Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism

The usual way to talk about cults is with the word brainwashing, and Montell's opening move is to point out how thin that explanation really is. Brainwashing suggests something done to a passive mind, a kind of psychological override that leaves no residue you could examine. Cults do not work like that. They work, she argues, through something much more ordinary and much harder to notice: the words people learn to use. A group does not need a compound in the desert. It needs a vocabulary, and then it needs to make you glad you learned it.

I picked up Cultish because I had already noticed this effect in small doses. I have sat in meetings where a piece of jargon I did not know marked me as an outsider within thirty seconds. I have watched people adopt a company's phrasing and become, quite visibly, more loyal to the company afterward. That is a minor version of what this book is about, and Montell is interested in the major versions, from Jonestown to SoulCycle, which is a range that sounds absurd until you have read her argument for why the range is legitimate.

The book is a work of popular linguistics rather than of clinical psychology, and that distinction matters for how you read it. Montell is a linguist and a journalist, the author of an earlier book about the slurs and slang women use, and she approaches cultish language the way a phonologist approaches sound, as a system with rules, functions, and payoffs. She is not diagnosing anyone. She is doing something closer to translation, taking material that most people find baffling and rendering it in terms anyone can follow.

The argument, stated plainly

The thesis underneath every chapter is that language does the recruiting before the doctrine ever arrives. Specific mechanisms keep recurring across groups that otherwise share very little: the invention of private terms for ordinary things, the loading of words with emotional charge so that ordinary speech starts to feel dangerous, the euphemisms that make extreme requests sound mild, and the clichés that let a member repeat a thought without having to defend it.

Anthropologists and scholars of new religious movements have been saying versions of this for decades, which is one reason academic reviewers have been generous to a book they could easily have dismissed as oversimplified. A scholar quoted in the reception of Cultish put the point dryly: the book is a nonacademic telling academics what they already know, with a clarity that reads like revelation. That is both the compliment and the limit. Nothing here is likely to surprise a specialist. Everything here is likely to reorganize how a general reader hears a conversation.

Montell's particular gift is for showing the mechanism operating at the level of the sentence. When a leader renames something, a tax becomes an offering, a punishment becomes a correction, a lie of omission becomes protection of the group, the leader has not just changed a label. They have changed what the listener is able to think while the word is in their mouth. The vocabulary arrives ahead of the belief, and the belief grows into the shape the vocabulary has already made.

The groups she walks through

The book moves through a series of case studies, and the order is doing work. It opens in the twentieth century with groups whose endings are public knowledge, so you can watch the language doing its job without having to reserve judgment about the outcome.

Jonestown and Heaven's Gate give her the starkest material, since both groups left recordings and written material, and both show how a shared vocabulary of commitment made each escalation sound like continuity rather than rupture. Scientology supplies the most quotable internal language, with its elaborate private terminology, and Montell uses her own training against it effectively, noting that when a group requires you to look up its own definitions of basic words, it has taken grammar itself hostage.

Synanon carries an extra weight the book is honest about, because Montell has a family connection to it through her father. That connection could have made her either harsher or softer than the material warrants, and what it mostly makes her is specific. She is not describing an abstraction when she describes what a commune's language did to the people inside it.

NXIVM and the multi-level marketing world bridge the book toward the present, and this is where the argument earns its subtitle. The techniques available to a leadership training seminar selling an upline and a downline, the special terms for recruits, the reframing of constant selling as personal mission, are recognizably the same techniques, attenuated but present, that the older groups used at full strength.

The modern end of the spectrum

The chapters that will get the most attention are the ones about groups we still belong to. Montell walks into fitness communities with serious followings, SoulCycle, CrossFit, Peloton, and takes their language apart with a straight face: the collective nicknames for instructors, the mantras, the shared vocabulary of suffering that turns a workout into a ritual, the way a class becomes a membership in something.

There is a real risk of cheap equivalence in this kind of move, and the book is at its weakest when it skims close to the edge of implying that a spin class and a doomsday sect belong in one sentence. Montell generally protects herself by staying descriptive. She is not saying your gym is a cult. She is saying the same linguistic tools, group-specific names, emotionally loaded reframes, repetition of shared slogans, appear across the spectrum, and that noticing them in the mild places is how you learn to recognize them in the dangerous ones.

QAnon gets similar treatment, which dates the book in a way that also shows how fast the terrain moves. Online conspiratorial communities, in her account, are cultish in precisely the ways her framework predicts: they generate their own lexicon, they reward members for using it, and fluency in the vocabulary becomes proof of belonging. The person typing the jargon is signaling that they are inside, and the signal costs them nothing except the ability to be understood by anyone who is not.

