Greenwashing Cults. How Cult Apologists Poison Wells

Abstract

The thesis developed in this article is that some authors commonly referred to as 'cult apologists', who use to present themselves as New Religious Movements scholars, engage in façade marketing by using certain well-known rhetorical devices and manifest logical fallacies to construct a deceptively positive image of cults and a negative image of the so called "anti-cult movement". Specifically, these authors use communicative measures that involve the use of terms and metaphors capable of activating conceptual frames capable of recontextualizing the message in a way that is convenient to them, as indicated by cognitive linguistics.