose to coerce and manipulate people in order to exploit their labor and turn them into deployable products for your transcendent mission.

[00:07:42]And please don't promise them space travel.

[00:07:45]Once they've built something, these charismatic leaders set their unique talents to code-switching in order to become something to one segment of their followers and something else to another, which Jones was known to be an expert at.

[00:07:58]Code-switching is an important tool in the arsenal of the aspiring cult leader, as it allows them to speak in several tongues at once, appealing to different but overlapping audiences, according to Derek Beres, Matthew Remski, and Julian Walker of the hit podcast Conspirituality and book Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Become a Health Threat.

[00:08:22]It also has the benefit of keeping their followers off balance, never knowing what will happen next.

[00:08:28]We can see this easily in the rantings of cult leaders who usually show a fondness for having themselves recorded so no pearls of wisdom slip away.

[00:08:38]But we can also see it in the famously mercurial temperament of Steve Jobs or in Donald Trump's habit of nicknaming political opponents and allies alike. Or even in a Bikram hot yoga teacher training, where students are yelled at, insulted, and forced to keep going to the point of fainting or vomiting, which then makes the little nuggets of approval feel like a sacred blessing.

[00:08:59]Hot and cold behavior is often accompanied by threats of, "If you don't like it, you're free to leave anytime."

[00:09:06]A loaded phrase intended to remind you of the exit costs you incur by disagreeing on any point with the guy at the top.

[00:09:14]More on exit costs in chapter nine.

[00:09:18]All right, and that's where we're going to have to stop for now. You can listen to the rest of it anywhere you get your audiobooks or get signed copies here.