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This week we’re diving into cults, and I’ll give you one guess why.
I grew up as a missionary kid in Budapest, Hungary where my parents worked at an international school affiliated with the Greater Grace World Outreach church which was previously known as The Bible Speaks. This church was based in Baltimore and I’m thankful I grew up at least geographically separated because it turns out that this organization has some cult-y vibes! I had always been weirded out by the throngs of people that followed founder ‘Dr’ Carl Stevens around whenever they’d visit Budapest for our annual European Conference and I was right to. While in college a dear friend, my previous youth pastor, shared the report that I had heard whispers about on and off for years. An ‘evil report’ that members were not ever supposed to read. Eye roll. Turns out that back in 1981, before this church defrauded a woman out of millions of dollars, went bankrupt, changed names and moved from Massachusetts to Maryland, there was a report by Christian Research Institute1 declaring TBS to be pretty cult like!
TBS has, up to the time of this writing, also maintained an orthodox, biblical2 position on those doctrines most essential to the Christian faith. Thus, we do not consider TBS a non-Christian cult, but rather a Christian ministry.
However, since the mid-1970s The Bible Speaks has been a subject of great controversy in New England and other areas in America and abroad where its members have been active, and the relationship of TBS with numerous other evangelical bodies has been strained. The underlying cause of many of these problems has been TBS' unusual concept of pastoral authority, which tends to both highly exalt the leadership of the ministry and stifle any critical evaluation of their teaching and decisions.
Instead of taking this warning and addressing the concerns, they forbade people from reading this report and leaned in hard to ‘pastoral authority’ and all kinds of weird beliefs about Stevens and kept on glorifying pastors.3
Adherents to the Bible Speaks are taught that Carl Stevens is God's man, God's delegated authority… the claim to being God's man and His delegated authority has placed Stevens in a position of unquestioned authority in the minds of many Bible speaks adherents. Many quotations from Bible Speaks tapes and literature give the plain implication that it would be wrong to question God's delegated authority. To do so would, in effect, be questioning God. To begin with, as you will recall, Pastor Stevens alleges that God promised him an anointing upon every message he would ever preach, thus making his messages virtually God's words.
There is a distinct tendency among Bible Speaks adherents to elevate Dr. Stevens to a point bordering on adoration.
I remember some real gross cult like adoration of this guy and even after he died,4 it passed on to his replacement and pretty much all the pastors in GGWO previously known as TBS. If you care to learn more there’s a whole podcast about it called Children of Grace, you can click around this website or read a 2004 Baltimore Sun article and of course last year’s 4 part Baltimore Banner expose on the years of non-handling of child sexual abuse allegations that I was interviewed for 5.
And I could go on and on about how white American evangelical Christianity is in actuality a cult of Christian Nationalism but others have already done so much better than me.
My other brush with cult-like enterprises was when my Dad tried to set me up in a multi-level marketing thing called Pre-paid Legal when I was in college. Luckily I was too lazy to set anything up so never got drawn into that pyramid scheme. In defense of Dad, I think he just wanted me to have some spending money because we were poor missionaries.
Finally, I’ll leave you with wisdom from Octavia Butler that I can’t stop thinking about and believe we should all keep in mind when looking for a leader.
Choose your leaders
with wisdom and forethought.
To be led by a coward
is to be controlled
by all that the coward fears.
To be led by a fool
is to be led
by the opportunists
who control the fool.
To be led by a thief
is to offer up
your most precious treasures
to be stolen.
To be led by a liar
is to ask
to be told lies.
To be led by a tyrant
is to sell yourself
and those you love
into slavery.”
―Octavia E. Butler,Parable of the Talents
Now, prepare to activate your higher vibrations as you try not to lose yourself in one of these.
CULTISH: The Language of Fanaticism by Amanda Montell
Amanda Montell explores how cults6 use language within their ranks and as a recruitment tool because it ‘provides a shared culture of understanding.’ Crucially, she acknowledges that the definition of cult itself is quite nebulous, that the word’s power can be diluted with overuse and it has a wide range of consequences — some cults result in mass suicides and some with minor dehydration.
Montell herself uses a modern, youthful7 , quippy voice as she highlights the powerful linguistic techniques that cults rely on to psychologically manipulate people. Tools like: redefinitions, euphemisms that obscure truth, catch phrases and secret codes, chants, mantras and even the used of forced silences, re-christenings and speaking in tongues. She includes the major players like 3HO, Jonestown, Heaven’s Gate, Scientology and the Branch Davidians as well as less8 harmful ones like social media influencers who use psychobabble to hawk supplements, CrossFit, SoulCycle and multi-level marketing schemes which flourish in the internet age.
She is full of pop culture references and sassy asides but also has over 20 pages of cited works at the end so has done a fair bit of research, inspired by her father’s stories about his own experience growing up in a cult. Montell approaches the topic with curiosity and empathy, delving into a few of her own personal brushes with cults9 and acknowledges that these groups prey on what humans long for; a sense of purpose, belonging, community and identity. Too bad they eventually morph into a dangerously vile ‘us vs them’ mentality that vilifies or even dehumanizes outsiders and declared insiders as ‘the chosen’.
Some of my biggest takeaways were the concepts of Thought Terminating Cliches10, the dark and offensive nature of casually throwing around the phrase ‘drink the kool-aid’, the existence of some of the truly bewildering organizations and how much danger results from our human tendency towards confirmation bias and the sunk cost fallacy. As a lover of words, I was sickly fascinated and horrified by the power in their weaponization and found this topic endlessly interesting. Reading this felt like a preventative medicine— to be able to name and look out for when these concepts are being used around me. Montell concludes with asking if there is a healthy way to participate in some of these less harmful groups. Ultimately, she encourages constant vigilance for any situation that has us abandoning questions, logic and emotional instincts which are essential to being human.
