CULT FIGHTERS IN CENTER OF RAGING STORM

Chicago Tribune

March 20, 1988

By Wes Smith

Holy Wars:A Mother's fight with a Bellevue church

Eastside Week
February 9, 1994

By John Colwell

Spreading the word on cults - Barrington-based network readily shares its knowledge of 'controversial' groups

Chicago Tribune

Sunday, January 29, 1995

By Annie Gowen

On that blustery day last October, calls began streaming into the
Cult Awareness Network's threadbare office, hidden away in a
nondescript building in Barrington.

Just hours before, 48 members of a mysterious religious sect had
been found dead after an apparent mass murder/suicide in
Switzerland. The staff warmed up the fax machine-a machine that,
because of the sheer volume of paper it would consume during the
day, would soon be declared obsolete and replaced-and braced for
the onslaught.

By the end of the day, the Cult Awareness Network's staff had
fielded inquiries from media outlets and concerned citizens from
all over the world, including Switzerland, England, France, Canada
and the United States. It also had sent out pages of documents,
case histories and newspaper reports on the Order of the Solar
Temple, the apocalyptic organization led by Luc Jouret, which the
network had been tracking for months.

"That whole day is a blur," remembers executive director Cynthia
Kisser of Wonder Lake, who found herself frantically borrowing a
colleague's blazer for the evening's capper-an appearance to
discuss the tragedy on ABC-TV's "Nightline."

These days, when cult-related news breaks-whether the Solar Temple
massacre or the siege of the Branch Davidian complex in Waco,
Texas-the Cult Awareness Network can be counted on to be in the
thick of it. The grass-roots organization, arguably the most
prominent anti-cult group in the country, fields some 20,000
inquiries a year and maintains some 1,200 case files on
"controversial" groups, from the Church of Scientology to Campus
Crusade for Christ, according to Kisser.

"There's not a major breaking news story with cult dimensions we
don't get calls about," Kisser says.

The network, based in Barrington but actually a loosely organized
group of 18 affiliate chapters throughout the country, grew out of
public tumult after the 1978 Jonestown massacre in Guyana, where
913 followers of Jim Jones died after drinking a cyanide-laced
fruit-flavored drink.

What began as a network of concerned parents has mushroomed into a
wide-reaching national organization that is often the first place
parents and other family members turn if a relative joins a cult.

"Information is power," Kisser says, sitting down for a recent
interview in the organization's quiet office. She is wearing a
jeweled pin on her sweatshirt, a gift from a woman who Kisser says
rediscovered her artistic skills after leaving a Far Eastern cult
with Cult Awareness' help.

"The more you gather information, you feel on stronger ground
asking (the cult member) to reconsider, or to search out
information on their own," she explains.

"Most people don't understand the cult phenomenon until it happens
in their family," says William Rehling, a former Cook County
assistant state's attorney and the president of the Cult Awareness
Network board.

When it happens, most want to become experts - fast.

"It was a relief to find CAN," says Sarah DeOpsomer of Barrington,
who is now a Cult Awareness staff member. She initially contacted
the group while trying to help her sister-in-law part ways with the
controversial religious group Way International.

"Here is an organization that knew what I was talking about,
without me having to explain it over and over," she says.

CAN was originally made up of a number of parents' groups formed
during the 1970s to respond to the flood of new religions-Eastern
and otherwise, some legitimate, others not. Now, however,
professionals of every stripe dominate its nationwide membership;
they range from law enforcement officials to lawyers to therapists.

CAN is now the only secular clearinghouse of cult-related
information in the country. In addition to its always ringing
hotline, the group provides families or law-enforcement personnel
with newspaper clippings, reference materials and even tax returns
on many groups, including some that have employed mind-control
techniques or been involved in illegal activity.

Throughout its 16-year history, the group has been so passionately
outspoken of the danger of destructive cults-"rabidly emotional" is
the way one CAN ally describes the group-that the network has found
itself the frequent target of critics. They charge that the Cult
Awareness Network is made up of anti-religious agitators who back
disreputable "deprogrammers," kind of counselors-for-hire who make
their living "deprogramming" religious sect members, often at the
request of the family. ("Exit counselor" is the more polite term.)

"Yeah, they're biased, but they're biased toward groups they feel
are harmful or destructive," says Ronald Enroth, a sociology
professor at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, Calif., and the
author of several books on cults and abusive religions. "There's no
other organization like them. Basically, I think the most positive
thing they do is provide information on religious groups that are
controversial, so parents can call up and ask, 'It's strange, it's
new, my kid's involved, what can you tell me about it?'"

Some see things differently.

"CAN and other groups and individuals in the anti-cult movement are
a destructive cult themselves," says Rev. Dean Kelley, the
counselor on religious liberty for the National Council of
Churches, a national organization of Protestant, Orthodox and
Anglican mainline churches based in New York City. "They do not
understand much about the nature of religions, and particularly new
religious movements."

It's called the Cult Wars, the often antagonistic debate between
so-called "anti-cult" groups like CAN and those advocates of "new
religions" like Kelley.

And it can get ugly. Currently, for example, Kisser has filed a
libel suit against the Church of Scientology, the Unification
Church, and the Lyndon LaRouche political organization for making
allegedly defamatory comments about her in their various
publications, including a Unification Church claim that she
"confessed" to once working as a topless dancer. Kisser denies that
claim.

