Australia’s “Cults Crisis”? Some Recent Developments in the “Cult Scene” 2000–2025

Abstract

Since at least 2020 public concern around “cults” in Australia has emerged from a period of relative abeyance to once again become headline news, attracting significant free-to-air television coverage, numerous podcasts, and growing online activism. This has led to the establishment of a parliamentary inquiry in the State of Victoria. Drawing on a contextual constructionist framework, this article traces the social construction of this episode of “cult controversy” by mapping the contemporary Australian “cult scene,” examining how what groups wider Australian society perceives as “cults” has shifted in recent years and some of the changing dynamics of how these groups and their opponents interact with wider society. This article suggests that this so-called “cults crisis” has been primarily driven by three significant and overlapping changes in the “cult scene”: a younger generation of media-savvy anti-cult activists, comprising journalists, content creators, and (primarily) Second Generation Adult (SGA) former members; a more receptive socio-political and legal context in which the “cult problem” has converged with wider societal concerns around child abuse and domestic and family violence; and a broadening of the definitional parameters of what is classified as a “cult” in contemporary Australia public discourse to include a number of conservative evangelical and Pentecostal churches.

1. Introduction

Over recent years, particularly over the period from 2020 to 2025, the issue of “cults” has once again begun to loom large in the Australian cultural imagination with an upsurge in reporting on the theme across various media platforms and concern expressed in political quarters about a series of small and unpopular minority religious groups. This is by no means the first time this has happened, as periodically over the last century Australia has witnessed a series of “cult controversies” which have flared up at different times and which from a social constructionist perspective have often been symptomatic of wider societal issues as much as specific incidents relating to distinct religious groups (see, e.g., Doherty 2020b, 2020c, 2026; Cusack 2020; Possamai and Lee 2004; Richardson 2001; Wallis 1977). This recent surge in public awareness around the “cult problem” (Barker 2011), however, appears to have achieved a higher degree of social salience than previous controversies and may have considerably greater consequences than earlier controversies. Indeed, several media outlets have asked whether Australia has a “cult problem” (see e.g., Lawry 2025), and one journalist from The Guardian Australia has even suggested that the nation is experiencing a “cults crisis” (Kolovos 2025a).

In April 2025, after lobbying primarily by a group of former members of the Geelong Revival Centre and journalist Richard Baker, the Parliament of the State of Victoria announced that it was establishing an inquiry into “the recruitment methods and impacts of cults and organised fringe groups” to be conducted by its Legal and Social Issues Committee (Parliament of Victoria 2025a). Focusing primarily on this ongoing Inquiry, which is due to report by September 2026, this article offers a descriptive reconnaissance of the contemporary Australia “cult scene”—to borrow a phrase from British sociologist Barker (2004, 2014). What follows below examines how the particular groups wider Australian society perceives as “cults” (or, more recently, High-Control Groups or HCGs)1 has widened in recent years; some of the changing dynamics of how these groups, and particularly their growing array of opponents, interact with Australian society; and how this has been influenced by wider shifts in the economic, political, technological, legal and cultural environment of contemporary Australia. This article suggests that while ongoing monitoring and investigation of some specific groups is warranted, particularly in cases of documented abuse and criminality, the language of a “cults crisis” is an unhelpful exaggeration and that a series of unrelated incidents and several wider societal concerns and controversies have both converged and been conflated with the issue of “cults” in order to suggest that a larger societal threat exists than is actually the case.

To undertake this task, I seek to map the wider Australian “cult scene” examining some recent trends in how anti-cult (or cult awareness) groups, the media, and politicians have responded to the “cult problem” and some of the ways in which the economic, political, technological, legal and cultural environment of contemporary Australia has influenced current claims regarding this so-called “cults crisis,” in particular during the last 15 years (2010–2025). I conclude by discussing what I consider the three most significant drivers of this current “cult controversy.”

2. Contextual Constructionism and Moral Panic

At the outset, before examining more specific aspects of the Australian “cult problem,” it is necessary to say something about perspective taken in this article. The theoretical approach adopted in this article is that of contextual constructionism. Put simply, I seek to recognise and examine the objective basis of concerns expressed about a small number of (primarily) religious groups labelled as “cults” in contemporary Australian public discourse, while also balancing the subjective constructionist elements which have facilitated the maintenance (and sometimes exaggeration) of these same concerns within the public sphere. This perspective differs from a strict constructionist perspective which does not seek to acknowledge (or simply brackets out) any objective basis to constructed social problems (see Best 1993).

By adopting this approach, I hope to respond in an irenic, rather than a polemic, way to the recent accusation levelled at scholars of New Religions by Australian anti-cult activists that they dismiss critics of “cults” as “engaging in moral panic” and in doing so have “denigrated survivors” and “cloaked abuse in the language of religious freedom” (McIvor et al. 2025, p. 25). Instead, I suggest that this criticism is misplaced, and emerges from a faulty understanding of both the concept of moral panic and the wider social problems approach to studying “cults” which has proven an effective exploratory and explanatory lens for analysing specific “cult controversies”—and various other social problems—since the 1970s (see, e.g., Doherty 2013, 2020b; Barker 2011; Cusack 2020; Introvigne 2009; Wallis 1977). Indeed, while not above criticism (see esp. Feltmate 2016), it is one of the primary approaches listed in a major textbook on teaching about New Religions (Richardson and Introvigne 2007). On this approach, Jenkins (2000, p. 20) helpfully summarises:

The cult issue, like any social problem, is socially constructed. This does not mean that negative stories are false or even exaggerated, and some cult groups may indeed be committing criminal and dangerous acts… However, the level of public concern about cults at any given time is not necessarily based on a rational or objective assessment of the threat posed by these groups, but rather reflects a diverse range of tensions, prejudices, and fears.

An important aspect of this social problem approach is that it seeks to look at how different social players construct their specific images of the groups in question and to what end. In this regard, as Jenkins (2000, p. 22) further notes, “we must find who is making the claims about particular religious groups, as well as the means by which each side projects its arguments and the changing tastes of the audiences to whom they are seeking to appeal.” This is precisely what this article seeks to trace.

Regarding the concept of “moral panic.” This is also an established approach within the sociology of deviance and has been applied in a variety of different social settings as a means of understanding how certain issues become wider controversies (see, e.g., Thompson 1998; Goode and Ben-Yehuda [1994] 2006). The term was first coined by sociologist Stanley Cohen in the 1970s and defined as:

A condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests; its nature is presented in a stylized and stereotypical fashion by the mass media, the moral barricades are manned by editors, bishops, politicians and other right-thinking people; socially accredited experts pronounce their diagnoses and solutions; ways of coping are evolved or (more often) resorted to; the condition then disappears, submerges or deteriorates or becomes more visible

(Cohen [1972] 2002, p. 1).

This approach does not deny the existence of social problems, rather it questions their extent, or, as one scholar put it, “moral panics have their beginnings in objective conditions and real dangers,” but that “the real problem…is prevalence, not existence” (Introvigne 2009, pp. 105, 107). Contrary to the accusation noted above, there is no denigration of survivors intended by taking this approach, rather it seeks to understand and explain the sociological factors which have gone into socially constructing the issue of concern, bringing it to public attention, and making it the potential subject of social control. As Best (1993, p. 139) summarises, “contextual constructionists study claims-making within its context of culture and social structures.”

