Why Would Anyone Join a Cult? Dark Messiah Author Breaks It Down (Exclusive Essay)

Why would anyone join a cult? Sara Z. Carson, author of the debut novel Dark Messiah, does not answer that question from a distance. In her exclusive essay, she starts with herself — young, in a new city, and closer to saying yes than she likes to admit — and then follows that same question into fiction, where a teenage girl does not have the friend who pulled Carson away.

Carson moved from upstate New York to New York City in the late 1990s for college, she writes, feeling young, naive, insecure, lonely and afraid while trying to define herself. In the Times Square subway, she says, smiling testers from the nearby Scientology Center beckoned her. Because she liked magazine quizzes, she saw little difference at first.

She says street-smart friends and her own unwillingness to join Scientology stopped her. But she is honest about what she imagines would have happened next: she would have gladly taken the Oxford Capacity Analysis, answered personal mood and extravagance-type questions, then been told she needed courses for her supposed shortcomings — and she says she would have followed directions, because she did not know what she wanted and liked being told who she was, whether by magazines or by a group using e-meter readings and asking for personal secrets.

That honesty is the point. Carson says she came from a good family, had friends and loved ones, lacked nothing materially, and had critical-thinking tools — yet still wanted an easy route to comfort and to fill an inner emptiness after everything familiar was gone. She jokes this would have been easy money for Xenu. She describes herself as a lifelong passionate armchair expert on cults, and as a weird kid in that respect.

Her Short Answer: Love, Solutions, Purpose

Dark Messiah, Carson writes, is the story of a teenage girl drawn into a cult in 1970s San Francisco, and writing it made her address the common question of why anyone would join one. Her central answer is short: people are drawn because joining can instantly offer love, solutions and a purpose. What follows, she adds, may be less pleasant.

She cites Steven Hassan’s Combating Cult Mind Control and other experts for the view that personal circumstances are an inflection point. Life transitions — moving city, a breakup, a death, a professional setback, loneliness or uncertainty — can make a person highly susceptible to a cult’s offered solutions.

Carson then widens that argument to the present. She describes recent years as soul-crushing, citing deep cultural and political division, truth as a wedge issue, lingering COVID-era isolation habits, a constant stream of outrageous phone headlines, and fear over everything from finances to food prices. Her summary feeling, as she puts it, is that nothing feels like it will be okay.

When Carson Sees the Same Pattern Elsewhere

Carson says she has personally believed since 2015 that part of the population has been in a cult, after a presidential candidate came down an escalator claiming to have solutions for everything. She says she heard an early rally and thought the candidate sounded exactly like Jim Jones. She argues the candidate attacked others’ hypocrisy while rationalizing his own through subterfuge, charm and lies, harnessed public darkness, won, and gathered devoted followers and enablers. The essay passage inspected does not name that candidate, and this blog does not name one either. This is Carson’s opinion, presented here as hers.

Carson says it is not only well-known politicians. She links Alex Jones’s Sandy Hook claims to audience members stalking and harassing grieving families, and she describes loosely tied QAnon followers circulating claims about mass child trafficking in tunnels, JFK Jr. being alive and poised to take over government, and imminent arrests of political foes supposedly consuming babies’ blood. Those are claims Carson describes, not facts this blog endorses.

Outsiders may find some online belief claims laughable, frustrating or enraging, Carson says, but she tried to write with compassion, creating full, complex characters drawn to easy answers in hard times.

Nell, the Girl Who Had No Friend to Pull Her Away

Nell, the fictional protagonist of Dark Messiah, enters her cult after the accidental death of her younger sister and trauma from an inappropriate relationship with an older teacher. At first she finds peace with the messianic leader and meets generous, thoughtful members seeking belonging, family and relief from outside hostility. Over time she sees the danger of believing easy answers. Carson adds that leaving is difficult because a person’s whole identity can be sacrificed to regain stability.

Carson contrasts Nell with herself. She jokes about repeatedly passing e-meter readings and wondering whether quiz answers would tell her who she was supposed to be. She also mentions a high-school week pretending Rush Limbaugh was right about everything to impress an older student who did not notice her, and wearing pleather pants because she thought she could be a club kid. These are her own dalliances, she makes clear, not claims of cult membership.

The difference, Carson says, is that Nell did not have a street-smart friend pulling her away, and that she spent a novel trying to understand rather than judge Nell.

The Impulse Does Not Vanish

Carson closes with a caution that applies beyond cults. She says the impulse to find answers does not vanish after dodging it once or many times; it waits. She says most people have looked at something — an MLM, a wellness guru’s multi-step plan, or a political rally resembling a revival — and quietly thought it might fix them. Her closing caution is that, if lucky, people remember it is never that easy.

Dark Messiah by Sara Z. Carson hits shelves on Nov. 3, the essay says, with no year given in that sentence, and is available now for preorder wherever books are sold. No price is given, and none is added here.