As Kelley says: "If you reflect upon the long history of antagonism
between religious groups and the anti-cult movement, of which the
CAN is a relatively recent arrival, and the vicious barbs and
arrows they have been slinging at each other for 20 years, you know
what I mean by the Cult Wars."

Perhaps most spurious, at least to the Cult Awareness Network, is
the charge that the group has advocated involuntary deprogramming,
which involves kidnapping, a felony. It's an accusation officials
deny.

"The deprogrammers operate as independent entrepreneurs, but they
are part of the CAN network," explains J. Gordon Melton, a
researcher in the department of religious studies at the University
of California-Santa Barbara. "CAN serves as a conduit between the
parents and deprogrammers. Overwhelmingly, this is what they do."

Court documents in the recent case involving Galen Kelly, a New
York deprogrammer accused of kidnapping a Washington, D.C., woman
(he pleaded guilty to a lesser charge), revealed financial records
that showed CAN had kept Kelly on a $1,500 retainer for several
months.

"He never did do deprogramming for us," Kisser says. "He did
security work."

Cult Awareness does, however, provide referrals to so-called "exit
counselors," professionals trained in legal, voluntary
deprogramming-but usually, Kisser stresses, as a last resort.

"Just finding a deprogrammer is a short-sighted approach to the
problem," she says.

Helping a family member leave a cult requires the efforts of the
entire family and, often, she says, extensive therapy.

The Los Angeles-based Church of Scientology, a multimillion-dollar
empire built by the late L. Ron Hubbard of "Dianetics" fame, has
opposed CAN at every turn, particularly after Kisser was featured
prominently in a devastating 1991 Time magazine cover story that
labeled Scientology "The Cult of Greed."

"Scientology is quite likely the most ruthless, the most
classically terroristic, the most litigious and the most lucrative
cult the country has ever seen. No cult extracts more money from
its members," Kisser said in the article.

Litigious is right. Since then, relations between the network and
the Church of Scientology-which had never been good, especially
given that Scientology members were fond of picketing and
disrupting CAN's annual conferences-have deteriorated in a morass
of lawsuits and countersuits.

Various members of the Church of Scientology have filed more than
50 lawsuits throughout the country against the Cult Awareness
Network, nearly all of which have been dismissed. A few of these
remain unresolved. (CAN also was recently named in a $40 million
libel suit filed by Landmark Education Corp., a San Francisco
program that is an outgrowth of the self-improvement program known
as est.)

"Basically, (CAN is) attacking any religion that is small enough
and new enough not to fight back," says Glenn Barton, a spokesman
for the Church of Scientology. "We have fought back."

Because of the lawsuits, Kisser now takes pains to avoid labeling
groups "cults."

"It's really not our position to say whether a group is or is not
a cult," she says. "That raises the question of arbitrariness."

Those who have been helped by CAN are vociferous in their praise of
the organization.

"They are wonderful, kind and generous people," says a Chicago
doctor who extricated his 22-year-old daughter from the Rev. Sun
Myung Moon's Unification Church in September 1993. "Anyone who
would use smear tactics against them is wrong."

The doctor, who asked that his name not be used, turned to the Cult
Awareness Network as "the starting point," after his daughter was
recruited into the collegiate arm of the Unification Church while
at school at New York University.

The low point, he says, was when his daughter, who had been tapped
to be a Unification Church recruiter herself, telephoned one night
to announce her course schedule for the next year.

"It was for four public speaking classes and one class in Korean,"
he says. "It seems funny now, but at the time it was tragic."

The doctor turned to a professional exit counselor, the author of
one of the books to which CAN had referred him.

The counselor, he says, "really helped. I see that person as a
great savior in our family." His daughter is now back at NYU, out
of the organization and doing well, he says.

Cult Awareness' small paid staff-five people, including Kisser,
hears such stories daily. Sometimes, they say, they just try to
serve as a sounding board for family members who need to talk about
their situation.

The most poignant calls, DeOpsomer says, are from parents who have
completely lost track of their son or daughter.

"The most tragic phone calls are when they don't know where
somebody is," DeOpsomer says. "I've had families say, 'The last I
heard ...,' or, 'I had a P.O. box ...' That's the hardest."

"I feel it is a kind of special ministry," says Mt. Prospect
resident Marty Butz, a religious scholar and former cult member,
who now helps staff the CAN hotline.

The Barrington office is brimming with piles of newspaper clippings
and a variety of books on cults ("Combatting Cult Mind Control," is
one title).

For security reasons, the group does not publicize its exact
address. Calls to the Barrington organization are sent through a
relay station from the 312 area code. (CAN was originally located
in Chicago and has kept the 312 number to maintain a Chicago
presence.)

Although Kisser says she has never felt afraid for her life, she
does feel that "they've tried to come after me in terms of trying
to harm my reputation."

The lawsuits have taken a financial toll on the not-for-profit
organization. CAN has an operating budget of $300,000 annually,
which it raises mostly through donations, sales of resource books
and tapes, and processing fees for informational packets. Although
CAN officials decline to say how much they've spent on legal fees,
the amount runs into the tens of thousands of dollars, Kisser say.

"It's been a huge problem for us," Kisser says. "Easily you could
say it's put our programs, in terms of expansion and outreach, back
by at least 5 to 10 years."

"If we were to close, or to get closed down by the litigation," she
continues, "it would be a real loss to the public.

"We're the only national organization that does this. Where else
would they go?"

The Cult Awareness Network can be reached at 312-267-7777.

Cult Fighters' Future in Doubt

Los Angeles Times

01 July 1996