Is Shen Yun a “Cult”?

No, but it’s a fair question given what you may have seen online.

While every year, a million people join us in theaters, we know that many had searched Shen Yun online beforehand and found alarming accusations. As Shen Yun performers and staff, we want to directly tell you who we are, what we believe, and what life here is like, so you can make your own decision.

Where is the “cult” label from?

Shen Yun was started by practitioners of the meditation discipline Falun Gong. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been persecuting Falun Gong practitioners in China for more than 26 years. To justify its ongoing atrocities, it worked hard to label us an “evil cult.”

Shen Yun began in New York’s Hudson Valley in 2006, when a small group of elite artists came together with a shared mission. A big part of our story is that many of us escaped China after the communist regime began suppressing Falun Gong.

Falun Gong (also called Falun Dafa) is a spiritual practice in the Buddhist tradition. It includes meditation exercises and revolves around the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance. In the late ‘90s in China, the government there estimated there were 70-100 million people practicing it—more than the members of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) itself. Facing such a large, albeit peaceful, group with its own ideology, the regime came after Falun Gong with full force in 1999.

Overnight, tens of millions of Chinese were labeled enemy of the state. Hundreds of thousands were sent to prisons and labor camps, many of them tortured, and killed. The entire state-run propaganda machine was blasting character-assassination attacks on Falun Gong around the clock, trying to turn an entire nation against fellow citizens.

An Erroneous Label

Outside of China, the Chinese regime struggled to justify its oppression on common, peaceful people. That is when an American PR firm suggested it tap into the cult narrative so many people in the West knew and feared. That was the way the “cult” label was slapped on Falun Gong—by the CCP and its representatives.

Independent scholars and experts who studied Falun Gong have concluded that we do not fit the definitions of a cult. Journalist Ian Johnson, who spent years reporting on Falun Gong in China and won a Pulitzer Prize for his daring coverage, observed that “its members marry outside the group, have outside friends, hold normal jobs, do not live isolated from society, do not believe that the world’s end is imminent and do not give significant amounts of money to the organization. Most importantly, suicide is not accepted, nor is physical violence.” Johnson described it as “at heart an apolitical, inward-oriented discipline.”

We have no membership rolls, no fees, no clergy, no initiation rituals, and no acts of worship. If you listen in on our daily conversations about the practice, they’re mostly about mundane-sounding things like taking ownership for our actions, improving our moral character, and being more considerate of others.

Discover What’s New - Blogs