Cult Favorite

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, fus...

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,...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

We’ve made it to our 25th episode! In all the excitement, Merinda forgets her computer, and Mike swoons over his latest thrift store find. But we do manage to talk about new Max documentary Cult of Fear: Asaram Bapu. The story of a guru-turned-prisoner is also a story about evolutions in the Indian legal system and about the relationships between religious and political power. As ever, questions a...

This week, we’re staying in the 90s and are still talking about abuses of power that turned into tv spectacle. Performances of masculinity continue to abound, but gone are WWE’s costumes and Springer’s staged fights. The skirmishes in this case appear within federal agencies and their approaches to an insulated religious group. Join us as we discuss Waco: American Apocalypse (2023), which details...

This week is a treat for Mike, a feat for Merinda. We’re extending our stay in the ‘90s, taking a day trip to the entertainment world o’ wrestling. But, not unlike enlightenment, entertainment can cozy up to exploitation pretty quickly. This is what happens in Netflix’s Mr. McMahon, which tells the story of a lonely billionaire’s quest to gain approval from his father by building the WWE empire. W...

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 abomina...

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...

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 b...

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 Chr...

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 b...

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 prov...

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 o...

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 religio...

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 clos...

What can possibly make sense of a billion-year contract or a billion-page menu? We're on the case, with a conversation that ranges from Scientology’s Sea Org to The Cheesecake Factory’s dizzying array of food options. This week, we’re talking about Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief. Cameos include (but are not limited to): Rock Hudson, Majorie Cameron, John Travolta, Aleister Crowl...

This week, we go online and off the grid to The Garden, where video posts began a debate over whether the group is a commune or a cult. But who ultimately decides? What criteria do they use? And what (if anything) is gained by the question in the first place? We discuss these matters and more, learning along the way a few things about how subsistence and social formation converge/collide. So come...

This week, Mike convinced Merinda to watch Secret Lives of Mormon Wives! Luckily, docu-soaps offer a neato middle ground between documentaries and reality tv. We talk genre, gender, sexuality, power, audiences, tradwives, the capital of “cute,” and Mormon media. Merinda quotes people she admires. She also describes her Very Strong Feelings about the tendency to reduce/oversimplify complex worlds i...

This week, the long and winding road to Oregon presents even more paths. We make pit stops in Germany, Australia, and India, ultimately landing on a back road in the Deep South for some boiled peanuts. Along the way, we talk about relationships and betrayals—big hopes, broken hearts, and new beginnings. In the end, the Rajneeshees lose their leader but not their cause, a few people spend some year...

The Netflix documentary Wild, Wild, Country tells the story of Rajneeshpuram, a commune founded by the Indian guru Shri Bhagwan Rajneesh in Oregon in 1981. The followers turned a 60,000 acre ranch in central Oregon into their own spiritual commune. Led by Bhagwan's personal secretary, Ma Anand Sheela, the Rajneeshees eventually took over the government of nearby town of Antelope, Oregon and it...

On one level, the HBO documentary Brandy Hellville & the Cult of Fast Fashion is about the Brandy Melville brand, the messed-up social norms it relies on and perpetuates, and the teenage girls it harms. On another level, though, it’s also about fast fashion as a phenomenon—with Brandy Melville as just one example of a much bigger machine and structural reality. In exploring Brandy Melville, th...