Non-Toxic Cults, Part I

is there any such thing as a "good cult"? And can even bad cults do some good?

Screenshot from 2008 Mike Myers’ movie, The Love Guru.

When I was a high schooler in the late ‘80s, the Boston Church of Christ, a megachurch and predatory cult that targeted young people, was highly operational. It was not uncommon to hear its young recruits cheerfully asking in the hallways of Boston Latin School, “Do you want to go to a Bible study?”

I was both mildly curious and quietly defensive. They were probably selling a very different brand of Christianity than the gentle, generous theology I’d been raised with. I was fairly well inoculated against joining because of a deep belonging to my own progressive Christian tradition, and particularly because of how the “good cult” of my UCC church camp had formed me.

But then one of my closest friends and fellow drama nerds started going to BCC’s weekly house-church bible study. Then she escalated to other events: Sunday worship at the Boston Garden, Friday night devotionals, daily confessional calls with her Discipleship Partner. Soon it was her beautiful voice in the hallway inviting people to Bible Study. And her peers, especially younger students, started answering the siren song.

She was busy with church every night of the week and all weekend. She more or less dropped out of Drama Club, which was similarly demanding of time (and its own sort of cult). She was discouraged from friendships with other teens who had adamantly rejected the church, and encouraged to distance herself from her brothers and parents, who were erudite agnostics and increasingly alarmed at the changes in this person beloved to them.

Izi and I, however, oddly stayed close. I attribute this to the fact that unlike many of our friends who were mostly lapsed Catholics or cultural Protestants, I had a rudimentary theological anchor, the better to take on her new convictions. Probably there was a little misplaced Savior complex in the mix — a belief that I could call her back from this abyss.

Also: I was a pretty shy and lonely 16-year-old, and didn’t want to let a friendship with a fundamentally amazing human go (because Izi was the best, even as a low-level leader in a cult. Smart, kind, funny, compelling and truly loving).

What makes most people vulnerable to cult initiation to begin with is loneliness, like the kind I was suffering from. Isolation. Poor mental health. Basically, I’m describing adolescence and young adulthood! All humans crave belonging, meaning and a sense of safety. Cults offer those in spades, in particular to young people who are trying to individuate from their families of origin but who crave the security and ease of *some* kind of family.

But other people–Izi included, because I went and asked her as I was writing this post–join a cult simply because they want More. More meaning, depth, human connection not just as an antidote to loneliness, but for its own sake. They want to be part of something bigger and more beautiful and deeply healthful and helpful. This is a longing that all kinds of cults, good-and-bad-and-a-little-bit-of-each, can and do satisfy.

In Izi’s own words:

I think what made me a "mark" so to speak was the knowledge there was more to life and to me and to Us than I had been taught or told or shown during my upbringing, and the desperate hunger to find it. I was also coming to a moral crossroads within, and realizing I did not like the person I was becoming (high school romantic shenanigans) and that I needed help to find and walk a different path.

Why I say all this: the BCC was the best option I could find at the time, in terms of meeting these needs. And maybe that's the case with many cults and imbalanced ideologies and peoples' responses to them - it's the best you can do, it's the best you can find at the time. When you know better, you do better.

Izi and I walked the cobblestoned streets of downtown Boston where she lived, and debated the Bible, sexual morality, whether heaven and hell existed or not and who was going where. We skipped Junior Prom (she because the Church didn’t allow dating, me because I didn’t get asked and didn’t have the courage to ask anybody) and went to a G-rated movie with a bunch of her new freshmen friends.

I finally decided to go to a Bible study after all, to see what it was all about. Reader: it was amazing. It was like a whole week of my church camp compressed into one heady, delicious night, and so close to home! I was SO earnestly welcomed by every other person in the room (all teenagers! Just like me!). SO affirmed, even though they really didn’t know me at all. SO stimulated by the conversation: teenagers who wanted to get deep! And talk about real stuff! Out of an ancient book! And I was, of course, boldly invited back, again and again.

I didn’t learn the term “love-bombing,” a strong feature of cults, until much later. But I enjoyed the love-bombing tremendously. I was still deeply insecure after years of elementary and middle school bullying. In high school I had fallen in with a smart liberal crowd that was sophisticated and sharp-tongued, and I, the resident Pollyanna, often felt (and sometimes was treated) like a B-lister, which didn’t help scaffold my self-esteem. I remember being paralyzed into silence by social anxiety at a party. One of the older boys I was standing with turned to me after a few minutes and said, “Molly, you’re so vapid.” *Ouch.* Tom, if you ever see this–I contained multitudes then; and you chose to be mean over being curious.

The only place I felt truly safe and loved was at my church camp, but it was 200 miles away. This was well before cell phones and social media, so I missed out on the midyear camaraderie and working community there. My joy and God-esteem was a fleeting summertime harvest in those days.

All of this made me both an easy target for low-key high school bullying *from so-called friends* and an easy mark for the love-bombers.

But even as I wanted to slip under the warm electric blanket of the prodigal love the Church was offering, a community that really wanted me and promised not to hurt me, something held me back. A gnawing in my stomach. A distant ping in my brain. Was this love real? I mean: they didn’t really know me.

Then again, did my own church camp friends really know me? They knew the me I presented at camp: the Pollyanna, yes, but unguarded, confident, funny, exuberant. They didn’t know a lot of details of my home life, or my politics or interests, all the stuff I thought made me Me. And while the timeline was longer–it usually took at least until Wednesday of a typical camp week for us to start saying we loved each other–was that love any more real than what the Boston Church was offering? Maybe they were both cults.

