The Christchurch attacker dipped into the cultic milieu by adopting the Black Sun symbol on the cover of his manifesto. So did the terrorist who killed Jo Cox MP, as he read publications with titles such as Secret of the Runes, and kept a bag of runes in a string bag. How should we think about the extreme right’s fascination with the cultic?
The cultic milieu concept has been used by a range of academics interested in the extreme right. It has often been taken up by those analysts of the extreme right who are particularly concerned with examining the ways some individuals and groups invoke a sense of the spiritual, making claims that their activism is related to something ‘higher’, and so in part at least about finding answers to larger questions of life and existence.
The term was coined by Colin Campbell in 1972, in an article called ‘The Cult, the Cultic Milieu and Secularisation’ – though here Campbell was not really concerned with using it to study phenomena such as neo-Nazism. Its development by scholars interested in the study of the extreme right was given a boost in 2002 with the book edited by Jeffrey Kaplan and Heléne Lööw , The Cultic Milieu: Oppositional Subcultures in an Age of Globalization. As well as reprinting the original essay, chapters looked at phenomena such as US white supremacism through the lens of the cultic milieu, and helped introduce the term to a new audience, especially those concerned with the history and dynamics of the extreme right. Others concerned with American extremism and conspiracy theories, such as Michel Barkun, have similarly helped to inspire others who have used the cultic milieu concept to study the extreme right.
