In the face of the increasingly variegated ideological landscape of contemporary America, cults have become the focus of public controversy

A: The Nature and Study of Cults; One: The Scientific Study of Religion? You Must Be Joking!; Two: Definitions of Cult: From Sociological-Technical to Popular-Negative; Three: Three Types of New Religious Movements; B: The Historical and Sociological Context of Cults; Four: A Time when Mountains were Moving; Five: The New Religions: Demodernization and the Protest Against Modernity; Six: Secularization, Revival, and Cult Formation; C: Who Joins New Religious Movements and Why?; Seven: The Role of Deprivation in the Origin and Evolution of Religious Groups; Eight: On Becoming a World-Saver: A Theory of Conversion to a Deviant Perspective; Nine: The Joiners; D: The Coercive Conversion Controversy; Ten: The Seduction Syndrome; Eleven: A Critique of "Brainwashing" Claims About New Religious Movements; Twelve: Clinical and Personality Assessment of Participants in New Religions; E: The Satanism Scare; Thirteen: The Construction of Satanism as a Social Problem in Canada; Fourteen: Magical Therapy: An Anthropological Investigation of Contemporary Satanism; Fifteen: Teenage Satanism as Oppositional Youth Subculture; F: Violence and New Religious Movements; Sixteen: Sects and Violence: Factors Enhancing the Volatility of Marginal Religious Movements; Seventeen: The Apocalypse at Jonestown; Eighteen: Cult Extremism: The Reduction of Normative Dissonance; G: The Cultural Significance of New Religious Movements; Nineteen: Women's 'Cocoon Work' in New Religious Movements: Sexual Experimentation and Feminine Rites of Passage; Twenty: The New Age Movement and the Pentecostal/Charismatic Revival: Distinct Yet Parallel Phases of a Fourth Great Awakening?; Twenty-One: Cultural Consequences of Cults; Appendix: Cults and the Internet; Twenty-Two: NRMS, the ACM, and the WWW: A Guide for Beginners