Wait...you grew up in a cult?!

When I tell people I grew up in a cult, they usually picture the Branch Davidian compound or an FLDS ranch. I grew up in suburban America.

Some adults in the cult I grew up in used to laugh about outsiders calling us a cult. They joked about putting cauldrons on our porches to play into the rumors. They said we were called a cult because we didn’t believe in orthodox Christian beliefs like the trinity.

Overhearing these adult conversations made me curious to know for myself what other Christians said about us. One day I was browsing at a Christian bookstore and found a book about cults. I checked to make sure my parents weren’t in sight and looked in the index to see if it mentioned our group. There was a small entry for the group I had grown up in—The Way International (TWI). I felt like an imposter inside that evangelical bookstore, like there must be a scarlet letter that everyone could see alerting them I didn’t really belong in their store. 

The word cult is often used as a pejorative term to describe a fringe group. In fact, the definition in Webster makes it sound like that’s all a cult is: “a religion regarded as unorthodox or spurious.” Still, what qualifies as fringe or not is pretty subjective. As Reza Aslan puts it:

Vox @voxdotcom

What distinguishes a cult from a religion? “The biggest joke in religious studies is that cult + time = religion.” – @rezaaslan Stream Cults, Explained, our first episode of Season 2 of Explained, now on @netflix: netflix.com/explained

In other words, what’s fringe at one point may eventually become an accepted religion.

While this does happen and while fringe ideas are not necessarily problematic, the leaders who come up with fringe ideas are often narcissistic. Believing their unique ideas are better than everyone else’s, they manipulate people into following them and staying with a devotion rarely seen in other contexts. The people who flock to fringe ideas are usually at a vulnerable point in their lives and may be easily swayed by the promise of insider information.

All that to say, not believing in the trinity or hell or Christmas is not what harmed me or thousands of other members. The real problem in TWI was the inordinate amount of mental control and manipulation. Steven Hassan describes this control as an influence continuum, ranging from healthy amounts and types of influence to more extreme, cult versions. (Some people use the terms high-control group or religion instead.) Amanda Montell, author of the book Cultish, likes the term cultish to describe how some groups are controlling without quite warranting the word cult. (It’s important to note that cults and high control groups exist outside of Christianity as well.)

The International Cultic Studies Association acknowledges some of the difficulties with the word cult, but still finds the term useful and has a list of characteristics of these types of groups. I’ve quoted those here with some examples of how those fit TWI. My examples aren’t exhaustive, but I hope they will help clarify what I mean when I say I was raised in a cult. 

• “The group displays excessively zealous and unquestioning commitment to its leader and (whether he is alive or dead) regards his belief system, ideology, and practices as the Truth, as law.”

  • I have misgivings every time I write on this blog because we were so strongly discouraged from disagreeing with the cult.

  • My dad could never bring himself to say the founder, Victor Wierwille, was wrong about anything even when our splinter group began to teach some things differently. He could only say, “We retaught that.”

• “Questioning, doubt, and dissent are discouraged or even punished.”

  • This was one of the reasons I ultimately left. We were told to question everything, but that really meant to question mainstream Christianity and to only think what the cult told us.

  • The splinter group I grew up in followed a man named Chris Geer (former bodyguard of Wierwille who collected followers after Wierwille’s death). He was not as charismatic or controlling as Wierwille was, but he still ostracized people who were not respectful enough or taught something differently from him. It really upset me when a man I highly respected because of his level of education and knowledge of Biblical languages was ostracized by Chris Geer, and my parents would not go hear him teach when he came to town.

• “Mind-altering practices (such as meditation, chanting, speaking in tongues, denunciation sessions, and debilitating work routines) are used in excess and serve to suppress doubts about the group and its leader(s).”

  • Our group did speak in tongues, and we were encouraged to be speaking in tongues or thinking about God almost every waking moment.

• “The leadership dictates, sometimes in great detail, how members should think, act, and feel (for example, members must get permission to date, change jobs, marry—or leaders prescribe what types of clothes to wear, where to live, whether or not to have children, how to discipline children, and so forth).”

  • Our splinter group was not as controlling as the original TWI. Still, we were encouraged to have jobs that we could take anywhere God wanted us to go. (Many former TWI members had small businesses like window washing that a person could easily start up again anywhere.) As I planned what I would do after college, the expectation was that if I moved, I had to go to a city that had a group who followed Chris Geer.

  • We were taught to be very distrusting of our emotions. Emotions like fear and anxiety meant we did not trust God.

  • TWI had a typical fundamentalist approach to child raising—children are born sinful, expect immediate obedience, don’t spare the rod, etc.

• “The group is elitist, claiming a special, exalted status for itself, its leader(s), and its members (for example, the leader is considered the Messiah, a special being, an avatar—or the group and/or the leader is on a special mission to save humanity).”

