It's our 2nd annual Halloween special episode!!! And that's doubly funny because Mike hates Halloween. For this year's special we take on TWO documentaries (and kind of a third one too) about Ed and Lorraine Warren, 20th century demon and ghost hunters extraordinaire. We discuss The Devil on Trial (Netflix 2023) and Devil’s Road: The True Story of Ed and Lorraine Warren (HBO Max, 2020). There's also a special cameo by the 2023 Canadian documentary about the Satanic Panic, Satan Wants You. But we also talk about Ghostbusters, why Mike doesn't do horror and why Merinda does, why we need horror stories and tales about demons, and Mike lore about genre-hopping Christian musician Carman. It's a spooky episode of Cult Favorite that goes great with candy corn!
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Production assistance from the Department of ReligiousStudies at the University of Alabama.
Theme music produced with Udio.
Follow us on the TikTok and Instagram at @cultfavoritepod.
Production assistance from the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama.
Theme music produced with Udio.
Follow us on the socials at @cultfavoritepod.
Production assistance from the Department of ReligiousStudies at the University of Alabama.
Theme music produced with Udio.
Just how well do signifiers float, you ask? Well, we’re back with a corporate case study whose labels could serve as lifesavers. Examples include but are not limited to: “charisma” (=yelling + boss energy + money), “revolution” (=paying a fair wage), and, of course, “cult” (=a group of people trying hard for someone who’s a jerk). Pull on a comfy v-neck and go window shopping with us at American Apparel, which recently received Trainwreck treatment from Netflix. CEO Dov Charney first made waves by not subjecting workers to sweatshop conditions (revolutionary!) and then made waves by creating an abusive work environment of his very own (just another day at the office!) and then...went on to launch a new brand and keep making money elsewhere (you saw it coming!). As “cult” shows up with increasing frequency in public discourse about harm, the element of “religion” becomes more and more nebulous. We talk about this and then some, leaving you with our cult favs in the way of some TV recs for your consideration.
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Production assistance from the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama.
Theme music produced with Udio.
There’s a new season of Shiny Happy People out now, and Cult Favorite is on the case with some unsolicited advice. Do: process dad issues. Don’t: crack eggs over your head for tuition money or others’ sport. Season 2 of the series focuses on Teen Mania, an evangelical youth phenomenon spearheaded for thirty-ish years by Ron Luce (himself stylized by way of motorcycles, loud voices, and evangelizing at drive-thrus). Youth culture has always scared grownups, and the latter have always strategized about how to corral the former. Enter Honor Academy, wherein ambitious teens volunteered via a lifetime commitment to serve on the frontlines in an ostensible battle between good and evil. What they came to realize, however, is that serving God and country also involved unpaid labor, telemarketing, crawling through trenches, and carrying a heavy cross in the middle of nowhere sans food/shelter/map. We talk about the rise and fall of the program, its ideological framework, and its relationship to political power. Remember, everybody: social structures always shape our own senses of self! And eggs are best enjoyed as a protein boost rather than as a humiliation device.
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Production assistance from the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama.
Theme music produced with Udio
Would you like a methodology for optimizing or enhancing human experience and behavior? Would you like a vagueness-translator to make that question make sense? Well, have we got an episode for you! We’re finally talking about The Vow (season 1), a documentary series about NXIVM—a MLM with an acronym as confusing as its mission. We hit the highlights about what the group got up to and why leader Keith Raniere is now serving a 120-year prison sentence. More than that, though, we talk about how/why universalizing rhetoric and individualist ethics can make for such a compelling and explosive combo. We also think through some of the ways the doc’s production lands, and we ask how it might look different if the former and current members of the collective weren’t rich. Come for Catherine Oxenberg’s phone call to a princess, asking her to get the now king of England to put her in direct contact with the Dalai Lama. Stay for the critical thinking!
Links:
NYT reporter Barry Meier reviews The Vow and Seduced: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/27/arts/television/nxivm-the-vow-seduced-keith-raniere.html
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Production assistance from the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama.
Theme music produced with Udio.
