A traditional element in many apostate tales--from nativist tomes against antebellum Catholics to stories from "cult" defectors in the 1980s --is the illicit detailing ofof strocities. Thse sometimes included sex, consiporacy and even murder. ...a number of schoalrs have recognized that similar horrific stories have been told about a variety of religious groups throughout American history. Over the past three centuries , they argue, catholics, jews, mormons, adn members of ISKO?N adn the Unification chuch, among others, have all been the subjkects of strinkingly similar tales of sex, murder, and consipiracy. Harvey Cox, for example, argues that four historically recvurrent themes emerge in narratives told that four historically recurrent themes emerge in narratives told about "marginalised" and feared religious groups. These are the beliefs that the group is politically subversive, that sexual and beavioural deviancy occurs within the groups conines, that the group presents a false facade of beginity and that the group somehow brainwashes its members and transforms them into zombies. The socialgoists David Bremley and Anson Shupe also note similar reccurring motifs in old and new controversieus include (1) deceptiopns and corecion used to revruit and hold members (2) illegitmacy of beliefs (3) sexual pervsion, (4) polticial subversion adn (5) finical explotioan...
(89)

...despiore the widely shared perceptions of a spiritualy explosion in teh late 1960s, several schoalrs more historically removed from the peroid suggest that little statstical evidence supports the claim. In terms of new religious movements, for example, the sociologists Rodney Stark and his collegues assert that the p;opulation of the population joining new religions--as well as the number of new religions foudned--remained realtively stable from the 1920s to the 1980s. (100)

...most of the largest news and general-interest magazine portrayed the Jesus movement favourbly . In a cover story in the June 1971 Time, concluded that "in a world filled with real and fancided demons for the young, the form their faith takes may be lessi mportant than the fact that they have it. US NEws and world report wrote of a "supercharged evangism...the latest versuion of an American peitism that has erupted periodically since other times" and qouted the evagenlist Billy Graham praising the movement. In an article in Readers Digerst tellinginly titled We Need Their Faith, Norman Vincent PEale asserted that the Jesus people were sometimes "emotional to the point of hysetria, or dogmatic to the point of rudeness". but he suggested that the "established leadership". needed to queel these things, needed to quell, . Look beneath some of the exuberance and the long hair and the odd clothing" Peale reasured his readers "for the true hallmarks of Christianity, the love and joy and fellowship that have astounded observers ever since the first century" (118)

(it might be interesting to compare the discourses surround the emerging chuch movement with Peales arguement)

all typing mine, all qaoutes from making the american religious fringe, sean mccloud, unc press (mclouds book is really vaulable b/c it actually goes to the mains stream protestant weekly peroidicals in a systematic way)