As I will make clear—and as public testimony and submissions before the current Victorian Inquiry hearings have illustrated—some demonstrable harm has been perpetrated by members of several distinct minority religious groups who have been labelled as “cults” in contemporary Australia. However, this article also suggests that some of the claims-making about these groups—particularly as it has appeared in the Australian media and in the inquiry hearings in Victoria—has also been disproportionate, historical, and anecdotal. Much of what has been described to the Inquiry thus far, while both socially and morally objectionable, does not reach the threshold of criminality nor necessarily extend beyond the levels found more widely in other contexts, particularly among lawful social or religious groups. On this issue, the perspective I take is similar to that of Barker, in that in dealing with these kinds of concerns I believe “it is necessary to provide accurate and balanced knowledge of the movements to public and official bodies, but that the movements and their members should not be treated in law any differently than the rest of the population” (Barker 2004, p. 31). One of the chief challenges presented by this Inquiry—and one which was both foreseeable and avoidable (see esp. Sessions and Doherty 2021, p. 186)—was that it has raised valid concerns surrounding religious liberty and what looks significantly like an attempt to circumvent well-established Australian legal norms for protecting religious minorities by means of delegitimizing their religious status by arbitrarily applying the “cult” label in a manner which seeks to separate religious practices from their foundation in religious belief. Such an approach is by no means anything new (see, e.g., Richardson and Introvigne 2001), but the clumsy way in which the initial Guidance Note for the current Victorian Inquiry was framed has exacerbated this issue in contemporary Australia, necessitating a more contextual analysis.

In this regard, the current situation in Australia, as I will elaborate at greater length below, does arguably meet the definitional criteria of a “moral panic” as set out by the important text of Goode and Ben-Yehuda ([1994] 2006). Goode and Ben-Yehuda ([1994] 2006, p. 33) suggest that there are “five crucial elements or criteria” which characterise a “moral panic”: concern, hostility, consensus, disproportionality, and volatility. Moreover, the situation also appears to be following the five stages of “moral panic” set out by Thompson (1998, p. 8).

First, concern has been shown about the behaviour of a vague category of religious groups (“cults”) which is indexed by heightened media coverage across platforms in Australia over recent years. During this period, vastly different religious groups have been reified into a vague category of “cults” by the media, this approximates the first two stages of Thompson’s model, “cults” have been “defined as a threat to values or interests” and this perceived threat has “been depicted in an easily recognisable form by the media” (Thompson 1998, p. 9).

Secondly, hostility toward these groups has clearly been expressed in the mobilisation against them and this same media coverage which has cast them as “folk devils,” and set them apart in the public discourse from other groups (e.g., mainstream religions) as particularly pernicious. This hostility has also encouraged the emergence of a new generation of anti-cult activists who have formed a primarily online countermovement within the last five years. This follows Thompson’s third stage of a “rapid build-up of public concern” (Thompson 1998, p. 9).

Thirdly, these actions have achieved a considerable consensus in media and wider culture that a distinct group of “cults” are harmful. The bipartisan support demonstrated in the establishment of the Victorian Inquiry is indicative of the level of consensus achieved, at least within a sector of the Australia community. This generally matches up with the fourth stage of Thompson’s model in that the Inquiry illustrates “a response from authorities and opinion-makers” (Thompson 1998, p. 8).

Fourthly, disproportionality has been shown in the amount of media reporting in recent years, and on some of the reporting on the Inquiry which has highlighted a certain number of submissions while failing to indicate that some of these were related to alleged incidents, many of which were historical, and some of which took place outside of Victoria or even Australia (see, e.g., Veldkamp 2026). Disproportionality has also been demonstrated by media reporting on the methodologically unsound online survey conducted by the Inquiry to arguably exaggerate the extent of the harm perpetrated by various “cults.” Perhaps the most significant aspect of disproportionality, however, has been the media use of language like that of a “cults crisis” to dramatise the situation, where claims made by the journalist in question were based on two days of hearings from “survivors and experts.” When one begins to disaggregate submissions and examine hearing testimony, a somewhat different and less alarming picture begins to emerge.

Most submissions to the inquiry relate to only a handful of numerically small groups—particularly the Geelong Revival Centre (25 submissions), Shincheonji (10 submissions), City Builders Church (six submissions), and the Two-by-Twos (Cooneyites) (five submissions). The one exception here is Jehovah’s Witnesses, who have not been a subject in the public hearings. Jehovah’s Witnesses have been the subject of 46 submissions—a significant number of which are from interstate or international—but they are also by far the largest of the groups mentioned in size—with just over 15,000 members in Victoria (according to 2021 Australian Bureau of Statistics Census data). The small number of these submissions is particularly interesting given the wide global reach of Facebook, Reddit, and other social media in disseminating knowledge of this Inquiry and the number of interstate (and international) submissions which have been included among the public submissions (see Doherty 2026, pp. 20–21). Additional questions around proportionality emerge when submissions on various individual groups are disaggregated and analysed in more detail. Two examples from more high-profile groups are illustrative of these problems.

First, Shincheonji has received a considerable amount of negative media coverage in recent years and has clearly become one of the primary groups of concern in the Inquiry (Doherty, forthcoming). There have been 10 submissions related to Shincheonji: one (Submission No. 124) is from outside of Australia; three (Submission Nos. 14, 66, 96) are from former members who were only engaged in preliminary Bible studies led by Shincheonji instructors but appear to have never formally become members of the group; three (Submission Nos. 38, 174, 268) are from concerned parents or relatives of current or former members (one of which is from outside of Victoria); and two are from former members of Shincheonji in Melbourne. The final submission is testimony provided in the early hearings. To put this in perspective, as a group within Victoria, Shincheonji numbered around 800 members in 2024 at the peak of negative media coverage about the group. While statistical data on any kind of abuse or harm is notoriously difficult to analyse—a point the Legislative and Social Issues Committee are acutely aware of from a previous inquiry undertaken directly prior to the current Inquiry (see Parliament of Victoria 2025b, pp. 10–12)—an upward estimate gauged by submissions is that around eight former members, which translates to around 1% of Shincheonji’s Victorian membership, have raised concerns. This is despite widely disseminated social media posts, particularly on Reddit (r/Shincheonji), encouraging former members to make submissions (Anonymous 2025). The personal hurt experienced by these people should not be minimised, nor should the issue of underreporting of abuse, but neither can we ignore how statistically small the number of reports of harm are.

A second example relates to submissions about the Church of Scientology, which has historically been one of the most heavily scrutinised religious groups in Australia and was previously banned in Victoria. Scientology is the subject of six submissions; one (Submission No. 235) is from outside of Australia; one (Submission No. 290) from outside of Victoria; one (Submission No. 28) is based on an AI-generated YouTube podcast entitled “Psychological Mechanisms found in Scientology” which first appeared in October 2024 and also appears to have been AI-generated; one (Submission No. 157) is a one-page document which simply states a series of unsubstantiated claims regarding practices which Scientology allegedly engages in, based on “two years research and advocacy” experience; and one (Submission No. 100) is similarly a series of unsubstantiated and general claims written by a friend of a former member.

On closer examination, none of these documents deal with explicit, documented claims related to Victoria (though two appear to allude to the case of Mirriam Francis, discussed extensively in the media—see Kendall 2025; McIlveen 2025). The last, and the most substantive, is a joint submission from the Olive Leaf Network, of which former Scientologist Mirriam Francis is a contributor, and relates to widely publicised claims of harm she experienced during her Scientology childhood in the United States during the 1990s (see McIlveen 2025). On any reckoning this is a vanishingly small body of evidence for harm allegedly perpetrated by a group who have attracted an inordinate number of negative media stories alleging wrongdoing over the course of decades in Australia and who in Victoria number less than 600 members according to 2021 Australian Bureau of Statistics Census Data (see, e.g., Doherty 2014; Possamai and Possamai-Inesedy 2009; Mutch 2019).

