The Power of Religious Memes

Religious memes are among the most powerful that have ever conquered the human mind and then used it as a vehicle of propagation. They may be the most powerful mediators of human experience and passion. A list of such examples would be as long as human history. I will just offer three.


In the 1950s, a Chicago woman, Dorothy Martin, claimed to have received messages by automatic writing from her mentor, Sananda, on the Planet Clarion. She convinced a number of followers that the inhabitants of Clarion would destroy most of North America, starting with Chicago, on December 21, 1954. These followers quit their jobs and sold their possessions and came to her house on December 20 to await the spaceship that would save the faithful followers. As midnight passed, the followers wondered what was going on. At 4:45 in the morning, Martin claimed to have received another message, in which Sananda announced that the attack had been called off. Martin ended up in Arizona, where she claimed (under the name of Sister Thedra) to receive messages from Sananda until her death in 1992. One person, on the basis of flimsy evidence, had convinced other people of something ridiculous (the name Clarion should have been a dead giveaway); this indicates that the human brain is primed to look for and cling to memes that claim to be religious revelations.


Marshall Applewhite was a director, opera singer, and music professor who had psychological problems. In the 1970s, he gathered followers into his Heaven’s Gate cult, convincing them that he was the reincarnation of Jesus Christ and that salvation would come in the form of a spaceship. In 1997, he told them that the spaceship had come and was in the tail of the comet Hale-Bopp. The whole cult committed suicide, by poison, alcohol, and asphyxiation, in order to board the spaceship.


A preacher named Jim Jones convinced hundreds of people in the United States that he was the supreme representative of God in the modern world. He began to fear that government authorities were prying into his church, the Peoples Temple, and might discover something incriminating or might curtail some of his activities. So he and his followers moved to Guyana and established a village in the jungle called Jonestown. Jones still expected that the end of the world would come in the form of a government takeover of his church, and he had his followers practice mass suicide by drinking fruit punch. A 1978 visit from United States congressman Leo Ryan seemed, to Jones, to be the fulfillment of his fears. Cult members met the congressman and the airport and gunned him down. Jones then told his followers to drink the cyanide-laced fruit punch: this was not a practice drill. They all did it, even Jones himself. Acres were covered with the colorfully-clad corpses of the suicide victims.


This is how powerful religion memes can be. Jim Jones had created a mythology about himself, which incorporated many of the evolved capacities of the human mind. The people thought of the Jones cult as their family, thus tapping into their desire for altruism. He made use of the power of sexuality, convincing his female followers that he was not only their spiritual leader but their physical husband as well. Adherents gave up everything to join his cult, and when it was threatened, they believed Jones when he told them they had nothing more for which to live.


This essay is part of my recently-published book Life of Earth: Portrait of a Beautiful, Middle-Aged, Stressed-Out World, just released by Prometheus Books.