You may have noticed that I'm not using my name in this article. It's not (total) cowardice, but when you tell others that you have spent over 20 years in a cult, you imagine some perplexed reactions. There must have been something very wrong with you or, if not, you must have suffered terrible mental violence. Since most people can't relate to your experience, and it would take too long to describe it, you generally dismiss it and go on with your life.
I have decided to write about cult life because I have come to realize that it's not as "otherwordly" as I had thought. It's just the extreme expression of a departure from the historical, confessional faith. Any Christian who feels the weight of unbiblical rules and regulations superimposed by a church that implicitly believes we are saved by grace but stay saved by works is experiencing in part the reality of life in a cult. Just as the book Lord of the Flies can be profitable as a clear and vivid illustration of what a society can become in the absence of rules, a look at a cult can be an effective wake-up call to the dangers of Christian relativism.
I will not go into details because I think most people know what cults normally include: alienation from previous family and friends, deviation from commonly accepted sexual or marital practices, unquestioned obedience to one leader (to the suppression of conscience and common sense), questionable methods of child raising, and indoctrination. I think that the question most haunting for many ex-cult members is, If certain practices of this cult are so clearly immoral, why did I accept them?
That's when many are tempted to fall into the "I was brainwashed" answer. But was I? I remember joining a happy bunch of people who proclaimed to love Jesus and who were intent on saving the world. Coming from a totally uninformed adherence to formal Catholicism, I had no clue as to what true Christianity was all about. These happy people read the Bible and interpreted it in a way that made sense.
We were young and wanted to be radical. We wanted to take the Bible "literally" and do what Jesus "really taught." Churches were bogus, full of hypocrites, tangled up in doctrine. We didn't need doctrine. The Bible was meant to be self-explanatory and easy to understand. We just had to take it literally.
"Everyone who forsakes not…." We abandoned our previous family and friends (unless they were willing to follow us or to support us financially) and were ready to abandon even our spouses and children at a moment's notice, for the overall benefit of the group. We took Acts 2:44-45 to an extreme, in the misconceived notion that most of the Bible was a blueprint for our conduct today. We gave up all that we had and lived without a penny in our pockets, not just in the coziness of some community, but even as we traveled, "going into all the world to preach the gospel to every creature." It was exciting and we really felt the way the first disciples might have felt in their times.
We discarded the Ten Commandments because Jesus summarized them in the word "love." Since love was the only law, anything done in love was right. For the sake of unity, we had leaders who told us what were the practical applications of that love, ultimately referring to one leader, the group's founder, who from the start had assumed almost total infallibility. Sadly, the word "love" soon assumed distorted, even grotesque shades of meaning.
"Bible prophecy" was also emphasized and played a great role in keeping us in the cult. Our leader had the only true interpretation and we had better keep reading his writings on current events, since Jesus could come back any minute and we didn't want to be caught unprepared!
Our evangelization programs were intense. Since the salvation of those we met could very well depend on us, we used every possible means to drive them to a decision. Our main appeal was our outward ecstatic joy (the victorious life was mandatory, and if you were not victorious you could even be plagued by demons), our outward manifestations of love, and a message that seemed different and exciting.
We also took seeker-oriented methods, as everything else, to an extreme. Besides the evangelical drive, we needed converts and supporters to survive financially as a group. So whatever people wanted to hear, we (or rather, the leaders) could always modify the group's doctrine at a moment's notice. The change in doctrine was seen as "new revelation" by God to our leader and prophet.
Once a person was drawn into the group, however, he or she was kept there by both constant excitement and fear. The excitement was provided by upbeat music, great testimonies, constant change and travel, and frequent new revelations. The fear was strictly connected to a doctrine of works. In a thin veneer of orthodoxy, the cult taught that salvation was only by grace through faith. On the other hand, heavenly rewards were promised only to those obedient to the Word (as interpreted by the cult), and the wrath of God seemed to still dangle heavily over our heads.
We were not brainwashed. We were just following a person who claimed to "explain the Bible as it really is." How is that different from what you may find, thankfully on a much lower scale, in many churches today?
"Most churches don't do violence to our conscience or common sense." Don't they? Even if we want to ignore the crazy scandals most of us have heard from friends attending mainstream churches, what about the everyday parent who totally alienates his children by insisting on a strict form of pietism at home that will make him or her accepted by the rest of the congregation, without bothering to see if those regulations are true biblical mandates or manmade traditions? What about the way some Christians alienate their friends with a rigid evangelistic message that makes no real sense to them either, but they make no effort to question because it has to be "believed by faith"? What about the countless books, CDs, meetings, and retreats advertised daily for a church addicted to some spiritual inspirational high? What about the evangelists that so many follow to the letter, without "searching the Scriptures daily to see if those things are so"?
