Tag: Fundamentalism

Dear Tanya,

I saw you last week on Compass and have since read your book about your experience in Hillsong. It was a most enjoyable read — your conversational style, your humour, sharing your pain, your observations, your joys, your caring.

I was reminded painfully (and sometimes with some brief moments of joy and appreciation) of my own experience in a religious cult. You were brought up in yours; I chose mine when in my late teens. Yours was what my cult would have called a “free and easy” one; by contrast I would describe mine as very tightly controlled and regimented. But your book has opened my eyes to see how similar the two different cults have been and are.

When I first left my cult I went straight for the libraries and bookshops to find books to read works that would help me make sense of my experience. What astonished me at the time was learning that though we had always thought of ourselves as unique, as a church teaching a way of life that could be traced back to the first and second chapters of Acts, and that no other church claiming to be Christian was the least bit like us, — what I learned was how very, very, similar, alike, we were to Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Hari Krishna or Moonies,. . . . you name it, they all share the same horrendous modus operandi (as you also came to learn). We could never imagine ourselves being like yours — Pentecostal, tongues, inviting outsiders to fellowship without prior vetting, music-dominated services, feel-good preaching — we were opposed to all of that stuff but your book has shown me that we were still the same.

Cults come in many guises.

But there are the same fundamental techniques of manipulation. There’s the same black-and-white thinking. I smiled when I read that you didn’t understand a word your first-year sociology lectures were talking about. I, too, could not make sense of my initial course in sociology. A minister had said things like our daily routines should be private and not the subject of study and I sure as hell could not make sense of trying to study how our lives worked according to scientific models. What I did not recognize at the time was that that sort of thinking was totally contrary to all I understood about life as something between “me and God and my church” — I could not recognize that I was living in a fairy tale world patterned after the Book of Revelation and Bible Prophecy.

There is the busy-ness of it all. That’s another common feature. There is no time for anything else. After our daily studies and meditations at home and our week-night bible studies and our other week-night speaking clubs and our weekly all day worship time and our other fellowship or “doing the work” time — there was no time to do anything but maintain the mind-game of fighting to hold oneself all together.

And the judgmentalism. Church members often commented to me that they expected me to become a minister eventually but what they did not know was that I had “confessed” to our authorities certain private doubts and alternative readings of the Bible (I actually came to realize I knew more about the Bible than those trained in our Bible Colleges) — and personal weaknesses. The authorities knew things that would always mean I would be deemed with some suspicion, some degree of wariness. I could continue to attend so long as I shut up about it all.

You mention gays. Yes, they “did not exist” in our church, either. Though looking back I can now see what I failed to see at the time about some of my associates. I knew then that they were struggling with a pain I could not fathom but now I can see what they were going through, or at least the root cause of their unfathomable pain in such a church.

The church — yours and mine — cannot understand “man’s ways” which are the “ways of the devil”. I think of the many people who needed just a little wisdom that could be gleaned from some basic understanding of psychology, people, say, with pasts that involved PTSD, with people who are at various points on the autism spectrum, with drug addicts, . . . our churches are pretty much guaranteed to make their conditions and suffering worse. But for a time they will continue to put on a brave face and play make-believe with their “new self”.

And yes, why is it that your church began in much the same way as ours — with a man who would today be condemned as a sexual predator and who sought some sort of escape from his personal failings by means of some charismatically shared visions.

And the pain of leaving and leaving it all behind. Discovering that one’s friends, one’s “brothers and sisters in Christ”, are nowhere to be found. They are behind cement walls and out of sight and hearing range. They are not fearing enough for your salvation to come looking for you. You are dead to them. That was one of the hardest parts, as you know. Discovering that people you believed were spiritual family, closer than your physical family, only cared for you insofar as they saw you as part of their “body of Christ”. Leave it and you vanish like a fly out the window.

When you wrote the book it was clear you were still working through your feelings about leaving. It took me some years to do the same. Quite some years. I went through various stages as you have done. I think by now I really do have it pretty much for most part out of my system. I think that because I no longer write about it as much as I used to and I have less interest in engaging with the topic as I used to.

What is also frustrating is seeing others leave only to turn to some other idionsyncratic cultish world of their own. They missed the point.

I have since studied other movements like the radicalization of extremists, in particular suicide bombers and Islamist terrorists. I wrote about various studies about those persons on this blog and was always mindful of how similar the recruitment processes and experiences of those young men and women were to yours and mine. Now we see new forms of extreme right-wing radicalization and conspiracy theory groups: there we see the same processes at work only without the religious cloaks that we are familiar with.

When I left my cult, I thought for a while I would enter a world of enlightenment and freedom. That was only partly true. I — and no doubt you, too — can see “mind-control” and radicalization techniques at work a mile off, whether it’s in the world of religion or politics or some other social movement – or should that be “antisocial” movement.

It was a good and refreshing reminder of the world of the cult experience, Tanya, and I thank you for your book. I hope others who are beginning to question their experience with Hillsong or something similar read it and find assurance through it — assurance that they are not mad, but very normal, and that they are saner than they have ever been for having those doubts.

Sincerely,

Neil

P.S. And omg, what a relief it is to be rid of that Hillsong Prime Minister who boasted he was secretly laying hands on every victim of a natural disaster that he touched, and who had no respect for fundamental democratic norms, and the rest… oh the pentecostal/cult smugness that just reeked through!

continuing from the previous post about Tanya Levin’s People in Glass Houses: An Insider’s Story of a Life In and Out of Hillsong:

The Amway technique:

“When couples are recruited into Amway, they are all treated pretty much the same.”

