The book received largely positive reviews, with praise for the detailed coverage of the movements it profiled, as well as the quality and usage of comparative analysis.

Then the Branch Davidians are discussed, notorious for their standoff with the ATF in Waco in 1993, concluding in a fire of contested cause that killed over seventy members of the group.

He then discusses Heaven's Gate, a group that had killed themselves en masse in March 1997 in California to supposedly ascend to the next level of human existence.

He also compares Heaven's Gate and the Solar Temple, describing their commonalities as striking; he views both as giving a "space-age" version of a classical salvation story, where the members would transcend the material world.

Noting other commonalities in ideology, he classifies the pair as, unlike the other groups, a "mystical Apocalypse of deathly transcendence", where the mass suicide would lead to escape from earth and an achievement of grace.

[10] Scholar of religion Jeanne Halgren Kilde praised the book as "particularly valuable" in its usage of comparative perspective,[1] while sociologist Anson Shupe called its analysis "first rate" with a "clear writing style".

[7] Hans G. Kippenberg, writing for The Journal of Religion, called the work "a remarkable step toward understanding and explaining religious violence".

[11] Thomas Robbins compared the book in design to How the Millennium Comes Violently, describing that work as a "less conceptually subtle volume" in discussing similar concepts with more neat categorization.

He criticized a "discontinuity of nuances" in the book, with the analytical model perhaps needing to be reformulated to allow for more emphasis on variability in external versus internal causes.

[9] In a review essay by Nathalie Luca, she wished that there was more that had referred to the dynamic between cults and the anti-cult movement, and noted "the limits of participatory ethnography have perhaps been reached", but that this would require a group of researchers and would be "a real scientific challenge".

[7] Adam Lutzker and Judy Rosenthal, in a review of the book along with two other works, analyzed it in the lens of the concept of the unheimlich, the uncanny.

They described all three book as having "improved understanding of both modernity and the wealth of social movements and social worlds that make up contemporary society"; they noted that although written by sociologists it was less focused on language than the other books they discussed, and described it as "an outstanding contribution to the political analysis of millenarian groups.