Bikram Choudhury claimed to heal President Nixon's thrombosis and developed his own form of yoga that became an international brand. The brash, tale-telling, foul-mouthed yoga teacher built an empire around his teacher training courses. But he was also a predator and abuser. Where did Brikram yoga come from? (Spoiler: it's a long story about colonialism in India) Why do we think physical training requires verbal abuse? Is Bikra, the Vince McMahon of yoga? We'll answer all of these questions and more this week!

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Production assistance from the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama.

Theme music produced with Udio.

Pull up a chair or twenty, and join us for a conversation about Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets (2023). Made famous in the mainstream for their TLC reality show 19 Kids and Counting, Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar presented a very specific image of a very large family within the “Quiverfull” movement whose children were reliably obedient and mild-mannered. Behind the literal and figurative scenes, however, the line between authority and abuse was often a blurry one, both for the family and for the Institute in Basic Life Principles, whose teachings were reflected by the Duggars at every turn. Merinda has logistical questions about big families and returns to the mundane workings of power. Mike watches cartoons and muses about strategies within group mobilization. As always, we think together about how/when/why “cult” rhetoric appears, who wields it, and what its effects are. #cultfavorite #duggars #studyreligion

Links:

Danielle Lindemann, True Story: What Reality TV Says about Us (2022) https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374720964/truestory/

Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (1991)

https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300050608/the-democratization-of-american-christianity/

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Production assistance from the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama.

Theme music produced with Udio.

This week, we’re talking about Chaos: The Manson Murders (Netflix, 2025). Most stories about Charles Manson depict him as a special brand of villain: a personification of evil incarnate, a manipulative mastermind who lured vulnerable hippies to their murderous doom, a sociopath who looked for hidden meanings in Beatles’ lyrics and foretold an apocalyptic race war. In this documentary’s treatment, investigative reporter Tom O’Neill presents Manson as a CIA pawn who learned his mind-control techniques from his own ostensible time in the covert MKUltra program. Our conversation doesn’t try to get to the truth of the matter. Instead, we discuss how and why people turn to exceptionalism narratives to make sense of the mundane. In the process, we learn that Mike’s never seen The Manchurian Candidate or Rosemary’s Baby! So send us your classic movie recommendations as we try to get him caught up to speed.

Links:

Celisia Stanton’s Truer Crime podcast episodes on the Manson murders: https://truercrimepodcast.com/manson-pt-1/

If the ingredients of something called a “cult” include a charismatic figure and unquestioning followers, the phenomenon of “Kai the Hitchhiker” helps us think about what happens when the power dynamic between those elements is inverted. Famous for the local news interview that launched a thousand memes, Kai was an unlikely hero whose lowkey charm saw people clamoring to make him a late-night and reality tv star. What do people offer and, alternatively, ignore when we want to see a particular story play out in a way that satisfies us? How do we respond when someone doesn’t follow our social scripts about wealth and power? What stories do we tell retroactively to make it make sense? What do we expect of someone deemed charismatic, and what does that tell us about ourselves? We explore these questions and others, like: will we ever get the video working for this podcast? Hang in as we keep trying, dear listeners!

Merinda's Cult Favorite:

Hanif Abdurraqib’s “To Chan Marshall: A Letter to Cat Power” (in season 2 of the Lost Notes podcast); then his own examination of musical moments and figures in 1980 for the 3rd season (the episode that reckons with the deaths of John Lennon and Darby Crash [lead singer of punk band Germs] is so good). Both are examples of attending to context with empathy, which is one of his trademarks and which siiiiiiiigh, thank you.

Mike's Cult Favorite:

“I Don’t Like Who I Was Then” by The Wonder Years

As an undermatured 40 year old recovering emo kid, a song where a dude sings about genuinely tryingto be a better person with the lyric “Like I'm working babyface, Out of Mid-South in the eighties, I kept a blade hidden in my wrist tape” just hits me right in the heart.

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Production assistance from the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama.

Theme music produced with Udio.

