Cult Favorite

Once upon a time, a young reporter named Jerry Springer made his way to Chicago with the dream of launching a talk show that allowed regular people to tell their stories. On his journey, he met a tabloid-trained producer, who turned the hopeful tv host into the Ratings King and staged increasingly dramatic antics at court through a daytime talk show that was called brilliant by some and an abomination by others. These included a fist-fight involving a klansman and a man who married his horse, but then one day, there was a murder. Some decades later, two intrepid scholars would go on a quest to learn more about this fraught empire after they found an archive entitled Fights, Camera, Action! on Netflix. They were armed only with questions like: When do people get annoyed when something is “fake,” and when are they happy to suspend disbelief? Whose stories get told and how? Where do exploitation and responsibility start and stop? And just what *was* the show Merinda’s middle school class visited?? What will become of our adventurers? Tune in and find out.

Links:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/08/arts/television/jerry-springer-netflix-documentary-5-takeaways.html

“Good Sex as Food for the Revolution” by Dr. Candice Nicole Hargons via Emily Nagoski’s Substack

https://substack.com/inbox/post/155927881

“Tennessean by Birth” poem by Nikki Giovanni

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhPUvucdGvk

Ross Benes’s book 1999: The Year Low Culture Conquered America and Kickstarted Our Bizarre Times (out April 2025)

https://kansaspress.ku.edu/9780700638574/

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

Theme music produced with Udio.

Delving into the term “cult” means looking at unlikely case studies. This week we talk about Netflix documentary OneTaste: Orgasm, Inc. —the story of boss babe Nicole Daedone, who made big business out of personal pleasure. Hers is a love story between capitalism and heteropatriarchy, with supporting roles from yoga, meditation, sexual awakening, exploitative profiteering, and coercion. Questions abound, including but not limited to: What happens to a cultural narrative when it’s rendered “religious”? When do scholars get interviewed, and when do they not? What kinds of conditions would foreclose a company like OneTaste from succeeding in the first place? When is exploitation a story people pay attention to, and when is it just a regular day at the office? Come for the answers, stay for the conversational bookends. Merinda gives a reading! Mike learns what mycology is! And remember, kids, context always shapes the stuff we call special.

Links:

2009 NY Times article on Daedone and OneTaste:https://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/fashion/15commune.html

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

Theme music produced with Udio.

Mike and Merinda are back in 2025 to discuss one of the most popular cult documentaries of 2024. Breath of Fire, streaming on Max, tells the story of Kundalini yoga, Yogi Bhajan and Guru Jagat. It's a story of an American counter-cultural movement that turned into a conspiritualist wellness business. Along the way we discuss toner scams, millennial audiences, and Robin Hood. It's good to be back!

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

Theme music produced with Udio.

Happy merry holly jolly, everyone! It’s our season finale, and we have a dubious gift for you! Holiday movies already have the magic market cornered, so we’re here to offer balance by demystifying some things that might otherwise seem to fly around in the ethers with Santa’s sleigh. Spoiler alert: they’re to do with religion! While Merinda’s taste in holiday horror tracks toward the 1974 Black Christmas movie, Mike serves up some this year with How to Become a Cult Leader—the 2023 Netflix series that greets religious minority groups with snark and disdain. Sit back and listen to the feelings fly, friends! What is it about

“religion” that tends to flatten structural inquiry? When are we willing to be reflective about our own complicity with exploitative systems and when are we not? What is it about the us/them dichotomy that gives a bear hug to our worst impulses? And how do other binaries like private/public and sacred/profane get in on that action? Why is it so much harder to give the reality media treatment to religion than to something like love? Merinda is incredulous and tries not to swear too much. Mike provides insights about authenticity claims. Ghosts of episodes past (particularly, casting callbacks and young-Mike lore) appear! We reflect on what we’ve learned over the last few months and gear up for a long

While Merinda was too bored with heteronormative relational projections and too busy with conferencing to write a description for our conversation about Escaping Twin Flames (sorrrryyyyyy! But go listen anyway, folx—it's a doozy), here’s wishing your ears a happy Monday with our latest episode on Raël: The Alien Prophet (2024). Spreading the message of the Elohim—an extraterrestrial species they believe to be responsible for creating human life on Earth—Raëlians got their start in France in the 1970s, started a lab called Clonaid, spoke before the U.S. Congress, and now boast an international movement. Vehicular modes of transport in this episode include not only spaceships but also Mike’s Hot Take Express! We hop aboard the latter to talk craft, genre, and the clichés and expectations attending them. What does free love have to do with human cloning? Why are claims about human exceptionalism so pervasive? How is a cult documentary like a sonnet? And does the Hot Take Express have a good snack cart? Listen and find answers to all but one of those questions.

