Recommend me books about religious sects, cults, and small denominations

The title pretty much says it all.

http://www.clambake.org/archive/books/bfm/bfmconte.htm

here is a nice page on the oneida movement. they are fun to read about. from perfectionism to silverware! (actually, that would make a pretty good book title) :

http://religiousmovements.lib.virginia.edu/nrms/Oneida.html

http://religiousmovements.lib.virginia.edu/nrms/solartemp.html

He throws lots of tempting little tidbits at you, but doesn't always clarify or acknowledge his sources.

Any recs for a book on the Heaven's Gate cult?

They're not the most thrilling sect, but I'd still quite like to read this book about the Muggletonians.

omg this story is BONKERS -- forced vasectomies, no children allowed in the church! accusations of jim jones-like behavior from a waxy 93 year old corpse like leader!
6 part series in the ABJ, this is the journalist talking with public radio
http://www.wksu.org/news/story/40712

http://www.ohio.com/news/local/ernest-angley-s-grace-cathedral-rocked-by-accusations-involving-abortions-and-vasectomies-1.531094

Rev. Angley came to Akron from North Carolina. He built up his congregation before buying up the operations of fellow televangelist Rex Humbard in the 1970s. Angley eventually brought what’s now CW 55 to the air in 1985.

He’s been operating the station -- plus Grace Cathedral and a restaurant, Cathedral Buffet -- in Cuyahoga Falls since 1994. But during a sermon this past July, the 93-year-old addressed allegations of sexual misconduct in his organization. That led to a call to the Beacon Journal’s Bob Dyer, who spent the last several months interviewing almost two dozen former church members.

Preventing children

He and others say Angley holds so much sway over his members’ lives that he has persuaded them to get abortions and vasectomies even when they didn’t want to.

“None of us have kids because he makes all the men get fixed,” said Becky Roadman, 32, who quit the church last year and now lives in Georgia. “You’re not allowed to have babies there.”

That assertion is seconded by Akron resident Angelia Oborne, who worked in the church’s restaurant, the Cathedral Buffet, for 20 years before quitting the church a year and a half ago.

“My husband and I can’t have children because my husband had a vasectomy,” she said. “We were looking at getting it reversed, but I’m 35 years old and ... may not be able to have children anymore.

“And that breaks my heart, because that choice was made for me, because of the brainwashing, the mind control. We weren’t allowed to have children. If you turned up pregnant, it’s almost as if you had sinned.”

Oborne says Angley once advised a friend to think of her growing fetus as “a tumor.”

“She was four months pregnant and she sat in the [abortion clinic] waiting room and told her baby that she was so sorry that she was doing this,” Oborne said.

“I know another girl — she won’t come forward — but she was forced into having four abortions.”

whaaaaaaat

damn this is a thread that is very aligned with my interests that i have never seen before.

Going Clear, obv

This is fiction, and I already praised it in the Autumn 2014 reading thread, but I love Jeanne Thornton's The Dream of Doctor Bantam, which is about a girl in mourning for her sister who falls in love with a member of a Scientology-like cult devoted to uprooting its members' belief in temporality. It's a comic novel, but insightful about sectarian recruitment and the emotional compensations cult membership seems to offer. Thornton drew a pretty amusing mock-Chick Tract to illustrate her fictional cult's beliefs: https://www.scribd.com/doc/105155731/Love-Is-a-Battlefield-A-Publication-of-the-Institute-of-Temporal-Illusions I've also heard good things about Brian Evenson's novel The Open Curtain, about apocryphal violence in early Mormon history, but I can't vouch for it yet.

Tim Parks's first novel, 'Tongues of Flame' is a good one about a small hardline Christian sect trying to bring a rebellious atheist teenager to heel. Very autobiographical, apparently (the rebel was Parks's older brother).