Download or read book The Rhetoric of Religious Cults written by A. Mooney and published by Springer. This book was released on 2005-08-02 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Rhetoric of Religious Cults takes as its departure point the notion that 'cults' have a distinctive language and way of recruiting members. First outlining a rhetorical framework, which encompasses contemporary discourse analysis, the persuasive texts of three movements - Scientology, Jehovah's Witnesses and Children of God - are analysed in detail and their discourse compared with other kinds of recruitment literature. Cults' distinctive negative profile in society is not matched by a linguistic typology. Indeed, this negative profile seems to rest on the semantics and application of the term 'cult' itself.