Dangerous Minds: Brainwashing Accusations, Affect, and Criminality

ABSTRACT: Most new religions scholars agree that what is termed “brainwashing” is not an effective technique of mental manipulation. Rather, they argue that brainwashing is an accusation levied to set apart religious movements, their members, and leaders as being illegitimate. This article excavates the affective and emotional history of brainwashing accusations in order to understand better the social control work done by such accusations. Attention to brainwashing accusations’ affective and emotional undercurrents reveals that brainwashing accusations do not simply mark movements and individuals negatively at the level of discourse: they create felt hierarchies of social difference that inspire visceral exclusionary or repressive impulses. This analysis suggests that the power brainwashing accusations have to reorganize social space and relations therein precludes analytical usefulness of the term brainwashing in the study of religions.