While some degree of harm has been experienced by this small group of people, allegedly inflicted by a variety of different religious groups, when disaggregated by specific groups rather than a poorly delimited category of “cults,” serious questions arise about whether it is reasonable to speak of a “cults crisis.” Once the over-generalisation created by using the reified category of “cults” is abandoned, one is left with a more sober picture: a variety of smaller religious groups have hurt a small proportion of their former followers in some manner. It is difficult to say whether this harm has extended more widely within these groups, though in terms of raw numbers it is clear that even on the most upward estimate, and taking into account the much smaller numerical size of most of the groups in question, these figures still pale in comparison with the more significant numbers presented to the 2012–2013 Victorian Inquiry into the handling of child abuse by religious and other non-government organisations (see Parliament of Victoria 2013, p. 3) or those presented to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (2017, p. 290), both of which dealt with more specific forms of abuse in (primarily) more mainstream religious bodies.

Finally, volatility refers to the situation in “moral panics” where an issue suddenly erupts and just as quickly subsides, or the concern about it becomes institutionalised. This approximates the fifth stage of Thompson’s model, in that “the panic recedes or results in social changes” (Thompson 1998, p. 8). Making a judgement about this aspect of the current “cult controversy” is more difficult at the present time and will need to await future revisiting, though at the current moment it is suggestive that the primary precipitating event that brought this issue to the floor of the Victorian State Parliament was a popular podcast about the harm which took place in the Geelong Revival Centre—a small Pentecostal Church which has attracted controversy in Victoria for decades.

As indicated above, this is not the first time that the issue of “cults” has come to be considered a social problem in Australian history—or, put differently, become the subject of a “moral panic”—and it is worth turning briefly to some earlier background on how the “cult problem” has emerged in previous decades in order to provide wider context to recent changes in the Australian “cult scene” and to highlight a baseline from which some of the unique aspects of this current “cult controversy” can be discerned.

3. Minority Religions in Recent Australian History

While during the period from 1960 through to 2000 Australia witnessed a series of “cult controversies,” throughout the first decade of the new millennium, the topic of “cults” was far less prevalent than it had been during the 1990s (Doherty 2020b). As had been the case overseas, the events of 11 September 2001, and in Australia the October 12 Bali Bombings in 2002, created a new “folk devil” for the Australian media in Islam and while occasional reports regarding “cults” continued to appear, these were by no means as prolific as in the previous decade. Two significant controversies, however, occurred during the decade of the 2000s.

First, beginning in 2005, the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church (then still known primarily as the “Exclusive Brethren”) found themselves at the centre of controversy after a brief and ill-fated foray into politics, when hey were identified to be behind a series of third-party political advertisements favourable to conservative politicians in state and federal elections. This controversy extended over several years, becoming particularly acute in the lead-up to the 2007 federal election. The controversy featured on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s (ABC) flagship current affairs programme Four Corners and various tabloid television programmes and ultimately resulted in a full-length journalistic expose by Fairfax journalist Michael Bachelard entitled Behind the Exclusive Brethren (Bachelard 2008). Despite this, no action was taken against the Brethren and no breeches of electoral law were uncovered. The Brethren have, however, remained a regular target for media in the period since—frequently being labelled a “cult” even while they have arguably “denominationalised” in some ways and reduced their level of sectarian tension with wider Australian society (Doherty 2012, 2013, 2020a; Doherty and Dyason 2022).

Secondly, toward the end of the decade, the Church of Scientology was placed in the spotlight, with a series of media exposés by programmes like Four Corners and by tabloid television program Today Tonight, coupled with a campaign by Independent Senator for South Australia Nick Xenophon and cyber-hacktivist collective Anonymous. Despite a significant amount of media and government attention, including an inquiry by the Senate Economics Legislation Committee which featured a chapter on “cults,” no sustained legal proceedings were instigated against the Church of Scientology and no further action was taken. While the Senate inquiry recommended exploring the possibility of founding a federal “cult-watching” body, this was ultimately rejected by the Gillard Labor Government in 2010 (Doherty 2014).

The period from 2010 to 2020 saw continued sporadic reporting on various groups, though no concerted anti-cult campaigns like that against the Brethren and Scientology emerged. Indeed, during this period some more even-handed, even sympathetic, material appeared in the Australia media about groups once labelled as “cults.” The ABC programme Compass, for example, featured several more nuanced and human-interest stories on the Rajneeshees (Akhurst 2013) and the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (Spring 2013) as part of a series of retrospectives on radical religious and social movements entitled “Whatever Happened to…” While some sporadic negative reporting focused on a few groups, notably Universal Medicine (see Coco 2020), the wider societal focus during this period was primarily on religious malfeasance in established churches and the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse set up by the Gillard Labor Government in early 2013.

This Royal Commission saw the investigation of a number of Australian religious groups, particularly the Roman Catholic Church. While “cults” were not the focus, among the groups investigated were a small number of minority religions, including Jehovah’s Witnesses who became the subject of an extremely negative case study (Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse 2016). The final report of the Royal Commission focused primarily on mainstream religious bodies like the Roman Catholic Church and the Anglican Church in Australia. These events did untold damage to the Australian churches and their social capital. As sociologist of religion Hughes (2025, p. xv) recently commented, “[t]he appalling evidence of child sexual abuse within churches and church organisations, so publicly revealed to wider society over the past twenty years, and universally decried, has robbed the Christian churches of the moral force they once exerted.”

It is in from this context of the public loss of trust in religious institutions, and a wider context of listening to victim-survivors of religious and other forms of abuse, that we must examine the more recent developments in Australia’s “cult scene” and how these wider cultural developments within Australian society have helped shape the perception that Australia is currently experiencing a “cults crisis.”

4. Recent Developments in the Australian “Cult Scene”

4.1. Media

The topic of “cults” began to reemerge in media coverage around 2016 following a wider trend in Australia (and internationally) relating to the consumption of true crime media content (see, e.g., Vitis and Ryan 2023). During this time journalists, writing primarily in the true crime genre, began to produce long-form works about various “cults,” some of them largely historical, which have proved popular among readers and have easily been platformed across other growing sectors of the Australian media landscape, in particular podcasts and streaming services. Indeed, the current “cult controversy” in Australia has tracked with the massive uptake of podcasts and streaming services by the majority of Australians (particularly those in younger demographics), as the last decade has witnessed a major generational shift in how Australians consume media content.

In 2017, for example, only 37% of Australians used streaming services, and this has grown to 91% in 2025. This compares to only 52% who watch free-to-air TV down from 71% in 2017. Similarly, changes can also be seen around podcasts, with an overall listenership of 52% in 2025, with 66% of listeners in the 18–44 demographic, and with crime being the second most popular genre with a listenership of 28% (see Australian Communications and Media Authority 2026). What I call “cult content,” has become a popular subgenre within true crime, arguably appealing to the same growing demographic audience.

The most significant early example of this shift was Chris Johnston and Rosie Jones’ book The Family (2016), which self-described as “a powerful work of investigative journalism that reveals the legacy of a notorious cult.” This book, the format of which has been followed by later examples—for example, Norris’s The Messiah’s Bride (Norris 2022)—was not a book about religion but rather a true crime book involving religious individuals and in many ways followed in the wake of similar “cult” books which had been appearing in Australia since the early 1990s, when journalist Martin King—well-known for his work on tabloid television programme A Current Affair—co-authored a notorious exposé entitled Preacher of Death (King and Breault 1993) with former Branch Davidian Marc Breault.

