There’s a new season of Shiny Happy People out now, and Cult Favorite is on the case with some unsolicited advice. Do: process dad issues. Don’t: crack eggs over your head for tuition money or others’ sport. Season 2 of the series focuses on Teen Mania, an evangelical youth phenomenon spearheaded for thirty-ish years by Ron Luce (himself stylized by way of motorcycles, loud voices, and evangelizing at drive-thrus). Youth culture has always scared grownups, and the latter have always strategized about how to corral the former. Enter Honor Academy, wherein ambitious teens volunteered via a lifetime commitment to serve on the frontlines in an ostensible battle between good and evil. What they came to realize, however, is that serving God and country also involved unpaid labor, telemarketing, crawling through trenches, and carrying a heavy cross in the middle of nowhere sans food/shelter/map. We talk about the rise and fall of the program, its ideological framework, and its relationship to political power. Remember, everybody: social structures always shape our own senses of self! And eggs are best enjoyed as a protein boost rather than as a humiliation device.

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Production assistance from the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama.

Theme music produced with Udio

Would you like a methodology for optimizing or enhancing human experience and behavior? Would you like a vagueness-translator to make that question make sense? Well, have we got an episode for you! We’re finally talking about The Vow (season 1), a documentary series about NXIVM—a MLM with an acronym as confusing as its mission. We hit the highlights about what the group got up to and why leader Keith Raniere is now serving a 120-year prison sentence. More than that, though, we talk about how/why universalizing rhetoric and individualist ethics can make for such a compelling and explosive combo. We also think through some of the ways the doc’s production lands, and we ask how it might look different if the former and current members of the collective weren’t rich. Come for Catherine Oxenberg’s phone call to a princess, asking her to get the now king of England to put her in direct contact with the Dalai Lama. Stay for the critical thinking!

Links:

NYT reporter Barry Meier reviews The Vow and Seduced: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/27/arts/television/nxivm-the-vow-seduced-keith-raniere.html

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Production assistance from the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama.

Theme music produced with Udio.

For the last stop of our summer road trip, we head to Rome, NY, where a retired Air Force base closed out the millennium by playing host to mosh pits, sexual assault, avoidable death, raw sewage, and fire. That’s right, campers, we’re talking about Woodstock 99: Peace, Love, and Rage (HBO/Max, 2021). Pack some critical thinking along with your fresh water because questions about how quickly/easily true horrors can become normalized are vital to ask right now. On the main stage, we’re playing a few of the hits: the making and marketing of a collective, the consequences of ignoring systemic issues, the curation of blame, and the strategies of subsequent history-telling. On the second stage, there’ll be appearances including but not limited to: moral panics embedded in generational logic, gender scripts/expectations, machinations of social cohesion, and Merinda’s distaste for nu metal.

Links:

Gina Arnold, Half a Million Strong: Crowds in Power from Woodstock to Coachella ⁠https://uipress.uiowa.edu/books/half-million-strong

Demographics of Jan 6 attackers: https://www.shu.edu/news/a-demographic-and-legal-profile-of-january-6-prosecutions.html

Texas Death Breathes New Life Into Professional Wrestling by Colette Arrand

https://vgbees.com/texas-death-breathes-new-life-into-professional-wrestling/?ref=bigeggwrestling.com

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Production assistance from the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama.

Theme music produced with Udio.

This week we’re talking about sports celebrity, open secrets, and what people are willing to ignore in the name of loyal fandom. Join us for some conversational tailgating as we discuss Netflix’s Untold: The Fall of Favre (2025). A small town hero who became a football legend in his own time, Brett Favre is known by most for his time as a superstar quarterback in the NFL. Sports media personality Jenn Sterger alleges, though, that she knew him as a dude who unsolicitedly sexted her. Meanwhile, the state of Mississippi knows him as the sports star who diverted millions of dollars from welfare funds for use in pet projects. Spoiler alert: a story about a charismatic leader is yet again a story about abuses of power. In such a story, which elements get what amount of time/attention and why? What boundaries get drawn around which kinds of behavior? And what’s with the impulse to compare sports and religion? Listen in for thoughts from two of your biggest fans.

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Production assistance from the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama.

Theme music produced with Udio.

Roll up your sleeping bags and grab a flashlight because Cult Favorite is going to camp! Next stop on our summer road trip is the 2006 doc Jesus Camp, which follows a few kids as they attend the Kids on Fire School of Ministry. Led by Becky Fischer, the charismatic camp fuses God and country, drawing portraits of “us” and “them” with primary colors of red, white, and blue. The film, meanwhile, fuses different branches of evangelicalism and plops them squarely into rural America in its own process of stacking up insiders and outsiders. The concept of spiritual warfare involves skirmishes over classification, so we think through some that show up in the film re: relationships and distinctions posed between learning/indoctrination; religion/culture; belief/politics. The rhetoric and rituals reflected by these categories also shape them, so let’s make sure to pack some critical thinking skills along with our bug spray. We also kindly ask that no one forgets s’mores stuff, plz and thx.

