6 Little-Known Cults Are Mostly Nonviolent

NEW YORK - Hundreds of odd, little-known religious cults exist in the United States, but few of them ever turn violent. When they do, it's usually because they fear they're endangered, experts say.

The groups generally exist quietly in isolated areas, with members following rules set down by a dominant leader.

They go about their business largely unnoticed, except when a confrontation with neighbors or authorities occurs.

Sunday's deadly shootout at the Branch Davidian sect's compound near Waco, Tex., was a particularly violent example of such a confrontation bringing a group to public attention. Several federal agents and cult members were killed in gun battles when the agents arrived to search for weapons and arrest the cult leader.

There are about 600 cults scattered across the United States, according to J. Gordon Melton of the University of California at Santa Barbara and a leading authority on religious groups in the U.S.

Most of the groups are unfamiliar to Americans, he said.

Some of the sects are offshoots or ousted splinter groups of mainstream denominations, such as the one in Waco, which broke from the Seventh-Day Adventist Church more than 50 years ago.

They're "very, very rarely" involved in violence, Melton said. "That's one reason why we don't hear about them. Nothing happens. They aren't news."

Ironically, the Branch Davidian sect stems from a heritage that renounces violence. Seventh-Day Adventists are pacifists, and in wartime they serve only in non-combatant roles.

But the Waco group has "its own, different theology," said William Shea, a biblical scholar and Adventist.

"It's been a thorn in the side of the church for years, an embarrassment and source of irritation and confusion," Shea said.

Sociologist Jeffrey Hadden of the University of Virginia said cult violence usually stems from fear of outsiders or sometimes from leadership struggles within the group.

In the Waco case, he said, "It strikes me that the federal agents overreacted. If a group is suspected of stockpiling weapons, there's a responsibility to remove them, but storming the place with 100 federal agents doesn't in any sense seem called for."