Certainly, in previous years, other journalists had produced similar works on specific groups (e.g., Webber 2008), but in the new milieu of podcasts and streaming services this type of long-form journalism proved highly marketable, successfully crossing multiple media platforms. As Cusack (2020, p. 48) astutely observed, “the immense press and online interest that accompanied the book and the documentary is an excellent example of the “echo-chamber” aspect of the internet, in which a limited amount of information is recirculated, mainly in short news items and podcasts.”

The book was soon being utilised, alongside the accompanying documentary series The Cult of the Family which aired on the ABC in 2017, as a teaching resource in schools (see, e.g., Australian Teachers of Media 2020). The series was later taken up by Netflix. What is important in the current context, is that this crossover between “cults” and true crime eclipsed the religious aspects of Hamilton-Byrne’s group and instead focused on the (very serious) criminal activities and abuses perpetrated by the Family (see Cusack 2020; Doherty 2019).

This media trend around the success of The Family and “cult content” in true crime has continued over ensuing years. In November 2018, for example, Who magazine produced a glitzy collector’s edition entitled True Crime Stories: Cults (2018), which was widely distributed. While primarily based on a similarly mass-produced People magazine collector’s edition of the same name from the United States, this Australian version featured several Australian specific groups including a chapter on “Life inside the Family,” on Anne-Hamilton’s Byrne’s group, but also chapters entitled “Australia’s most notorious sex cult” (on the Order of Saint Charbel) and “A most secretive sect” (on the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church). These stories recycled a series of earlier interviews with former members in various magazines. The opening sentence of this collector’s edition was indicative of a wider cultural fascination which was beginning to emerge at this time, with the author noting that “cults of the past are having a moment in the culture today” (2018, p. 6) before going on to highlight the success around docudramas like Wild Wild Country (2018) and Waco (2018). This magazine special issue, moreover, also featured an example of an increasingly visible phenomena in the Australian media, what I will call here the “cult survivor.”

Among the interviews which appeared in the Who magazine anthology was Claire McAuliffe, who had previously been interviewed for Who’s sister publication New Idea in 2018. McAuliffe in many ways pioneered what can be seen as a new social role which might conveniently be called the “cult survivor”—a hybrid between what sociologists call a “career apostate” (see, e.g., Wright 1998) and the feminist phenomenon of the “public survivor” (Serisier 2024). Beginning in the mid-2010s, McAuliffe leveraged her experience as a former member of two breakaway Roman Catholics groups—the Order of Saint Charbel and the Society of St. Pius X—to “speak out” in the media against “cults” more generally. She began to give TEDx talks and appeared across a variety of traditional and developing media platforms. McAuliffe’s lived experience narrative featured, not only in magazines like New Idea, but also on television programmes like the prime-time current affairs panel show The Project (Campbell 2018), podcasts like the ABC’s Earshot (Drewitt-Smith 2023), and in numerous online and print articles in Australia and overseas.

While she was never paid for her appearances, through this process McAuliffe built a media brand as a compelling public speaker and was ascribed a significant amount of legitimacy both as a Second Generation Adult (SGA) who had been raised in a strict religious environment (the Society of St. Pius X) and as a woman who had also joined, at a later stage, another controversial breakaway sect (the Order of Saint Charbel). Like public survivors of sexual assault who have built high-public profiles in recent years in Australia (see O’Neill et al. 2025), McAuliffe was able to utilise ally journalists, current affairs programmes, and public speaking events to tell her story and to warn about what she perceived as the danger of “cults.” Among the places where McAuliffe has appeared, and further indicative of the wider popularity of “cult content,” was the podcast Let’s Talk About Sects (discussed below), where McAuliffe was an early guest in 2017. McAuliffe even self-published a memoir entitled Lessons from a Cult Survivor (Ashman 2018) and went on to study a Bachelor of Arts, majoring in Religious Studies at the University of Queensland, going on to present at academic conferences like the Australian Association for the Study of Religion in 2024 and co-author a chapter on her experience in the Order of Saint Charbel (Doherty and McAuliffe 2026). McAuliffe’s significant media profile, particularly on podcasts, highlights the wider interest in “cult content” and the ways in which an entrepreneurial “cult survivor” can build a successful media brand through the feminist act of “speaking out.”

As intimated earlier, the popularity of true crime podcasts in Australia over the past decade has grown exponentially across multiple demographics, particularly women, and particularly with a focus on crimes depicting violence against women (see Vitis and Ryan 2023). Coinciding with this wider genre and medium growth, a series of podcasts have also emerged featuring “cult content” which have tapped into both the widening popularity of the true crime genre among younger Australians, but also the increasing social salience of concerns around violence against women. Two of these podcasts are significant and have produced books.

The first was Jo Thornley’s more tongue-in-cheek Zealot podcast which began in 2017, followed by Thornley’s book of the same name in 2019 (Thornley 2019). The other was the more serious programme by investigative journalist Sarah Steel Let’s Talk About Sects which began casting in 2017. Steel (2022) subsequently published her book Do As I Say: How Cults Control, Why We Join Them, And What they Teach US About Bullying, Abuse and Coercion (2022), which has been influential in promoting the current narrative about coercive control and “cults” which underpins the Victorian Inquiry and which offers an often-neglected gendered lens on the “cult problem.” Indeed, over the 2024 and 2025 period, Steel’s podcast has featured most of the publicly visible and activist victim-survivors to appear before the Victorian Inquiry. This podcast has won several awards, and Steel has appeared not only at major public events such as the Vivid Festival in Sydney, but also sponsored and chaired panels at the Decult conference in New Zealand in 2024 (Let’s Talk About Sects 2026). Steel’s success here appears to have influenced others and as recently as early 2026 another podcast, Aftercult, was launched featuring Dave Mullins (see Dumas 2026), a former member of a branch of the wider Gnostic Movement associated with the late Columbian–Mexican esotericist Samael Aun Weor (Victor Manuel Gómez Rodríguez) (1917–1977).

What can be observed here is a wider digital media trend which is like earlier trends around the medium of tabloid television, whereby the topic of “cults” has clearly resonated with the same younger demographics (Doherty 2014). A whole new generation of Gen-Y and Gen-Z have been exposed to well-established themes of “cult menace” (McCloud 2004) through multiple forms of digital media, alongside far less exposure to either wider religious practice or an alternative interpretive frame of the contemporary “cult scene.” Indeed, a number of those covering the current “cult controversy” are younger, early career journalists who have begun their media careers during the post-#MeToo era and who primarily depict the “cult problem” through the lens of a pre-existing media “cult stereotype” and an expanded lens drawn from legitimate societal concerns about violence against women (discussed below).

While a powerful tool for exposing genuine abuse, this perspective has little nuance for the wider religious context in which certain practices have taken place or the historical context of earlier controversies (and the tendency of the media to recycle content). Instead, the primary frame of reference for this group of journalists, and indeed for the wider Victorian Inquiry, has not been religion but rather wider societal concerns over the abuse of women, children, and young adults (particularly university students). For journalists, however, this has been assisted not only by the growing prevalence of the “cult survivors” as a distinct social role, but also the increased visibility of anti-cult groups, who in recent years have arguably been afforded greater space in the Australian media than at any time since the late 1970s.

