Cults really started to fascinate people when Jimmy Jones cult began in November of 1978 when all attention was focused on the mass suicide in Jonestown. A similar event happened in 1993 when federal agents engaged in a shoot out with cult leader David Koresh. Cults build around a charismatic leader who has a lifestyle dedicated to a specific spirituality group that they know other people will follow. Mormonism began as a small cult then grew bigger until it eventually became a church. All new religions started the same way by beginning small and getting bigger, eventually becoming a church.
The most well known cult so far is the Heaven's Gate cult. The 39 members who took their own lives in March of 1997 were professional Web page designers who used the Internet to attempt to win converts and spread their message (CNN). Heaven's Gate members believed that Hale-Bopp, a comet that was currently in the news, was the sign that they were supposed to shed their earthly bodies, or "containers-, and join a spacecraft traveling behind the comet. The spacecraft was supposed to take them to a higher level of existence. They died in shifts-, some members helped others take a lethal drink of phenobarbital and vodka before taking their own concoctions of the fatal mixture. Police found all of the cult members dead in an eerily calm and orderly scene on March 26, 1997 (CNN). For a time, the story was a national obsession as the media revealed details about the group.
The reason people are attracted to modern cults because they puts emphasis on community and on direct experience with the divine. In cults' participants often find a level of social support and acceptance that they do not find in a nuclear family. This makes and generates a sense of belonging to something profound and a feel of being somebody. People who often join cults such as this, join because they think they are getting something the world did not give them.
