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The Theoretical Framing of a Social Problem: The Case of Societal Reaction to Cults in Israel

From the 1970s to the late 1980s, Israeli society witnessed a flow of bettereducated middle-class youth to Human Potential and New Religious Movements. Influential sectors of Israeli Jewish society responded negatively to this trend. This article analyses the nature and impact of the brief ensuing anti-cult process from the opposing theoretical perspectives of Social Functionalism and Social Constructionism. Each of these theories was devised to account for the latent functions of societal reaction to cults, the strategies used, and their instrumental and symbolic outcomes in terms of societal repositioning. For this set of events at least, Social Constructionism is shown to better capture the process of societal reaction.