It’s also undeniable that American workout culture carries a strong Protestant charge…
Just look at the general vocabulary we use to talk about fitness: cleanse, detox, purify, obedience, discipline, perfection. These terms have unquestionably Biblical undertones, and when repeated day after day, the language of cleansing and purification can condition listeners to believe that achieving ‘perfect fitness’ is possible, if you try hard enough, and that it will in turn, ‘perfect’ their whole life.
THE GIRLS by Emma Cline
Evie is 14 years old during the summer of 1969 and is waiting for her new life at boarding school to begin. Doomed by her own mediocrity and ‘the suffocating constancy of myself’, she grows enthralled with a group of teen girls who carry themselves with a predatory grace and confidence. Feeling abandoned by friends and family, she joins them at their ranch commune run by a charismatic and controlling man where lines are blurred and lives are changed.
This is a fictionalization of the Manson murders from the POV of a sidelined teenage girl, desperate for an understanding of herself in a world where she feels little value. Alternating between a grown Evie in the present and her teenaged self in ‘69, this explores the specific vulnerability of teen girls as a cycle. Cline focuses on teen girls because as they mature, they both grow in power and lose it in their quest for meaning, understanding, approval and place. They are very often heavily influenced by a media concerned only with fostering dependence and profit, controlled by bewildered parents and manipulated by men who are used to getting what they want. Similar to Cline’s The Guest11, this also deals with desire, choice, a morphing identity and (dis)empowerment but with a very different narrator. I enjoyed the running parallel of teen girls to sharks— defiant, powerful, impossible to look away from and predatory in attitude though they aren’t actually at the top of the food chain.
With sharp descriptions and character work the tone here is heady with a dreamy, drugged like atmosphere that evokes a hot, sleepy California summer which barely covers up a growing darkness. It is full of specific sensory descriptions that blend the beautiful with the garish, grotesque and gross all the while admonishing the reader’s fascination with true crime and interest in the minutiae. There are little insertions of “later I’d find out” sprinkled throughout the flashbacks that build up the mystery, level up the tension and also pull you out of headiness into a visceral feeling of slow growing terror. Note that while not horror levels gory, it does get fairly violent and the nonchalant way some of those events are recounted can be jarring.12
I waited to be told what was good about me. I wondered later if this was why there were so many more women than men at the ranch. All that time I had spent readying myself, the articles that taught me life was really just a waiting room until someone noticed you—the boys had spent that time becoming themselves.
CULT CLASSIC by Sloane Crosley
Lola is content writer and serial monogamist who has led a “corrosive and insurmountably haunting love life for decades”. Recently engaged, she begins to run into her ex-boyfriends all over the city which is causing her to be way more introspective than she’d like. Turns out her ex-boss Clive, previously an editor at Modern Psychology magazine, created a start-up named Golconda13 and is using Lola as a beta test subject to test out their system of ‘ethical persuasion’14. Clive and his followers employees hope to eventually sell packages to wealthy clients that encourage certain behaviors with energy, vibes and social media manipulation also known as ‘massaging circumstances’. As the ex-boyfriend interactions increase, Lola unwillingly confronts her past actions and attempts to understand herself, her relationship habits and her future before taking matters into her own hands.
I get a huge kick out of Sloane Crosley’s writing voice even from the dedication15 and epigraph.16 Witty and acerbic, her humor is snappy and fast which could take a bit to ‘get’ but I love her books of essays and throughly enjoyed this tale, weird and meandering as it was. There are relationship rabbit holes, secret lairs, codewords, topknots and expensive espresso machines and while I’ve never had an ex so couldn’t relate on that level, I was drawn in by the combinations of the ridiculous and the mundane, the sacred and the secular. Though it can get quite absurdist, it is grounded in the very human tendency to search for love, meaning, acceptance and self-understanding. The spiritual mumbo jumbo mixed with corporate speak was a particular delight.
Romance may be the world’s oldest cult. It hooks you when you’re vulnerable, scares the shit out of you, hold your deepest fears as collateral, renames you something like ‘baby,’ brainwashes you, then makes you think that your soul will wither and die if you let go of a person who loved you. So you better have a good goddamn reason for saying ‘nah, not enough.’ The love lobby is worse than the fun lobby. More misery, more addiction, more heads on spikes. And for what?
have you ever been in a cult?
what culty books would you add here?
whoever they are
disagree but ok
who are of course always male
i remember him just being “Pastor” without a last name, like he was Prince or something
from the fuck the patriarchy shelf
and cult adjacent organizations
but not juvenile
potentially?
i was especially fascinated by the scientology story
these are used to discourage critical thought and elicit an immediate emotional response. for example the christianese phrases like ‘just trust god’s plan’ or ‘the bible says it i believe it that settles it’ or ‘god works in mysterious ways’ etc etc
from the anti-heroines shelf
intentionally so
which means a source of great wealth
don’t call it mind control!
“for the men. for some of the men”
“hell is other people - sarte”
“I waited to be told what was good about me. I wondered later if this was why there were so many more women than men at the ranch. All that time I had spent readying myself, the articles that taught me life was really just a waiting room until someone noticed you—the boys had spent that time becoming themselves.”
This knocked me over
Wow great list. I gotta read Sloane Crosley asap.
Not fiction. But I think Under the Banner of Heaven is a great culty read that shows how impacts of one leader can last for generations and splinter into more cults and crimes. TV show severance is my current fav culty watch!