Mystics and Messiahs

Mystics and Messiahs

Cover
Author	Philip Jenkins
Language	English
Subject	Cults
Publisher	Oxford University Press
Publication date	2000
Pages	294
ISBN	0-19-512744-7
OCLC	41231449
Dewey Decimal	200'.973
LC Class	BL2525 .J46 2000

Mystics and Messiahs: Cults and New Religions in American History is a 2000 nonfiction book by historian of religion Philip Jenkins. It was published by Oxford University Press.^[1] The book argues that the anti-cult movement in America starting in the 1970s extends farther back in American history to at least the seventeenth century. Nineteenth-century new religious movements like the Shakers, Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, Spiritualism, Christian Science, etc. had countermovements that resembled recent anti-cult movements. Anti-cult rhetoric, like the brainwashing thesis, was generated in the nineteenth century and later revived during the Cold War. Jenkins identified a cycle of cult resurgence and anti-cult reaction throughout US history, and he predicted that in 2010 there would be a cult resurgence typified by that cycle.