Against historians of religion who have argued that “cult” is just a term for a religion that people do not like, this article argues that “cult” has historical definitions in addition to its normative dimensions. The term’s meaning as a group that “brainwashes” stems in part from the post–World War II rise of groups that blend religion and recovery, and which are promoted by the American judicial system and federal dollars. Synanon, a group that originated the American model of a drug treatment center, allows us a unique entry point into this reassessment. Synanon argued that addiction, as just one of many “life-controlling issues,” required mutual discipline and containment. The article affirms members’ and critics’ description of the group as a cult that incarcerated its members and designed rituals to hurt them. Because of Synanon’s unique relationship to state-sponsored drug rehab, these conditions are not unique to the group. Further, the author’s affirmation of her subjects’ language cannot be separated from the normative valence of “cult.” Counter to the arguments of scholars such as J.Z. Smith, David Chidester, and Robert Orsi, scholars need to do more than describe when religions hurt people. We can also, through historical work, name when religion is designed to abuse, incarcerate, and experiment on people.

This article focuses on what may very well be the most popular text about cognitive disability in US American history. Released in 1953, Angel Unaware told the story of Hollywood stars Dale Evans’ and Roy Rogers’s experiences raising a young daughter who had been diagnosed at birth with what her mother referred to as an “appalling handicap” (what would later be labeled Down Syndrome). Situating this work and its reception within existing scholarship on postwar religion in the United States, this essay offers a novel interpretation of positive-thinking Christianity by showing how its grammars inspired and underwrote a nascent politics of disability for parents of “exceptional” children and their allies. In doing so, it not only underscores how religion has shaped notions of human difference in US American culture but also identifies disability as a crucial and heretofore neglected site of American religion making.

American Jewish writers Mary Antin and Jessie Sampter met as teenagers in 1899. Throughout the next four decades, they wrote letters and visited each other, discussing literature, politics, and life. Independently, both women achieved some professional success. Antin’s autobiography, The Promised Land, launched her to national fame, before she withdrew from public life to focus on religious pursuits. Sampter supported Zionist efforts from the United States, then moved to Palestine. Both women experimented with religious thought and intentional communities. Both women were disabled: Antin struggled with her mental and physical health; Sampter also struggled with mental health and had post-polio syndrome.

Drawing on Antin and Sampter’s correspondence with each other and with others, this article argues that their friendship was a crucial part of their subjectivity, their intellectual development, and their religious creativity. Intimacy and relationality were not merely supplementary to the real work of solitary thinkers but key for these women’s intellectual and spiritual development. In studying Antin and Sampter’s friendship, we suggest that studying disabled thinkers provides a lens for all significant friendships, in which each partner admits and permits vulnerability and each brings what they can. Their relationship points us to the importance of analyzing how bodies and vulnerability work in all friendships, and how the interdependence of non-romantic friendships can be essential to women’s creative work as religious thinkers and practitioners. Antin and Sampter’s friendship also demonstrates how religious thought happens within relationships, rather than being solely created by an autonomous, isolated subject.

In the first decades of the twentieth century, several same-sex couples populated the professional workforce of the Young Women’s Christian Association of the USA (YWCA), one of the largest and most influential US women’s organizations. At the same time, discourses of medicine and law hardened around binary categories of sexual identity, giving rise to the regulation of homosexuality as a pathology and crime. Contesting assumptions that Christianity has historically served to suppress and punish same-sex romance and sexuality, this article investigates how middle-class white women employed by the national administration of the YWCA carved out an institutional space that was at once welcoming to female couples and deeply dedicated to Protestant faith traditions. While the ongoing influence of nineteenth-century ideals of homosocial romantic friendship had considerable influence on this space, an inquiry into the work of the YWCA theologian Winnifred Wygal reveals the ways in which liberal Christianity could be used to authorize, rather than prohibit, love between women in the face of modern frameworks of sexual identity.