Brainwashing, Race, and New Religious Movements in the United States

ABSTRACT: This special issue explores discourses of “brainwashing” and histories of racialization in relation to new religions in the United States. There is a large body of scholarship about brainwashing and new religions and a robust literature about race and new religions. However, there is no sustained analysis of how mind control rhetoric is embedded in racialized frameworks or how these frames affect new religions. Articles in this special issue of Nova Religio explore the religious and Orientalist valences of brainwashing in the 1950s, Yellow Peril and Orientalist discourses of brainwashing from the Korean War (1950–1953) to attacks on the Unification Church during the 1970s–1980s, affective resonances of anti-Communist and anticult brainwashing accusations from 1950 to 2020, and racialized frontier myths in news broadcasts about Jesus Movement groups in the 1970s–1980s. The authors show that brainwashing rhetoric serves to protect White Protestant America from the perceived threat of racial and religious Others.