E77: Keep Sweet: The Final Episodes

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (0:10)
Hey, Sunstone Mormon History Podcast listeners, how's your summer going? What are you watching on TV? Are you watching more cult documentaries? Do we need to have a talk about this? Do you need to go outside, kick a soccer ball, drink some lemonade, have a normal summertime? What do you do in the summertime when all the leaves are green?
Well, if you're like us, we watch cult documentaries about our own community. And yes, we shouldn't use the word cult. That's a problematic word. Cristina, can you tell us why?

**Cristina Rosetti** (0:37)
So there's a long debate here in the field of religious studies as to this term. I want to like, as a blanket statement, say that I actually would never tell someone who was raised in a specific community what to, how to identify their experience or how to label their experience or the tradition they came from. That's not my job.
But when I am teaching about religions, I usually avoid this word because I don't know who's in my room. I don't know what their experiences are. And also, is my religion a cult? It's just a really big one. I don't know, who knows? But in terms of the history of this, one of the things that really matters is there is a long history of how stigmatization and marginalization does lead to retrenchment and isolation. If you point at people long enough and tell them they're crazy and weird, guess what's gonna happen? They're gonna isolate and retrench. Did that work out with the FLDS, Bryan? But the other thing that's really important is that I would really recommend, if anyone is interested, there's this really great article done by Religion Dispatch that's called Why Did So Many Black Women Die? Jonestown at 35
And when we think of Jonestown, a lot of people kind of have this imagining of Jonestown as something that it wasn't. People don't realize that Jonestown was a part of the Black Freedom Movement. And there's a very particular reason why Jonestown was a cult and the KKK wasn't.
You can all guess what that reason was.

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (1:49)
Is it white people? It's always white.

**Cristina Rosetti** (1:52)
It might be, it's flavor aid, Bryan, and it also might be racism.

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (1:57)
Another thing that I wanna talk about because I wrote this article in the LA Times defending under the banner of heaven, and I talked about our friend Roy Jeffs. I mentioned that he had just gotten off his compound, and our friend Shirley Draper, who is a good friend of the podcast, good friend of Sunstone, just an amazing woman, support, cherished families if you're out there and wanna help folks in fundamentalist communities. She doesn't like the word compound because it gets applied to Short Creek, which is not a compound. And her and I kind of had a back and forth because in Roy's case, when he left South Dakota, I think it qualifies as a compound. It was armed, they had security, they had a security tower, they were patrolling, they had night gear, it ran as a compound. But to Shirley's point, we like to call any place where fundamentalists live, which are usually ranches, farms, houses, compounds. And we just can't be lazy with those words because those words have real impact. So when you're watching these cult true crime documentaries, be careful in how you're talking about them because they can sometimes strengthen people's persecution complexes and make it harder for people to escape oppression.

**Cristina Rosetti** (2:57)
I also wanna plug Megan Goodwin and her work. She wrote a book called Abusing Religion on the Intersection of Media Representation and kind of anti-cult and cult discourse and religious studies.
And she also has done a lot of work kind of unpacking.
She's written a lot about Under the Banner of Heaven and talking about how the anti-cult movement has operated, its intersections with really kind of specifically racism, how the language has impacted women. So if you're interested to learn more, make it a good one, read her book.

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (3:27)
Hi, this is Lindsay Hansen Park.

**Bryan Buchanan** (3:29)
And this is Bryan Buchanan.

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (3:31)
Bringing you the story of Mormonism from the shadow of the Everlasting Hills, straight out of Zion. This isn't your grandpa's Mormon history.

**Bryan Buchanan** (3:39)
Thanks for. This is the tale of Mormon saints and sinners from our roots until present day.

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (4:03)
Gird your loins, lock your hearts and pay your tithing, because we're bringing you the story of Mormonism in all its paradisiacal glory.

**Bryan Buchanan** (4:11)
It's the Sunstone History Podcast.