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Production assistance from the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama.

Theme music produced with Udio.

What happens when someone with A Big Idea makes even bigger promises but fails to attend to logistical tasks and/or infrastructure? We’re sticking with our summer theme by telling the story of a beach music festival for the ultra-elite that became a trending trainwreck on social media. Charismatic entrepreneur + unquestioning yes-people + exploited local staff = a vacation that dreams (nightmares, specifically) are made of. That’s right, we’re going to Fyre Fest, and we want you to come along! We can’t promise comfortable accommodations, but we do promise insightful analysis about wealth, access, and influence in the digital age.

Bikram Choudhury claimed to heal President Nixon's thrombosis and developed his own form of yoga that became an international brand. The brash, tale-telling, foul-mouthed yoga teacher built an empire around his teacher training courses. But he was also a predator and abuser. Where did Brikram yoga come from? (Spoiler: it's a long story about colonialism in India) Why do we think physical training requires verbal abuse? Is Bikra, the Vince McMahon of yoga? We'll answer all of these questions and more this week!

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Production assistance from the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama.

Theme music produced with Udio.

Pull up a chair or twenty, and join us for a conversation about Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets (2023). Made famous in the mainstream for their TLC reality show 19 Kids and Counting, Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar presented a very specific image of a very large family within the “Quiverfull” movement whose children were reliably obedient and mild-mannered. Behind the literal and figurative scenes, however, the line between authority and abuse was often a blurry one, both for the family and for the Institute in Basic Life Principles, whose teachings were reflected by the Duggars at every turn. Merinda has logistical questions about big families and returns to the mundane workings of power. Mike watches cartoons and muses about strategies within group mobilization. As always, we think together about how/when/why “cult” rhetoric appears, who wields it, and what its effects are. #cultfavorite #duggars #studyreligion

Links:

Danielle Lindemann, True Story: What Reality TV Says about Us (2022) https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374720964/truestory/

Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (1991)

https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300050608/the-democratization-of-american-christianity/

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Production assistance from the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama.

Theme music produced with Udio.

This week, we’re talking about Chaos: The Manson Murders (Netflix, 2025). Most stories about Charles Manson depict him as a special brand of villain: a personification of evil incarnate, a manipulative mastermind who lured vulnerable hippies to their murderous doom, a sociopath who looked for hidden meanings in Beatles’ lyrics and foretold an apocalyptic race war. In this documentary’s treatment, investigative reporter Tom O’Neill presents Manson as a CIA pawn who learned his mind-control techniques from his own ostensible time in the covert MKUltra program. Our conversation doesn’t try to get to the truth of the matter. Instead, we discuss how and why people turn to exceptionalism narratives to make sense of the mundane. In the process, we learn that Mike’s never seen The Manchurian Candidate or Rosemary’s Baby! So send us your classic movie recommendations as we try to get him caught up to speed.

Links:

Celisia Stanton’s Truer Crime podcast episodes on the Manson murders: https://truercrimepodcast.com/manson-pt-1/

If the ingredients of something called a “cult” include a charismatic figure and unquestioning followers, the phenomenon of “Kai the Hitchhiker” helps us think about what happens when the power dynamic between those elements is inverted. Famous for the local news interview that launched a thousand memes, Kai was an unlikely hero whose lowkey charm saw people clamoring to make him a late-night and reality tv star. What do people offer and, alternatively, ignore when we want to see a particular story play out in a way that satisfies us? How do we respond when someone doesn’t follow our social scripts about wealth and power? What stories do we tell retroactively to make it make sense? What do we expect of someone deemed charismatic, and what does that tell us about ourselves? We explore these questions and others, like: will we ever get the video working for this podcast? Hang in as we keep trying, dear listeners!

Merinda's Cult Favorite:

Hanif Abdurraqib’s “To Chan Marshall: A Letter to Cat Power” (in season 2 of the Lost Notes podcast); then his own examination of musical moments and figures in 1980 for the 3rd season (the episode that reckons with the deaths of John Lennon and Darby Crash [lead singer of punk band Germs] is so good). Both are examples of attending to context with empathy, which is one of his trademarks and which siiiiiiiigh, thank you.

Mike's Cult Favorite:

“I Don’t Like Who I Was Then” by The Wonder Years

As an undermatured 40 year old recovering emo kid, a song where a dude sings about genuinely tryingto be a better person with the lyric “Like I'm working babyface, Out of Mid-South in the eighties, I kept a blade hidden in my wrist tape” just hits me right in the heart.

Follow us on the socials at @cultfavoritepod.

Production assistance from the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama.

Theme music produced with Udio.