For the last stop of our summer road trip, we head to Rome, NY, where a retired Air Force base closed out the millennium by playing host to mosh pits, sexual assault, avoidable death, raw sewage, and fire. That’s right, campers, we’re talking about Woodstock 99: Peace, Love, and Rage (HBO/Max, 2021). Pack some critical thinking along with your fresh water because questions about how quickly/easily true horrors can become normalized are vital to ask right now. On the main stage, we’re playing a few of the hits: the making and marketing of a collective, the consequences of ignoring systemic issues, the curation of blame, and the strategies of subsequent history-telling. On the second stage, there’ll be appearances including but not limited to: moral panics embedded in generational logic, gender scripts/expectations, machinations of social cohesion, and Merinda’s distaste for nu metal.
Links:
Gina Arnold, Half a Million Strong: Crowds in Power from Woodstock to Coachella https://uipress.uiowa.edu/books/half-million-strong
Demographics of Jan 6 attackers: https://www.shu.edu/news/a-demographic-and-legal-profile-of-january-6-prosecutions.html
Texas Death Breathes New Life Into Professional Wrestling by Colette Arrand
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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 sports celebrity, open secrets, and what people are willing to ignore in the name of loyal fandom. Join us for some conversational tailgating as we discuss Netflix’s Untold: The Fall of Favre (2025). A small town hero who became a football legend in his own time, Brett Favre is known by most for his time as a superstar quarterback in the NFL. Sports media personality Jenn Sterger alleges, though, that she knew him as a dude who unsolicitedly sexted her. Meanwhile, the state of Mississippi knows him as the sports star who diverted millions of dollars from welfare funds for use in pet projects. Spoiler alert: a story about a charismatic leader is yet again a story about abuses of power. In such a story, which elements get what amount of time/attention and why? What boundaries get drawn around which kinds of behavior? And what’s with the impulse to compare sports and religion? Listen in for thoughts from two of your biggest fans.
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Production assistance from the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama.
Theme music produced with Udio.
Roll up your sleeping bags and grab a flashlight because Cult Favorite is going to camp! Next stop on our summer road trip is the 2006 doc Jesus Camp, which follows a few kids as they attend the Kids on Fire School of Ministry. Led by Becky Fischer, the charismatic camp fuses God and country, drawing portraits of “us” and “them” with primary colors of red, white, and blue. The film, meanwhile, fuses different branches of evangelicalism and plops them squarely into rural America in its own process of stacking up insiders and outsiders. The concept of spiritual warfare involves skirmishes over classification, so we think through some that show up in the film re: relationships and distinctions posed between learning/indoctrination; religion/culture; belief/politics. The rhetoric and rituals reflected by these categories also shape them, so let’s make sure to pack some critical thinking skills along with our bug spray. We also kindly ask that no one forgets s’mores stuff, plz and thx.
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Production assistance from the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama.
Theme music produced with Udio.
What happens when someone with A Big Idea makes even bigger promises but fails to attend to logistical tasks and/or infrastructure? We’re sticking with our summer theme by telling the story of a beach music festival for the ultra-elite that became a trending trainwreck on social media. Charismatic entrepreneur + unquestioning yes-people + exploited local staff = a vacation that dreams (nightmares, specifically) are made of. That’s right, we’re going to Fyre Fest, and we want you to come along! We can’t promise comfortable accommodations, but we do promise insightful analysis about wealth, access, and influence in the digital age.
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.
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.
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.
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:
“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/
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Production assistance from the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama.
Theme music produced with Udio.
Delving into the term “cult” means looking at unlikely case studies. This week we talk about Netflix documentary OneTaste: Orgasm, Inc. —the story of boss babe Nicole Daedone, who made big business out of personal pleasure. Hers is a love story between capitalism and heteropatriarchy, with supporting roles from yoga, meditation, sexual awakening, exploitative profiteering, and coercion. Questions abound, including but not limited to: What happens to a cultural narrative when it’s rendered “religious”? When do scholars get interviewed, and when do they not? What kinds of conditions would foreclose a company like OneTaste from succeeding in the first place? When is exploitation a story people pay attention to, and when is it just a regular day at the office? Come for the answers, stay for the conversational bookends. Merinda gives a reading! Mike learns what mycology is! And remember, kids, context always shapes the stuff we call special.
Links:
2009 NY Times article on Daedone and OneTaste:https://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/fashion/15commune.html
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.