Links:

Susan J. Palmer, Aliens Adored: Raël’s UFO Religion (2004). https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/bucknell/aliens-adored/9780813534763/

Follow us on socials at @cultfavoritepod.

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

Theme music produced with Udio.

Links:

Interview with the co-creators: https://awardsradar.com/2024/06/24/interview-escaping-twin-flames-co-creators-can-attest-to-the-courage-of-cult-survivors/

Follow us on all the socials at @cultfavoritepod.

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

Theme music produced with Udio.

What can possibly make sense of company founders’ forgetting their own address in a deposition, doling out sex advice for retailers, and reading from the Book of Mormon at leadership retreats? This week, we’re going shopping! Don’t get distracted by the racks of leggings and maxi skirts, though: we’re looking for answers, using the promo code offered by LuLaRich. LuLaRoe is the store, but the proverbial mall is MLMs, and that mall is shaped like a pyramid. It’s easy to get lost in there, so we’ll take you through it, highlighting corporate appeals to individualism, capitalist aesthetics, and the ways that both those things prey especially upon women. As we wind our way through mall-walkers, Mike plays some very impressive word jenga, Merinda doesn’t know whether someone gets “gaslit” or “gaslighted” (she goes with the latter), and they learn that they are both pro-candy corn. Beware of grifters and their glower of positive thinking, folx. If we get separated, just meet back at the food court, and we’ll buy you an Orange Julius.

Links:

Interview with Sianne Ngai- https://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/43/jasper_ngai.php

Interview with producers: https://deadline.com/2022/04/lularich-jenner-furst-julia-willoughby-nason-blye-faust-cori-shepherd-stern-interview-contenders-tv-1235008620/

This American Life episode: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/543/wake-up-now

Barbara Ehrenreich's 2009 book Bright-sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780312658854/brightsided

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

Theme music produced with Udio.

What’s that...? You thought Led Zeppelin’s appeal was to do with Robert Plant’s soaring vocals and bodacious hair? Well. You clearly haven’t listened to their lyrics backwards. Come with us—if you dare—into the Haunted House of Rock Music [cue thunder crashes and villain laughter]. We’re piling into Marty McFly’s DeLorean time machine and traveling back to 1989 to watch Hell’s Bells: The Dangers of Rock ‘n’ Roll. It’s what’s playing in the background at a Halloween party thrown by the Satanic Panic, a new moral majority, parental advisory labels on “porn rock,” and general fears about teenagers enjoying themselves. Mike gets groovy with a Sandi Patty deep cut and a Grateful Dead jam session, while Merinda stands by the punch bowl muttering surly critiques about failures in textual analysis. What do our fears (and the ways we try to manage them) say about us? What do code-cracking and spreading conspiracy theories have in common? And what makes metaphors a trick for some and a treat for others? We have lotsa thoughts and zero jump scares. Listen and lurch!

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

Theme music produced with Udio.

Why would Tarzan leave Manhattan for Brentwood, TN? Find out as we take a tour of the Remnant Fellowship Church by way of the HBO/Max documentary The Way Down: God, Greed, and the Cult of Gwen Shamblin. Conversational topics include but are not limited to: 1980s diet culture, patriarchy in conservative American Protestantism, gender politics and anti-fat bias, and what gets normalized when religious groups are said to warp/twist/exploit a certain text or tradition. Mike drops some personal lore about parenting workshops, Merinda explains why she doesn’t like an exceptionalism narrative, and both agree that it’s annoying when gawking at big hair stands in for critiquing capitalist tax codes. PSA: Individual experiences are always wrapped up in and reflective of structural realities, everybody. Cult favorites include the amazing Aubrey Gordon. Less explicitly, we seem also to love accidental segues and a lack of transitions! Join us and follow wherever you listen to things.

Follow us on all the socials at @cultfavoritepod. 

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

Theme music produced with Udio

This week, we get a first-person account of the Buddhafield from someone who had been a member of the group for 22 years. Ballet, speedos, fruit carving, 80s-era disillusionment, and Rosemary’s Baby all make appearances. Mike questions reality, Merinda gets mad at the filmmaker’s mother, and we both think about different kinds/degrees of performance. Is confrontation a passable substitute for closure? Is “charisma” just patriarchy with a facelift? Join us as we discuss Holy Hell. And keep sending us feedback and film recs! We love hearing from you.

Links:

Christopher Breu, In Defense of Sex: Nonbinary Embodiment and Desire https://www.fordhampress.com/9781531508777/in-defense-of-sex/

Follow us on Instagram and X at @cultfavoritepod.

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

Theme music produced with Udio.