The week after I went to Bible Study, the gnawing and pinging grew louder as the social pressure to return grew. I had multiple humans voluntelling me to come back to the Church. And God calling to me in a small voice from an impossible distance. I was on a belay line in a deep canyon, and the voice calling from above held the other end of the rope.

Fast forward a year. I never went back to Bible study. I did stay friends with Izi. And I was shocked, on returning from a senior year spring break trip to Soviet Russia, to find out that Izi’s parents had hired an exit-counselor (aka cult deprogrammer) to undo Izi’s indoctrination. Her parents had told her they were going to visit a family friend for the afternoon, and kept her there for days as the exit-counselor (himself a former cult member) systematically dismantled the belief system the Church had instilled in her over the previous 2 years.

I nervously asked Izi to hang out, wondering: was she OK after this ordeal? Who would she be? Was she psychologically and spiritually shattered? Furious? Grateful? Ashamed? I gulped. An insecure, selfish thought intruded. Was she so changed that she wouldn’t want to be friends with me anymore? Her complicit Christian Lite friend? Maybe she’d race back into the arms of her longtime friends from well before me, her secular, snarky friends, utterly rejecting the last 2 years of her life.

I don’t remember our whole conversation (nor does she), but I remember we were riding the T on the red line where it comes out from underground to cross the Charles River into Cambridge. Haltingly, I asked her a question that seemed of paramount importance to me at the time.

“Do you still believe in God?”

She made Izi-style extreme eye contact with her huge baby blues, her Brooke Shieldian eyebrows furrowed in earnest, took my hands and said, “Molly, I will always love God.”

I sighed in relief.

When I asked her about this conversation, she said:

For what it is worth, I do not regret one moment of the time I spent in the BCC. There was so much goodness in what occurred within, and some without. You can't get up at 5am and read the Bible and pray for an hour every day alone, as a teenager, and not be changed. The sky would open. I experienced times of true fearlessness and direct connection. I allowed myself to be reviled by others for the choices I made, and did not care. I am also so profoundly grateful to my Mom and my family that I did not stay a moment longer than I did. That exit-counseling weekend facilitated one of the most profound awakenings of my life. The whole thing, the whole thing was a gift. PLUS I got to skip the whole sketchy teenage sex thing, not a small bonus (according to me).

After leaving the church (and high school!), Izi eventually found her way into other profound relationships–including a best-friendship in college that reparented and deeply healed her–and a series of communities that met her needs for mystic spiritual meaning, service and connectedness. Here we are in Berkeley, soon after I moved here in 2016:

Izi is lucky that she landed as well as she did, emotionally and spiritually, after leaving BCC (well, lucky and blessed! And hardworking. And the beneficiary of So Much Prayer, she says).

Often one of the devastations of leaving a cult is that it takes away a lot of the architecture of faith. Of course you can reject the teachings of a malicious or misguided religious cult and still love God, as Izi did. But for many, it’s surgery without anesthesia, and with the dullest of scalpels.

My denomination, the UCC, is a common first stop for spiritual refugees from high-control Christianity. More rarely, it becomes a permanent home. Maybe as a non-creedal, non-hierarchical tradition we aren’t clear enough in what we believe to provide a good alternative container for the gooey mess that people are when they are leaving fundamentalist religions.

My mentor Harvey, a therapist with decades of experience working with people who have been abused and victimized by cults, says that the moment of leaving is the most vulnerable time (same with the moment of leaving an abusive relationship, which he calls a “cult of 2”).

You’d think that people would have an enormous surge of self at a time like this–after all, they found the courage to leave, which takes a lot of self–but at this moment, they are very vulnerable to both being wooed or bullied back into the cult/relationship, or finding themselves in a new bind. So maybe it’s that even the UCC is too structured, a little too much like the church they left (as disorganized as our iteration of religion is).

Izi has some important thoughts here too:

Something I want to add to this part of the story and to the overall topic of the time shortly after someone leaves a cult - and actually I can only speak for myself and from my own experience but it might be relevant to others and the dynamic in general:

If you consider a human being to be a series of psychological levels and layers, it's like a whole floor of the building of a person is removed when one leaves a cult. It's the outermost level of identity and the one we are most familiar with in ourselves, at least consciously and in each other, and it also feeds into deeper sub-conscious layers of identity and belief.

You leave a group like that - and it's gone. What the hell do you believe? Who are you? What do you like and not like? How do you spend your time? What kind of future do you want? WTF is going on here and how do you fit in?

It's disorienting and de-stabilizing, perhaps especially for a younger person. It's also a tremendous opportunity to re-build a self with a different foundation, hopefully a truer and more authentic one. If I had this part to do over again, I would stay with the depth that opened in me in response to the pressure and shock of the exit-counseling. Instead, it became an un-understood touchstone for many years until after further development I could look back and see what had happened in those moments.

As someone with very little religious or spiritual trauma myself (having been raised in a good, or at least a relatively non-destructive, cult), it’s hard for me to organically understand just how destabilizing it is to leave your tradition.

What a lot of people who are deconstructing/decolonizing fundamentalist Christianity seem to need is to read, reflect, and only gather with other people also deconstructing or have already done that work. What they don’t necessarily need is to immediately pour themselves into a new container, however porous and flexible, where they will have to stand and sit and sing and pray and go along with what other people are doing en masse and unquestioningly.

And frankly, while in the liberal church we do less harm (mostly because we are non-hierarchical and therefore have fewer opportunities), we also still do plenty of bad things. I have stories!

All of this leads me to an important question: is there any such thing as a good cult? One that answers our legitimate human needs for spiritual and practical meaning-making, healing, belonging & connectedness, moral clarity, depth, purpose, right action? Without any of the bad side effects?

I’ll be back tomorrow with more thoughts.

Love!

Molly