“Shadow Takes Form”: Brainwashing and Government Religion in the Cold War

ABSTRACT: Despite their best corrective efforts, new religions scholars continue to wrestle with popular assumptions about cult brainwashing. Those attempting to loosen the hold of this media fixture have often traced its evolution from a pseudoscientific theory of political conversion born of Cold War fears of Chinese Communist indoctrination. This article revisits the Cold War-era formulation of brainwashing, highlighting Orientalist tropes and motifs of evil magic, to shed new light on the cultural legacies that inhere in the more contemporary discourse on brainwashing in new religious movements. Through a close examination of both public and classified Cold War-era documents, this article demonstrates that the concept of brainwashing was not merely an issue of secular political concern later appropriated in anticult discourse, but rather a notion conceived in and through the rhetoric and conceptual structures of religion.