4.2. Cult Awareness Groups

Among the more traditional Cult Awareness Groups (CAGs)2 active in contemporary Australia is Raphael Aron’s Cult Consulting Australia (CCA), based in Melbourne, which has existed in various forms and under various names since the late 1970s. Cult Consulting Australia describes itself as having been “at the forefront of the struggle to address the influence of cults” over the last 40 years (Cult Consulting Australia 2025). Aron, a Rabbi within the Chabad-Lubavitch Jewish community in Melbourne, initially became mobilised against “cults” in the 1970s, particularly in the aftermath of Jonestown and a growing awareness of the specific impact which “cults” were having on young people in Melbourne’s Jewish community. He has since written two non-fiction books on the topic: Cults: Too Good to be True (Aron 1999) and Cults, Terror, and Mind Control (Aron 2009). As the title of his second book suggests, Aron is a strong advocate for a “cultic brainwashing” interpretation of the “cult” phenomenon.

Aron’s influence has waxed and waned over the last 40 years, though he has been a regular media pundit on the issue going back to the early 1980s and has actively cultivated a relationship with the media as a “cult expert.” In recent years, Aron has been more vocal about what he calls “fundamentalist cults” which are primarily Christian-based groups (Bayens 2026), appearing on programmes like newsmagazine 60 Minutes (2023) and 7News (2024) to discuss groups like the Potter’s House Church and, in particular, Shincheonji, who he asserts have been the subject of the largest number of inquiries CCA has ever received (Parliament of Victoria 2025c, p. 27). Indeed, CCA has focused primarily on younger people who they believe have been targeted by groups like Shincheonji and is far more representative of a traditional anti-cult model geared toward those who have been recruited into groups, compared with the CAGs which have emerged in recent years (discussed below).

During his long career in cult awareness, Aron’s approach has tended to be that of exit counselling and is based around persuasion rather than coercion. In terms of his writings, Aron’s work is largely an unreconstructed version of the anti-cult ideology which was prevalent in the 1970s through to the 1990s. In particularly, he has not abandoned ideas around “cultic brainwashing,” noting to one reporter as recently as March 2026 that while “cults” have “sanitised their act over the last 20 or 30 years, [they’re] still doing the same thing in terms of brainwashing and mind control” (Bayens 2026). With reference to the alleged recent upsurge in interest, Aron seeks to explain this partially with reference to COVID, noting, “Cults give people a sense of certainty. COVID uprooted that certainty in many people’s lives, they didn’t know what was going on from one day to the other” (Bayens 2026). Interestingly, Aron does not appear to have been as enthusiastic in adopting the language around coercive control and appears to be more of a realist in terms of what can be achieved by an inquiry (Cult Consulting Australia 2025). Moreover, how aligned Cult Consulting Australia is with more recently formed CAGs is unclear, though it does appear that there is some divergence between Aron’s more traditional anti-cult foci on younger recruits and the largely SGA concerns around children raised in groups expressed by more emergent groups.

The second traditional CAG active in Australia is Cult Information and Family Support (CIFS) which was founded in 1996—initially by mother Ros Hodgkins whose daughter had joined the International Churches of Christ while a university student. More recently Tjore Klevjer, a trained counsellor and former member of the Children of God, has been the primary public spokesman for the group. While it has contributed to some previous government inquiries in Australia and overseas, its primarily focus has been on support for former members and their families and as an information clearing house (Cult Information and Family Support 2026).

In the context of the current “cult scene” CIFS appear to have been a more significant contributor than CCA. CIFS were involved in sponsoring the 2024 Decult conference in Christchurch, New Zealand, which brought together many of the major players in the Victorian Inquiry hearings. As an adjunct to Decult, moreover, CIFS sponsored a seminar for ex-members in early October 2024 in which British counsellor Gillie Jenkinson, a former member of what she described as a “evangelical charismatic Christian movement” (Lacey and Collette 2026), was the speaker. Jenkinson, alongside Janja Lalich and Marlene Winell, was also a keynote at the Decult conference. Jenkinson’s book, Walking Free from the Trauma of Coercive, Cultic and Spiritual Abuse: A Workbook for Recovery and Growth (Jenkinson 2023), moreover, has been influential in the wider international Cult Awareness Movement, being awarded the Dianne Casoni award by Canada-based organisation Info-Cult in 2023. Alongside Sarah Steel’s book, Jenkinson’s book has been one of the pivotal works in popularising ideas of coercive control within cult awareness circles in Australia. This seminar was soon followed by a petition to the Federal Attorney-General calling specifically for coercive control laws against “cults”—with a specific focus on Shincheonji (see Doherty 2026).

CIFS submission to the current Inquiry follows along a similar line, suggesting “that frameworks developed to address domestic violence and coercive control be adapted and extended to cases involving religious or ideological abuse” (Cult Information and Family Support 2025, p. 2). CIFS have also, however, called for “greater financial transparency and accountability for religious and charitable organisations that enjoy tax-exempt status” (Cult Information and Family Support 2025, p. 2) this follows from their earlier advocacy in this space in a number of forums and indicates another development in the contemporary “cult scene” regarding the economic regulation of religious groups (discussed further below).

CIFS appear to have greater alignment with the newer generation than CCA, and their membership appears to be more demographically mixed, though CIFS did not include its logo on the Beyond Belief: Responding to Cults and High-Control Groups in Victoria submission to the Victorian Inquiry—the major anti-cult group submission (discussed below). Also of interest are some organisational links between CIFS and the Rationalist Society of Australia (RSA) via Nathan Zamprogno, a local New South Wales politician and former CIFS committee member and now a member of the RSA executive. The RSA, while not primarily a CAG, have been vocal advocates of the Inquiry and have provided anti-cult activists with an additional platform for lobbying governments on the “cults” issue—particularly around the issues of coercive control and religious charity reform.

Most significantly in terms of Australian anti-cult groups are the series of more recently formed CAGs which have been established, primarily in Victoria, over just the last few years. While some of these groups consist, in all likelihood, of a very small number of overlapping members and function as little more than Facebook support groups, they have managed to attract significant attention and been afforded a platform by both the media and the Victorian Inquiry. The most vocal of these groups has been Survivors of Coercive Cults and High-Control Groups (SOCCHCG); Stop Religious Coercion Australia (SRCA); the Olive Leaf Network (OLN) and the Religious Trauma Collective (RCT) representatives of all of whom have appeared before the Victorian Inquiry.

While adopting aspects of traditional anti-cult ideology, the leadership of these groups is largely comprised of former members of religious groups who are Second Generation Adults (SGAs), most of whom were born into various “cults” rather than converted. Bearing this in mind, these groups tend to have a different focus to more traditional groups like CCA and CIFS. SRCA, for example, while adopting some of traditional anti-cult trappings (like Steven Hassan’s discredited BITE-model), describe themselves as “a group of ex-members from religious cults and high-demand religions who are working to raise awareness and promote positive changes to reduce coercive control in faith-based organisations” (Stop Religious Coercion Australia 2025). Other than appearing before the Inquiry and setting up the website and making media and podcast appearances—for example on Meshel Laurie’s Australian True Crime podcast episode “Cults and Coercive Control” (Tankard 2025)—the group does not appear to be particularly active.