The way God took me out of that situation deserves an endless doxology. The process was gradual as I became more and more interested in the lives and writings of other Christians throughout history. I was able to find a copy of a devotional by C. H. Spurgeon and biographies of George Muller and Adoniram Judson. As odd as it may seem, the fact that they could prayerfully, but freely, choose with which denomination they wanted to affiliate came as a surprise to me. For the first time, I believed that I could do the same without being struck from heaven.
Other realizations occurred at the same time. It was as though my eyes were finally opened. Providentially, right then some friends (ex-members) invited my family to stay at their house for a while, and we were able to visit them without ever returning to the cult.
After leaving, I joined a mainstream church and spent countless hours studying. The Internet had just been launched, and I was able to find invaluable information. I really didn't know what was right or wrong anymore, and I was determined to find out. The most logical source of biblical interpretation seemed to be the historical church, so I went back to the beginning, to the church fathers, Augustine, and especially the Reformers.
After reading of the controversy between Arminian and Calvinist views, I decided to read some of Calvin's writings and was immediately surprised by their clarity. It was obviously the most scriptural view of all. It was far from being seeker-oriented, and not always pleasing to the ear; but I figured that if I wanted to call myself a Christian, I should stick to purely biblical teachings. At the same time, I still had many questions that needed to be answered.
It was a heart-wrenching time. While struggling to keep my family going, emotionally and financially, after landing with no money in my pockets in a world that had become alien after 20 years of voluntary estrangement (I felt, on a light note, as the character Adam did in the movie Blast from the Past), I embarked on a desperate search for truth. I questioned and scrutinized every single tenet of my faith, sorting between facts and feelings.
God's law slashed my heart in all its sharpness as I realized that I could not really blame anyone else for the evil I had done. I found forums online where ex-members were discussing their experiences. Many of them were justly accusing the leaders for terrible deeds that had scarred their lives forever-episodes of child abuse, sexual abuse, deceit, and more. In my case, God had his hand on my heart and revealed very clearly that I was, in one way or another, even if indirectly, guilty of the same crimes against others and sins against him. I just could not ease my conscience by labeling myself as a victim.
While the law had done its job, it was harder to find the gospel. Churches swayed between an insistence on a holy life and a bountiful, yet unscriptural, dispensation of easy comfort, based on the forgiving nature of a god that must be at least as nice as we are. Even if I could read the true gospel message in the Scriptures or other writings, it seemed too good to be true-at least for me.
After a while, God led me "by chance" to a small Reformed church almost in my own backyard! There, for the first time I heard the gospel preached week after week, in no uncertain terms, and I had a visible and tangible expression of it in the correct administration of the sacraments. I saw an example of biblical church government, truly founded on Scripture, with a strong system of weights, balances, and accountability that involves the entire congregation, encouraging informed choices and theological awareness in all. I realized that a lack of a scriptural church government and a tolerance (if not an encouragement) of a "lone-ranger Christianity" produces fertile ground for the development of cults, moderate or radical alike.
For the first time, I realized that the Scriptures must be approached with an attitude of humility that allows us to consider the view of other Christians, and particularly of the historical church throughout the ages (as a cult, we believed that we had the only true interpretation of Scriptures-guess who were the 144,000?). I also acquired a particularly keen appreciation for the creeds, catechisms, and confessions that were written to protect the church from heresies such as ours.
The experiences of others who exit a cult are not always as easy as mine, and I credit God for opening a way before my feet. I know of many other people who have left this particular cult in shambles, totally confused, with broken homes. Some have committed suicide and there was recently in the news the story of a murder-suicide by a young ex-cult member. Others have been kidnapped by well-meaning parents who placed them under psychologically violent treatments. Most people, disillusioned by this experience, have abandoned religion altogether.
I am grateful to God for his guidance throughout my life, and even for this experience, which has produced a resiliency that I probably would not have had otherwise. Besides, the thought of having wasted more than 20 years of my life has caused me to set my life on a higher intensity, working harder than I would have ever worked before in my pursuit of the truth (through a confessional study of Scriptures and attendance to the preaching of the Word and sacraments), and in the truly exciting effort to glorify God and enjoy him forever in unity with the historical militant church as it continues to journey on.
