Dick Anthony

Academic career

Anthony holds a PhD from the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, California. He has supervised research at the Department of Psychiatry of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and at the Graduate Theological Union, and is a former director of the Graduate Theological Union's UC Berkeley-affiliated Center for the Study of New Religions. His research has been supported by government agencies including the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute of Drug Abuse and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and he has frequently testified or acted as a consultant in court cases involving allegations of religious coercion or harm resulting from involvement in a religious group. Anthony has authored or co-authored a large number of scholarly articles on the topic and has co-edited several books.

Involvement in the brainwashing debate

Anthony has characterized brainwashing as "a pseudo-scientific myth", and spearheaded efforts which from 1990 onward led to the general rejection of brainwashing testimony as unscientific in United States courts. Anthony asserted in the Washington Post that "no reasonable person would question that there are situations where people can be influenced against their best interests, but those arguments are evaluated on the basis of fact, not bogus expert testimony." Dismissing the idea of mind control, he has defended new religious movements, and argued that involvement in such movements may often have beneficial, rather than harmful effects.

Anthony was a key consultant for the government in the Fishman case and acted as a consultant in many subsequent cases of a similar nature, "frequently getting pseudoscientific mind control testimony excluded from evidentiary hearings". According to sociologist James T. Richardson, he was the "intellectual driving force" behind an amicus curiae brief on brainwashing endorsed by the American Psychological Association. In the Fishman case, the court accepted Anthony's argument that Margaret Singer's brainwashing theory lacked scientific support, a decision that set a legal precedent and led to the exclusion of Margaret Singer and her colleague Richard Ofshe as expert witnesses in this and subsequent trials. Afterwards, Singer and Ofshe twice sued Anthony, as well as the American Psychological Association, the American Sociological Association and several other scholars, for defamation and conspiracy to deprive them of their livelihoods. Both suits were dismissed; in the second the judge granted the defendants a SLAPP motion, requiring Singer and Ofshe to pay Anthony's and the other defendants' legal costs.

Anthony contributed a 100-page chapter on the brainwashing hypothesis to the book Misunderstanding Cults, edited by sociologists Benjamin Zablocki and Thomas Robbins, in which he criticized the "tactical ambiguity" of brainwashing theorists like Zablocki. In Anthony's view, brainwashing proponents have, in their efforts to resurrect a discredited hypothesis, continually modified key assumptions underlying the concept in order to avoid any possibility of its empirical verification. The chapter argues that "the term brainwashing has such sensationalist connotations that its use prejudices any scientific discussion of patterns of commitment in religious movements."

Reception

David G. Bromley and Anson Shupe, writing in the Encyclopedia of Religion and Society (1998), have credited Anthony and his co-author, sociologist Thomas Robbins, with having written "the most articulate critique" of the anti-cult movement's perspective on brainwashing. The sociologist James T. Richardson has referred to Anthony's scholarly work on brainwashing as "without peer".

Book chapters and articles

Books