The most significant contribution by these newer groups, and those in their wider network, has been the Beyond Belief submission, a significant piece which argues for extensive regulatory action against “cults.” The primary author of this submission, Patrick McIvor, a former member of the City Builders Church and survivor of conversion therapy, has considerable experience with government regulators and the submission presents a maximalist approach to how anti-cult activists believe government should address the “cult problem.” Other co-authors included Clare Heath-McIvor, another former member of City Builders Church (discussed below) and Renee Spencer, who runs the Recover from Coercive Control website (Recover from Coercive Control 2026) and whose estranged daughter is a current member of the Jesus Christians. Well-known international anti-cult activist Janja Lalich is also listed as a co-author and the submission is heavily coloured by her perspective—a minority position within the wider study of New Religions. While the submission has significant conceptual weaknesses (see Doherty 2026, pp. 23–29), it does aptly demonstrate the strategic way in which this newer generation of anti-cult activists have sought to extend the remit of the “cult problem” and link it up with other social problems—a point to which I will return. For example, the conclusion notes:

Victoria has undergone a generational shift in its understanding of coercion, control, and institutional abuse. Successive inquiries and reforms—across family violent (sic.), institutional child abuse, disability, mental health, elder abuse and human rights—have matured our legal and policy frameworks to a point where public recognition of group-based coercive control is not only possible, but a natural next step in the State’s ongoing commitment to justice, safety, and systemic accountability

(McIvor et al. 2025, p. 58).

Aside from lending their logos to this submission, SRCA and SOCCHG appear to be like the Victorian Cult Survivors Network, little more than Facebook groups and websites primarily aimed at providing a platform for the current Inquiry. Other groups who supported this submission, however, appear to be more proactive.

The OLN was set up in 2018. This group seeks to offer more tangible support to former members and is a registered charity. Its primary spokeswoman Maria Esquerra is a former member of the Children of God and a qualified psychologist based in Queensland. Also heavily involved in the OLN, is Miriam Francis, an ex-Scientologist who had previously appeared on Leah Remini’s Scientology and the Aftermath and on Sarah Steel’s Let’s Talk about Sects podcast. Members of the Olive Leaf Network were also involved in Decult in New Zealand in 2024. They have also been active in media reporting around the Inquiry (e.g., Kendall 2025). The OLN’s sizeable submission, entitled “Children in Cults” is primarily focused on children and the experiences of SGA former members, including a significant online survey conducted by U.K.-based former member of the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church, and long-time cult critic Jill Aebi-Mytton (Olive Leaf Network 2025).

Meanwhile, the Religious Trauma Collective describes itself as a group of “therapists who have personal and professional experience with religious harm and the trauma that can come from losing your worldview and identity” (The Religious Trauma Collective 2026). The primary driver of this group is Elise Heerde, a former member of Hillsong. Heerde has self-published an account of her involvement in Hillsong and the wider Pentecostal movement entitled Holy Hell: Saved So Hard I Needed Therapy (Heerde 2025). Heerde has also been active in the media, in particular in telling the story of her negative experiences within Hillsong (see e.g., Cunningham 2026). The RTC website also includes extensive podcast material and a focus more on the developing literature around what some writers are calling religious trauma. One focus of the RTC has been on the documented harms perpetrated in Christian communities against LGBTQIA+ people, an area usually unaddressed in traditional anti-cult groups, and Heerde has also appeared on progressive Christian podcasts like Spiritual Misfits (2025).

Ideologically, most of these SGA groups can be readily classified as secular anti-cult groups, or CAGs. Indeed, while historically much of the opposition to “cults” in Australia emanated from within the Christian churches, particularly among evangelical Protestants, this type of countercult material has not registered in the Victorian Inquiry. This also points to a wider trend among these SGA groups and those who identify as their allies. Many of those involved in these groups are coming to cult awareness activism not from the kinds of groups traditionally denominated as “cults” but from conservative evangelical and Pentecostal churches.

This trend has been well-illustrated in the lead up to the Victorian Inquiry. For example, SOCCHG president Clare Heath-McIvor—a former member of the Pentecostal City Builders Church in Sale, Victoria—had built an extensive social media platform including her Unchurchable podcast and a Substack entitled “Evangelical Explainer.” She also appeared, alongside her former husband (Patrick McIvor), on a 60 Minutes Australia report entitled “Praying for Power” ahead of the 2022 Victorian state election (Weaver and Grieve 2022). Heath-McIvor’s social media “cult content” is in many ways representative of these more technologically and public relations savvy cult awareness activists, and her content also provides a bridge between some traditional anti-cult ideology and more recent adjacent social movements like the #ChurchToo and exvangelical movements. Given the network established by this group of traditional and emergent anti-cult groups, it is worth looking briefly at what political take-up the “cult problem” has had in Australia in recent years.

4.3. Politics

Surprisingly, perhaps, given the degree of media saturation, politically anti-cult activism has not proven particularly popular among Australian politicians. As one of competing single issues which are often brought before parliamentarians, the “cult problem” has only attracted sporadic attention from a handful of politicians at both federal and state level over the past decade, though historically on a small number of occasions going back to the 1960s it has featured as a genuine political issue in state and federal parliaments. In general, some politicians may occasionally comment on the “cult problem” in the media, though this has rarely transferred into concerted political action.

We can see this in the current climate in Victoria, where political comment has been sought by activist journalists. As discussed elsewhere (Doherty 2026, pp. 6–8), one of the instigating factors in the current Victorian situation was the podcast Secrets We Keep: Pray Harder (2024), about the Geelong Revival Centre, by journalist Richard Baker which was followed by a series of reports in The Age newspaper (see, e.g., Baker 2024). These reports are indicative of non-committal nature of political engagement with the “cult problem.” Baker’s report, for example, quoted New South Wales Senator David Shoebridge from the Australia Greens, who had previous appeared in an exposé of the Hillsong Church, entitled Hillsong: A Megachurch Exposed in 2022, and—like other Greens politicians— has been critical of religious groups receiving public funding. Shoebridge’s comments, directed at the Geelong Revival Centre were that the “extreme limitations on the movement, communication and actions of some members of this church would in any other circumstance amount to coercive control.” Shoebridge also wrote an endorsement for former member of Providence Church Liz Cameron’s recent autobiography Cult Bride: How I was brainwashed—and how I broke free (Cameron 2025) and also offered commentary in a series of media hit-pieces on the Church of Scientology’s Athena School which appeared in the Daily Telegraph in late 2025 (Sproul-Mellis 2025a, 2025b). Shoebridge’s comments, it should be highlighted, emerge from a wider history of antipathy in parts of the Australian Greens toward some minority religions—particularly the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church, whose anti-Greens pamphleteering during the mid-2000s has created a long-running enmity within elements of the Greens party at both the state and federal level.

The other politician quoted by Baker was Nick Xenophon, whose anti-Scientology crusade back in 2009–2010 earned him international attention. This was intriguing, since Xenophon has been out of federal parliament since 2017. Xenophon voiced a position which had been held by a number of anti-cult politicians going back to the 1990s when he noted that “[p]oliticians are scared and unwilling to go after the tax-free status of religions” (Baker 2024, p. 14). Indeed, as discussed below, the issue of religious tax and charity benefits, is one of the core issues being raised in the current Inquiry.

Perhaps most consequential in this regard was the fact that Assistant Minister for Competition, Charities and Treasury, Dr Andrew Leigh “declined to comment” on specific questions around charity reform but suggested that claims about the Geelong Revival Centre were “deeply concerning.” Leigh, a trained lawyer and economist who was previously an academic at the Australian National University, has been approached by the media regarding several religious groups over recent years including the Church of Scientology (see Schneiders 2021) and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (see Schneiders and Steinfort 2022). Leigh, however, has also written specifically on the positive contribution made by religious charities to Australia’s social fabric (see Leigh and Terrell 2020) and at a federal level the Albanese Labor government has so far appeared hesitant in implementing recommendations made by the Productivity Commission in 2024 regarding removal of the ‘basic religious charity’ category (Australian Government Productivity Commission 2024), an issue which has particularly vexed secularists who highlight what they consider the lack of accountability from this category of charities in terms of reporting and governance (discussed below).

