CBR17 Bingo: Borrow – Support your local library! Like many of my reads, I borrowed this book from my local public library.
The story of cult leader Amy Carlson and Love Has Won burst onto the news due to the unusual circumstances surrounding her dead, but she and her group are just the latest incarnation of New Age new religious movements in the United States.
I have a bit of a fascination with new religious movements (which are not always cults, though all cults are new religious movements) – the fact that I’m not particularly religious or spiritual weirdly just adds to my fascination, because it just makes me more curious about why people go down these rabbit-holes from ever benign entry points.
I haven’t watched the Netflix documentary about Love Has Won, but I did follow the news coverage when the story originally broke. Even so, this book did not necessarily add much more to my knowledge of the confused beliefs of Love Has Won, though I did learn more about Amy Carlson’s early life, and more about her followers.
More interesting is the through-line of other New Age movements, including the Silver Shirts, the I AM movement, and the Church Universal and Triumphant among others. While I’ve always had a vague notion of New Age beliefs as the stereotypical ‘woo woo’ sort of thing, Sottile brings clarity to what they actually are, the racist underpinnings of many of the most successful New Age groups, and the uniquely American flavor of the phenomenon. This book gets you in with the bizarre story of Love Has Won, but shows you how it is only the latest incarnation of an ongoing undercurrent in American religion.
I did find myself curious about what the people who were in the heart of the organizations discusses really believed – and how those beliefs and stories came about – but I suppose that’s been lost with the passage of time and buried with the founders themselves.