From the mass weddings of Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church to the mass suicides at Jonestown, charismatic cults and their devotees have become facts of American life. Once exotic offshoots of the Sixties counterculture exciting suspicion, scorn, terror, and counter-terror, cults have grown so common and entered so many areas of public life that only spectacular disasters like the immolation of the Philadelphia cult MOVE seem to remind us how extraordinary...