Finally, Baker cited local State Australian Labor Party Member of the Legislative Assembly for the seat of Geelong Christine Couzens, who took up the concerns of her constituents with then State Attorney-General Jacelyn Symes and is one of the members of the Law and Social Issues Committee overseeing the Inquiry. It remains unclear, however, how much wider support the Inquiry has on the floor of the Victorian parliament.

From a political perspective the more important issue in recent years has been around perception regarding the influence of “cults” within politics. Insinuations about political intrigue and influence in high places are a key motif throughout the work on The Family, and over many decades, going back to the 1987 raids at Lake Eildon, there have been frequent claims voiced about cover-ups surrounding the group in high political places (see Johnston and Jones 2016). Less sinister, and more in the realm of Realpolitik, has been the growing involvement of various Pentecostal churches in Victorian State politics, in particular controversies surrounding the preselection and later election of Renee Heath to the Victorian Legislative Council. Renee Heath is the sister of Claire Heath-McIvor who has been vocal about the role City Builders church allegedly played in her sister’s electoral success (see, e.g., Kolovos 2025b). Other religious groups have been accused of political machinations in recent years, ranging from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to various Roman Catholic groups. Much less mentioned in the current Victorian Inquiry, but certainly an ongoing issue elsewhere in Australia (particularly in New South Wales) has been the renewed controversy surrounding the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church and their involvement in handing out how-to-vote cards for the Liberal Party during the 2024 federal election (Doherty 2026, pp. 18–19).

While some submissions to the Victorian Inquiry have expressed concerns about “system capture” (McIvor et al. 2025, p. 39) by “cults” this fear is largely exaggerated, but it has been utilised in recent Australian politics more as an argument to discredit party or factional rivals than as a genuine fear about “cults” being a driving force within Australian political culture. The political influence of a group like the Brethren, for example, has been minimal —though linking them to the conservative side of Australian politics has proven a successful strategy in political smear campaigns (see Doherty 2012, 2013). Similarly, it is worth noting that despite being Prime Minister from 2018 to 2022, Scott Morrison, a devout Pentecostal whose faith was often raised during his time in office, was unable to push through the Religious Discrimination Bill 2022, despite frequent claims about the intersection between his public faith and his political agenda. Indeed, like other religious groups, Pentecostal Christians have been engaging in Australian politics for decades, though their genuine policy outcomes or achievements have been few and far between (see, e.g., Austin et al. 2022). Religion and politics have always intersected in Australia and are part of the wider “sectarian strand” (Hogan 1987) which threads through Australian history—indeed, even secularist organisations like the Rationalist Society of Australia and their lobbying of politicians in favour of “coercive control” laws against “religious cults” and the removal of charitable status for religious groups are testament to how embedded these types of interest-based lobbying around the intersection of religion and public policy are in Australia more generally. This brings me to a final comment about the contemporary “cult scene” regarding economics.

4.4. Economics

Economic conditions in Australia, as they impact on “cults” in recent years, have focused on controversies which have existed in places like the United Kingdom since the 1970s, but which first emerged in Australia during the 1990s over so-called “cults” accessing tax exemptions granted to religion and to wider questions about the charitable concessions granted to religious groups in Australian law more generally (see Possamai 2018). Like other common law jurisdictions, Australia has long allowed tax exemptions for registered religious institutions from income tax, fringe benefits tax, and goods and services tax (GST). Unlike other jurisdictions, however, it has not heavily regulated its not-for-profit sector. This has caused consternation amongst secular commentators, who have long maintained the argument that because religion is something private it is not for the public benefit and therefore not charitable in the legal sense (on the various arguments here see Bussey 2020; Possamai 2018; Seabright 2024).

Charity law can, and has, played a role in the regulation of religion in a number of other common law jurisdictions, particularly in recent decades, and this has impacted directly on controversial religious groups like the Brethren (see, e.g., Doherty 2020a). Indeed, as leading Australian legal scholar Pauline Ridge observed as far back as 2011, there are risks involved in what she called the “state control of religious groups through charity law” (Ridge 2011, p. 1078). There are several ways in which charity law can, and has been, used as a way for the state to control and influence the practices of unpopular minority religious groups, and the line of questioning regarding charitable registration in the Victorian Inquiry may suggest a similar strategy is coming into play again in Australia. It is worth observing here that the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission (ACNC) did make a submission to the Victorian Inquiry in which it outlined its governance, regulation, and enforcement approaches. It also noted, however, that “when we become aware of concerns or issues relating to a charity’s governance practices or compliance with law, we will seek to work with the charity’s Responsible People to resolve those issues and any underlying causes” (Australian Charities and Not-for-profit Commission 2025, pp. 2–3).

Unlike the United Kingdom, which removed the presumption of benefit for “advancing religion,” Australian charity law reform gave the “advancement of religion” a statutory basis in the Federal Charities Act 2013. This has long been opposed by secularists. The Rationalist Society of Australia (2026), for example, highlights its objection:

Religious organisations are automatically considered charitable and given tax-exempt status for the “advancement of religion”. Religious groups are not subject to the same financial disclosure and probity obligations as other charities through the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission

(ACNC).

While this claim is only partially true (only basic religious charities are exempted from some governance and reporting requirements), it highlights a much longer running set of arguments put forward by secular anti-cult writers like Wallace (2007) and Mutch (2004), who suggest that “cults” abuse taxation and charity laws and should have these privileges stripped. While there have been attempts to use charity law as a means of attacking unpopular religious groups overseas, there are manifold legal complications, not to mention significant potential negative consequences for law-abiding religious charities which deliver a significant amount of the social welfare in Australia. This has not, however, prevented anti-cult groups from attempting to encourage this strategy against various groups—for example Jehovah’s Witnesses (see Browne 2017)—and the unprecedent public announcement in early 2026 by the ACNC that it is investigating Shincheonji’s Melbourne branch suggests that this approach may again be utilised more broadly in the near future (Australian Charities and Not-for-profit Commission 2026).

5. Conclusions

The “cult scene” in any society is constantly in flux, as any number of minority religions and their opponents vie for social capital and mobilise their resources in a wider religious marketplace. At any time, there will be various drivers which influence these social interactions, and as intimated earlier in this article, I will conclude by highlighting what I believe are the three most significant drivers of this so-called “cults crisis” which have helped precipitate the current Victorian Inquiry.

First is the emergence of a younger generation of media-savvy anti-cult activists, comprising journalists, content creators, and (primarily) SGA former members. While previous “cult controversies” in Australia have featured anti-cult groups as one group of claims-makers, these groups were unable to achieve the same level of media saturation across platforms as this new generation. The current “cults crisis” is marked by its significant social media footprint. While the number of these activists is not large, their media and social media impact has been, to date, considerable, and in sociological terms they have arguably successfully asserted ownership of the “cult problem” within the Australian public sphere.