  • Wierwille claimed that he had heard God’s voice audibly tell him that God would teach him the Word like it had not been known since the first century. This meant he could never be questioned, and we knew better than all the other Christians.

• “The group has a polarized us-versus-them mentality, which may cause conflict with the wider society.”

  • We were told the trinity (a foundational Christian belief) was wrong and that believing in the trinity was idolatry.

  • Even if we felt at odds with our local group for some reason, we had to stay there because no other church was acceptable. 

  • We were also told how other churches thought we were unacceptable due to our beliefs. When I left, I felt very strange trying other churches, like any minute someone might find out where I had come from and kick me out.

• “The leader is not accountable to any authorities.”

  • TWI did have a board, but in reality, no one could hold Wierwille accountable.

• “The group teaches or implies that its supposedly exalted ends justify whatever means it deems necessary. This may result in members’ participating in behaviors or activities they would have considered reprehensible or unethical before they joined the group (for example, lying to family or friends, or collecting money for bogus charities).”

  • I was fortunately spared actual experience with this, but I learned from reading Undertow: My Escape from the Fundamentalism and Cult Control of The Way International that a lot of sexual abuse happened. TWI taught that sex outside of marriage wasn’t wrong if everyone involved could “renew their minds” or not “get out of fellowship with God.” So women were often coerced into having sex with Wierwille and other leaders as a way of serving the men of God.

• “The leadership induces feelings of shame and/or guilt in order to influence and/or control members. Often, this is done through peer pressure and subtle forms of persuasion.”

  • TWI emphasized receiving revelation and believing God’s promises in order to receive things more than any other belief. So if something went wrong in our lives, anything from a flat tire to allergies to a death, we might be criticized (or our own brain would do it for us) for not listening to God, who probably told us something we didn’t listen to that would have averted the disaster, or for not believing the promises well enough to make God heal us, protect us, etc. I felt so much guilt over these things.

• “Subservience to the leader or group requires members to cut ties with family and friends, and to radically alter the personal goals and activities they had before they joined the group.”

  • My dad abandoned a plan to own a Sonic restaurant to focus more on the cult.

  • My parents always wanted to move outside the city but never did because it might interfere with being able to have meetings in their home.

  • TWI sent people to random places in their Word Over the World ambassador program. This is how my parents ended up in Oklahoma even though all their family were in Kansas. The splinter group I grew up in was a hodgepodge of people who had grown up in states all over the US and ended up in Oklahoma because of TWI.

• “The group is preoccupied with bringing in new members.”

  • We were supposed to bring new people as often as possible. I felt a lot of guilt because I rarely did. 

  • The purpose of Word Over the World program that brought my parents to Oklahoma was to start new groups over the whole world. 

• “The group is preoccupied with making money.”

  • TWI didn’t use the word tithe, which means giving 10% of one’s money to a church. They used the term abundant sharing, which meant we were supposed to give of our abundance, i.e. more than 10%. We were not supposed to give anywhere else to the point that some people felt bad tipping servers.

• “Members are expected to devote inordinate amounts of time to the group and group-related activities.”

  • Like many churches, we spent most of our Sundays and our Wednesday nights with the group, but we were expected to always be there and were questioned if we were not. Even if we were sick, we were told the best place to be was at fellowship hearing the Word. TWI also had classes we were expected to take. The class any new member was expected to take lasted two weekends, Friday night through Sunday afternoon. We were expected to retake this class any time it was offered. There were also intermediate and advanced classes. We also had times we would spend an entire day listening to teachings, called a day in the word, or a weekend, called an advance instead of the usual term retreat.

• “Members are encouraged or required to live and/or socialize only with other group members.”

  • Obviously, some groups get much more extreme with this. I’m fortunate that we were allowed to have friends outside the group. Still, we were encouraged to only have fellow members for our closest friends.

• “The most loyal members (the ‘true believers’) feel there can be no life outside the context of the group. They believe there is no other way to be and often fear reprisals to themselves or others if they leave (or even consider leaving) the group.”

  • According to the memoir mentioned above, many insiders did fear reprisals when TWI initially broke up.

  • For myself, I could imagine all the bad things that would be said about me if I left. I clearly remembered hearing one family who had left being called “a disappointment” and knew the same would be said about me. 

  • After I left, I had a feeling that something bad might happen to me at any time because I had left God’s protection. I knew intellectually that wasn’t true, but it was hard to shake that feeling.

In the end, my cult had no compound walls, no armed guards, no financial strings. Although some cults do insulate their members from the outside world in compounds and on ranches, others simply do it through indoctrination and fear. Yet that mental prison was extremely powerful, and I am still breaking down those walls to this day.