Prosperity gospel isn’t new. In the cult I was part of we would have deplored any suggestion we had anything in common with those “prosperity gospel” groups. With us, most of us struggled as a sign of humility, dedication and faith so that we could contribute to the prosperity of the elites, a prosperity that was needed for the doing of  “God’s work”

“Prosperity gospel isn’t anything new. It’s just since the nineties that it’s been really lapped up by a lot of the Western world as a standard part of Christianity. The late eighties were just awful for fundamentalist Christians.”

Selecting and focussing on the right bible verses . . .

“The Word of Faith movement had laid the perfect groundwork for prosperity gospel. It was as simple as ABC, and I don’t think they’d planned it at all. Number one, all of the bible is the Word of God and can be taken literally. Number two, you can take any verse of the bible and apply it to your life. Therefore, number three, you can take any verse of the bible and decide that that’s the one that counts, not the other ones. And finally, number four, we’ve been wrong about money all this time, when you look at the verses we can show you here.”

Each cult thinks itself distinctive, unlike any other. Take a step back and out, though, and you see how alike they all are:

“The Moonies are trained in exactly the same way, as are all cult devotees. Recruitment success ultimately depends on the quality of personal interaction with could-be members. The recruiter first learns something about the potential recruit. Then, to demonstrate that they have shared interests, the recruiter mirrors their target’s opinions. So, when an invitation to a workshop or a dinner is extended, it seems that the recruiter has something genuine to offer, based on the apparent compatibility of their beliefs or interests.”

This one is rightly elaborated on by Tanya in her book. I’ve addressed some other aspects of the process on this blog.

“They must be stupid’ is the reason given for cult involvement from many on the outside. Only the mentally ill, gullible or lonely would ever find themselves in a cult. Up close, nothing could be further from the truth.”

This one reminded me of the effect of the music, the light and temperature controls and visual layouts of major supermarkets to lower your resistance and encourage you to buy….

“These are altered state of consciousness techniques that initially induce calmness by giving the mind something simple to deal with and focusing awareness. Continued use brings on a feeling of elation and eventually hallucination. The result is the reduction of thought . . . .”

Today we see dire conspiracy theories about “them” — recall how it started….

“It was always a case of Us vs Them. The difference now is that We used to feel sorry for Them, and cheer on the day when They might be converted. Now, We are threatened by Them, the Great Unsaved, because They might take Our Freedom, Our Families, Our Profit Margins.”

Oh yes, and not just the Hillsongers…

“Many Hillsongers derive their beliefs about the world from anecdotal evidence, pastors’ ad-libbing and books written by Christians. The concept of applying usual logic to spirituality is abhorrent. My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways declares the Lord. ”

In an older post I used another word for this one, logicide:

“LOADING THE LANGUAGE

The group interprets or uses words and phrases in new ways so that often the outside world does not understand. This jargon consists of thought-terminating clichés, which serve to alter members’ thought processes to conform to the group’s way of thinking.”

Tanya Levin calls it Christianese. Some examples:

“Faith: The reason for all the things that don’t make any sense”

“Love: Feeling really special on the inside about anything at all; being nice to someone ”

“Grace: The whitewash process by which we only talk about the positive and no one has to be accountable for anything, for example,
‘When are you going to get a hold of the concept of grace?”

“Suffering for Jesus: Missing your connecting flight”

“Miracle: Anything that goes your way without trying too hard”

“Purpose driven: Unashamedly self-obsessed”

“Developing a negative, critical, defeatist attitude: Asking leadership why you’ve been told a bunch of lies”

In “my” old cult the equivalent of the next one was “Left the church” with the understanding that “they were never part of us to begin with” and “they are in the bond of Satan”:

“Now worshipping at another church: Left in disgust and outrage over being conned”

“Faithfulness to God’s will: Willing to put up with any amount of bad treatment from leadership and still go back to church”

This one, again, has wide application. In our cult it was a constant busyness with church activities plus fitting in a minimum of half-hour prayer and half hour bible study at home every day. But the principle applies even as far as society as a whole:

“Cult theorists argue that exhausting people helps maintain control. If all they’re craving is sleep and to see their kids, they’re not as likely to care where all the money’s going, or how nonsensical the ideologies are. The AoG calls it a commitment to the things of God.”

Words of wisdom for anyone who thinks “once a fundamentalist always a fundamentalist”, or that former cult members continue to be motivated by reactionary anger – spoken by one who escaped the ignorance of a cult upbringing, Tara Westover:

Anger has a role to play. Anger is a mechanism our brains use to get us — it’s a self-defence mechanism — your brain tells you to be angry so you get yourself out of situations that will do you harm.

Once you’re away, once you’re safe, you don’t need anger anymore. You can let it go and live a better life without it.

That’s from around the 40 minute mark of a broadcast interview with Tara Westover on ABC – Conversations. That’s the Australian ABC. The summary on the webpage:

Tara grew up in rural Idaho, in the shade of the Rocky Mountains.

Her family was ruled by her father, a radical Mormon survivalist who thought the End of Days was upon them.

His distrust of government meant Tara had no birth certificate and was home-schooled, which really meant she worked in her father’s junkyard.

When she became a teenager, her brother became violently abusive towards her.

Tara taught herself in secret and was admitted to Brigham Young University in Utah.

From there she went to Cambridge and Harvard, and had to educate herself about the wider world.

The interview was enlightening, so refreshing to listen to someone who has thought about her experiences in a constructive way. I’ll have to read her book, too.