Whether, however, this group can maintain momentum over a longer period is uncertain. At present there are clearly younger journalists who are willing to platform this group of “cult survivors.” However, it is important to bear in mind Beckford’s (1999, p. 105) important observation that, “[c]ult controversies cannot be properly understood unless the symbiotic relationship between the anti-cult groups and journalists is taken into account.” Should media stop platforming and amplifying the anti-cult ideological agenda of these individuals and groups, then it is unlikely that they are of a sufficient size to attract public attention, let alone wider public sympathy. Indeed, there is a very real question here as to whether the recent explosion of media coverage is just symptomatic of new media consumption trends or indicative of a genuine grassroots movement. Is the “cults crisis” actually a case of the medium being the message? Only time and further analysis can answer this question.

Second, and perhaps most important, is the fact that the current “cults crisis” is occurring in an arguably more receptive socio-political and legal context in which the “cult problem” has converged with wider societal concerns around domestic and family violence. This is unsurprising, and recent international trends in the larger anti-cult movement gesturing in this direction are well documented (see Sessions and Doherty 2021). As British anti-cult writer Dubrow-Marshall (2024, p. 96) observed in a recent chapter, the word “cult” itself “provides a clarion call for victims as a deliberately pejorative term which is used with the intention to call out systemic abuse and coercion in groups, organizations and in societies.” Dubrow-Marshall goes on to note how the language around “cults” has come to be utilised “in a similar way” to “calling out specific forms of harassment, bullying, and sexual assault or rape” and “can highlight specific abuses to an individual.” As a long-time participant in the wider anti-cult movement, Dubrow-Marshall’s observations here are important and points to a developing trend in Australia.

The current Australian “cults controversy” has coincided not only with wider international development like the #MeToo movement, but also with a more Australia-specific discussion around violence against women which has already had considerable impacts in the areas of law reform, most notably the introduction of coercive control laws in both New South Wales and Queensland. What is significant in this context is that “cult survivors,” adopting the language of victim-survivors, have sought to emulate a similar social role to successful Australian “public survivors” of sexual violence like Grace Tame and Rosie Battie, who have established major public profiles through a combination political advocacy, media engagement, and legal participation (see O’Neill et al. 2025). Ally journalists, moreover, have also entered the fray in platforming and amplifying these voices, most notably Sarah Steel, whose specific comparison of the “cult problem” to “coercive control” has been further magnified by the sectors of the Australian media, particularly on the ABC, who have run numerous segments featuring Steel promoting her specific, and arguably idiosyncratic, understanding of “coercive control” as it applies to “cults” (see, e.g., Leake 2022).

The current “cults controversy” has come at a time when social media activism, like that of #MeToo and #ChurchToo movements, has already had a significant impact in Australia (see, e.g., Hill 2019, 2021, 2025) and when those identifying as victim-survivors of any form of abuse are far more likely to receive a receptive hearing. Various government inquiries into different forms of abuse in recent decades, moreover, have sensitised Australian public more generally to the existence of abuse within both religious and secular contexts. These inquiries have provided something of a template for “cult survivors” to follow, a point not missed by the authors of the Beyond Belief submission quoted earlier.

In this contemporary atmosphere where victims are listened to, and their allegations taken seriously, these “cult survivors” have both appropriated—and been attributed by the Victorian Inquiry—the status of victim-survivors, with the particular form of social capital that potentially brings in contemporary Australia. Whereas in previous decades victimology was often contested (see, e.g., Holstein and Miller 1990; Jenness 1995a, 1995b), contemporary Australia cult survivors have “spoken out” during a time where that contestation has proven unnecessary. Indeed, what is interesting is how uncontested this status has been, despite significant challenges, both legal and conceptual, around trying to link up the “cult problem” with the pre-existing discussions around domestic and family violence and especially around coercive control, and the problematic ways in which this has often been done by anti-cult writers (for some examples of this, see esp. Sessions and Doherty 2021, pp. 177–82).

What appears to be happening here is a case of what sociologist Best (1990, pp. 65–86) called “domain expansion,” which historically revolves around a process of “[p]iggybacking new claims upon established social problems” and thereby increasing “the chances that the new claims will receive validation” (Best 1990, p. 82). How this “domain expansion” has taken place, and its ultimate outcome, will need to be left to a future analysis. The problem here will not be, however, whether “cult survivors” are seen as victim-survivors, but rather the wider legal and social question of whether coercive control laws are the right avenue for addressing the “cult problem”—or spiritual abuse more generally (see esp. Introvigne et al. 2026)—in an Australia context, particularly given the manifold legal problems around pre-existing coercive control laws in other Australian states and overseas jurisdictions (see esp. Newton 2023; Wangmann 2024). However, it would seem inadvisable for the Victorian Inquiry to pursue risky legal reforms around an untried (and empirically unsupported) understanding of “group-based coercive control” with dubious roots in the anti-cult movement, not least amid pre-existing concerns in other sectors of the community—in particular amongst Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander advocates—about the desirability of such laws and their potential to negatively impact already minoritised groups (see, e.g., Australian Women Against Violence Alliance 2021; Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service 2022).

A final, and somewhat neglected aspect, of this so-called “cults crisis” may ultimately be the most significant change in Australia’s contemporary “cult scene” from previous decades, but also what might ultimately prove to be the Achilles’ heel of the Victorian Inquiry. The new generation of cult awareness activists have broadened the discursive parameters of what is classified as a “cult” in contemporary Australia to such a degree that it has encompassed an ever-widening number of religious groups. In this process, numerous churches have been named either in submissions or hearings of the Inquiry itself and what has become very clear is that the “cult” label has been understood in such a broad way as to encompass almost any group of which the labeller does not approve. Historically, this expansionist approach has rarely proven successful, as Shupe and Darnell (2006, p. 244) observed in their important history of the American anti-cult movement, “aggressive expansion of the number of targeted groups to oppose is ultimately self-defeating.”

In fact, what I suggest, is that what many among this new generation of anti-cult activists are primarily reacting against are not groups historically denominated as “cults”—though some of these groups have obviously been mentioned during the Inquiry—but socially and politically conservative Christian churches. Indeed, many of these SGA anti-cult activists are concerned about negative experiences of “purity culture,” the stigmatisation of LGBTQIA+ people, hypocrisy over the exposed malfeasance of pastors, and what they view as the unholy marriage of evangelicalism and conservative politics. These “cult survivors” are, in fact, part of the wider social movement of exvangelicals (Bullivant 2022) and disaffected former Pentecostal Christians (see, e.g., Bohr and Hughes 2021)—a phenomenon commonly known in wider Christian circles as Pentecostalism’s “large back door.”

Women and LGBTQIA+ people have often borne the brunt of these negative features found in some evangelical and Pentecostal subcultures (and sectors of other churches) (see, e.g., Hollier 2024), and among those SGAs who were raised in this atmosphere and who have appeared before the Inquiry the indignation is palpable. For this group, anti-cult rhetoric has functioned in the way described by Dubrow-Marshall and has been an empowering way to signal to the wider world what they consider the harmful aspects of their former religious identities, but it paradoxically might also prove counterproductive in achieving their aims.

While Christian lobbyists who have appeared before the Inquiry appear to tacitly support actions against some unpopular groups they consider “cults”—like Shincheonji or the Church of Almighty God—they also recognise, as do some of the older anti-cult groups like CIFS and CCA, that “group-based coercive control” laws would be fraught with legal problems and could very easily catch unintended groups in their orbit if not carefully framed. This has brought about a situation where a significant body of mainstream religious groups have expressed concerns about the direction of the Inquiry and its threat to religious liberty. Unlike the traditional “cults,” some of these churches do have actual political and significant financial clout and it is possible that they will exercise both if the Victorian Parliament pursues laws which churches perceive may impinge on their ability to practice their religion freely.