Heaven’s Gate was a cult founded in the 1970s. In this paper Michael Corcoran analyzes the rhetoric the leaders used by examining three tapes that were produced in the final two years of the cult. These tapes reveal how Heaven’s Gate used social isolation to reinforce their indoctrination, which effectively reinforced the beliefs of the cult. These processes led to the death of the members of Heaven’s Gate, the largest mass suicide on U.S. soil in history.
Chocolate Pudding and Space Aliens: How the Heaven’s Gate Cult Propagated