We’ve made it to our 25th episode! In all the excitement, Merinda forgets her computer, and Mike swoons over his latest thrift store find. But we do manage to talk about new Max documentary Cult of Fear: Asaram Bapu. The story of a guru-turned-prisoner is also a story about evolutions in the Indian legal system and about the relationships between religious and political power. As ever, questions abound. How does the “cult” label morph when applied to a group of 40 million people? How does its functionality as an othering/familiarizing device hold up? What about cult discourse might get lost in translation across different contexts? And when was the last time you wrote/mailed a letter? Thanks for spending your valuable time with us and seeing us through to our 25th documentary discussion!

Follow us on the socials at @cultfavoritepod.

Production assistance from the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama.

Theme music produced with Udio.

This week, we’re staying in the 90s and are still talking about abuses of power that turned into tv spectacle. Performances of masculinity continue to abound, but gone are WWE’s costumes and Springer’s staged fights. The skirmishes in this case appear within federal agencies and their approaches to an insulated religious group. Join us as we discuss Waco: American Apocalypse (2023), which details the 51-day standoff between the Branch Davidians and the US government. Negotiators, snipers, the ATF, the FBI, armored tanks, desperate parents, a frenzied media, and Timothy McVeigh all make appearances in a story that sees conflicting visions/versions of American identity cancel each other out and go up in literal flames. On much lighter notes, we catch a glimpse into Mike’s childhood dinner rituals, and Merinda opines about tough-guy energy. #cultfavorite #waco #studyreligion

Links:

Bio of abstract expressionist painter Cy Twombly, Chalk: The Art and Erasure of Cy Twombly,by Joshua Rivkin

https://citylights.com/art/chalk-art-erasure-of-cy-twombly-2/

“For the Plot” new single from As December Falls: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YF-IqeMj9sE

John Stewart used John Cena’s heel turn this past weekend to explain our current geopolitical climate:

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Production assistance from the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama.

Theme music produced with Udio.

This week is a treat for Mike, a feat for Merinda. We’re extending our stay in the ‘90s, taking a day trip to the entertainment world o’ wrestling. But, not unlike enlightenment, entertainment can cozy up to exploitation pretty quickly. This is what happens in Netflix’s Mr. McMahon, which tells the story of a lonely billionaire’s quest to gain approval from his father by building the WWE empire. We talk scripts and performances, heroes and villains, masculinity and national identity. Instead of trying to distinguish between illusion and what’s reality or figure out who the real Vince McMahon is, we think about how artifice and authenticity—like babyfaces and heels—rely on one another to be what they are. Kayfabe, babe: it makes up and means every word. Fun facts abound, like: Mike thinks there’s a wrestling match for everyone. And Merinda’s prior knowledge about wrestling is entirely to do with movies that are not about wrestling. Grab a costume, and join us in the ring!

Links:

Colette Arrand: https://colettearrand.gay/

Bigg Egg wrestling newsletter: https://www.bigeggwrestling.com/

Follow us on the socials at @cultfavoritepod.

Production assistance from the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama.

Theme music produced with Udio.

Once upon a time, a young reporter named Jerry Springer made his way to Chicago with the dream of launching a talk show that allowed regular people to tell their stories. On his journey, he met a tabloid-trained producer, who turned the hopeful tv host into the Ratings King and staged increasingly dramatic antics at court through a daytime talk show that was called brilliant by some and an abomination by others. These included a fist-fight involving a klansman and a man who married his horse, but then one day, there was a murder. Some decades later, two intrepid scholars would go on a quest to learn more about this fraught empire after they found an archive entitled Fights, Camera, Action! on Netflix. They were armed only with questions like: When do people get annoyed when something is “fake,” and when are they happy to suspend disbelief? Whose stories get told and how? Where do exploitation and responsibility start and stop? And just what *was* the show Merinda’s middle school class visited?? What will become of our adventurers? Tune in and find out.

Links:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/08/arts/television/jerry-springer-netflix-documentary-5-takeaways.html

“Good Sex as Food for the Revolution” by Dr. Candice Nicole Hargons via Emily Nagoski’s Substack

https://substack.com/inbox/post/155927881

“Tennessean by Birth” poem by Nikki Giovanni

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhPUvucdGvk

Ross Benes’s book 1999: The Year Low Culture Conquered America and Kickstarted Our Bizarre Times (out April 2025)

https://kansaspress.ku.edu/9780700638574/

Follow us on the socials at @cultfavoritepod.

Production assistance from the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama.

Theme music produced with Udio.