What a linguist notices

Several threads run through the book that a reader interested in how language works will enjoy for their own sake. One is the way euphemism functions under pressure. Another is how repetition of a set phrase relieves a person of the burden of generating a fresh thought, which is comforting, and comfort is one of the products every group is selling. Another is the role of ridicule and taboo words, which mark the boundary of the community as effectively as any ritual does: there are words we do not use here, and obeying the rule is the membership card.

Montell is also good on what happens inside the mouth. People who have spent years in a group speak differently afterward, with rhythms and phrasing that can sound odd to outsiders, and she treats that as a genuine transformation of the person rather than an act they are putting on. The claim is uncomfortable because it implies that the entrance is not a dramatic moment. Nobody agrees to be manipulated in a single sentence. They agree to learn a few words, and the words do the rest.

There is humor here, too, which reviewers consistently note, and the humor is load-bearing rather than decorative. Cults are frightening partly because they are absurd, and a book that refused to laugh at the mantras would be a book that let the mantras keep their dignity.

Where it is soft

The book's limitations are the limitations of its form, and they are worth stating before you buy it.

Montell is more convincing on how than on why. She can show you, in detail, how a group's vocabulary constructs loyalty. She has much less to say about why one person walks out of a meeting free and another walks out committed, and the human variability in that question, temperamental, circumstantial, historical, gets less attention than the linguistics does. A reader hoping for an account of vulnerability will find sympathy for it rather than an explanation of it.

The personal register that makes the book readable also occasionally gets in its way, as at least one review noted, when a digression about the author's own life arrives at a moment when the analysis was doing something sharper. These passages are short and they are clearly a choice. They are also the only parts where the argument slows down without earning the slowdown.

And there is the matter of framing. The book says, correctly and repeatedly, that recognition is the point, that knowing the language is the defense. But recognition at a distance is easy, and the whole difficulty of cultish speech is that it sounds reasonable from inside the room. The book is better at giving you the vocabulary for the phenomenon than at simulating how it feels to be persuaded by it while it is happening.

The defense the book offers

Montell does not leave the reader with only a diagnosis, and her prescription is consistent with everything that precedes it: learn to hear the language, because hearing it is the only reliable early warning system a person gets. Groups rarely announce themselves. They announce a vocabulary. The moment a community starts giving ordinary things private names, starts treating a question as a sign of disloyalty, starts repeating a slogan where a reason would do, the machinery she describes has already begun.

She is careful to keep this practical rather than paranoid. Lots of groups, from hospitals to fan clubs, use in-group language, and using it is usually harmless. The warning signs she points to are the ones where the vocabulary starts doing your thinking for you: where you notice that you can no longer explain a belief outside the group's own words, or where hearing a disagreement produces irritation instead of curiosity. Those are cheap things to notice in yourself, and noticing them costs nothing, which is the whole point. The most quotable thing in the book is close to a rule of thumb: if you cannot say it in plain language, someone else may be holding the pen.

This is also where the book connects back to its larger cultural argument. The same verbal reflexes show up in marketing, in politics, in the way a workplace talks about itself, and Montell treats literacy in those reflexes as a civic skill rather than a parlor trick. You do not have to join anything, or quit anything, to benefit from it. You just have to start listening for the moment when a sentence stops carrying information and starts carrying membership.

What stayed with me

The test of a book like this is whether you hear anything differently afterward, and with Cultish I did. I noticed, for instance, how quickly a piece of shared jargon shortens a conversation inside a group and slows it to a stop at the boundary, and I noticed how pleased people are, including me, to use a term correctly in front of someone who does not know it. That small pleasure, Montell would say, is the whole mechanism at a scale nobody objects to.

I also finished the book with a revised sense of what recruitment actually consists of. The stories we tell about it involve coercion, isolation, dramatic rupture. The reality she documents is closer to an education: learn these words, use them a few times, hear how good they sound in your own mouth, and by the time the group asks you for something difficult you are already speaking its language. Language is the cheapest infrastructure in the world, which is exactly why it is the one that scales.

For readers who want a clinical or academic treatment, there are denser books on new religious movements, and scholars in the field will tell you this one simplifies. For a general reader who wants to understand, in a working way, how ordinary speech becomes a tool of control, and who would like to be able to recognize that transformation wherever it appears, from a company's all-hands meeting to an online mob, this is a clear, funny, and genuinely clarifying place to start. It made me pay attention to words I had been using on autopilot, and that attention has not worn off yet.