ABSTRACT
If the "mind control" argument for the New Religious Movements' (NRMs) recruitment/membership, and the groups' presumed social threat, failed to gain purchase among most North American academics or politicians, the anticult movement's (ACM) fortunes abroad have been far different. The European social movement industry has been much different from North America's, however, with distinct consequences for any religious countermovement's economy. For the past several decades, social scientists have suspected a linkage between postwar European anticultism and its older American counterpart. Unlike in the simpler economic contexts of the United States and Canada, the NRM controversies in Europe are complicated by post-World War II developments at cooperating and consolidating broad legal commonalities among nations. The "white-hot phase" of mobilization is precisely what the North American-European ACM coalition experienced from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s. In particular, this time period was the most productive phase of the American effort to proselytize its "mind control" ideology abroad and forge an international exchange.
