So, You Want to Join a Cult - Part VII

I discussed in Part VI the "It made sense to me" aspect of joining a cult. Even almost 20 years after leaving The Way, I don't define a cult by their beliefs. Some people look at the science fiction aspects of Scientology, or the ahistorical Mormon records of what they say went on in North America, or Muhammad's ascent to heaven on a horse that Muslims believe and laugh at the silliness of it all. They seldom examine their own beliefs in a man being raised from the dead, a virgin birth, a talking donkey and walls being brought down by trumpets and see how ridiculous they might seem to an outsider. Any religious belief is going to look bizarre to someone from outside that religion. For this reason I don't look at non-mainstream beliefs, in and of themselves, as evidence of cultishness, but at the actions of those in the alleged cult. 

One of the ways that a cult draws people in is for whatever their teachings are to make some kind of sense, at least the things that new people are being exposed to. A second method is to cultivate a sense of community, a sense of belonging, that you are engaged in something greater than yourself. 

I completed the Power for Abundant Living (PFAL) class on March 31, 1978. During the class I became aware that the Bible study at Tom and Joe's apartment was not the only one in the area, but was still unaware of the extent of The Way, or even that The Way was an organization. From April through July of 1978 I attended Bible studies, "twigs" in Way parlance, sporadically. However, in August of that year I ended up going to rural Ohio to attend the "Rock of Ages" annual festival. 

In 1969, fresh from expanding his reach by recording his PFAL class and co-opting groups of "Jesus People" hippies on both coasts, Way founder Victor Paul (VP) Wierwille formed what he called "The Way Corps", ostensibly a leadership training program. After a false start, what eventually became the First Way Corps group was assembled in August of 1970 for a two year stint at Wierwille's farm, grandiosely dubbed "International Headquarters". Around this time, a group of PFAL graduates, led by Donnie Fugit, a charismatic evangelistic type, participated in what later became the Word Over the World (WOW) Ambassador program. Up until this point expansion was more or less organic. People who had taken the PFAL class told their friends and family, and if enough were interested, then "International Headquarters" would mail out some cassette tapes (or videotapes if the potential group was large enough). Young "believers" often recruited for PFAL classes at their college campuses and several colleges became Way hotspots. The pilot WOW program would take this beyond "witnessing" in one's everyday life to a targeted missionary-like program where the primary purpose of the "WOWs" would be to "witness" and run PFAL classes. 

Previous to this, The Way had been conducting "summer schools", where interested people could come to attend workshops and classes. At the end of the summer, usually in early August, before the "kids" had to return to school, there would be a weekend music festival send-off. In August 1971, at this music festival, called "The Return of the Rock of Ages", (a reference to Jesus Christ as the rock of all ages) Wierwille announced the formation of the Word Over the World Ambassador program and invited anyone interested to come back in a month or so in order to receive their assignments. The first wave of WOWs would spread out from Ohio In October and return the following August. After tis, the Way "ministry year" would begin and end in August at the "Rock of Ages". Every August, at subsequent "Rock of Ages" festivals, a new group of WOW Ambassadors would be sent out, the previous year's group would be welcomed "home" and a new batch of Way Corps would start their training. Each year there would be more WOWs commissioned, there would be more Way Corps starting their training, and more attendees at "The Rock" until until in 1978, my first year, there were around 20,000 people from all over the world. 

When I first agreed to attend The Rock in 1978, I had no idea what I was getting into. I just thought a road trip would be a cool thing to do. (I'm a sucker for road trips) I was living with my parents and was between jobs, so a week in Ohio didn't really interfere with anything. I was recruited to drive a Way woman and her three children from New York to Ohio. She and her husband (who was already in Ohio for something called The Advanced Class) and kids were going to be WOWs that year. Joe (of Joe and Tom, whose apartment I originally attended Bible studies at) would be providing a hotel room for me to stay in during the week. We left New York in the late morning and after driving all day and into the night, arrived at a huge parking lot in the midst of Ohio farmland. I slept in the car. When I woke in the morning I was surrounded by thousands of Way people, greeting each other with variations of "God bless you". There were people pitching tents, families in RVs and believers driving in every day from area hotels. People were polite, people cared for each other, there was a distinct lack of chaos, trash was picked up, food was abundant and it was like it was one, big, happy family. While tiny compared to the half-a-million-strong Woodstock almost a decade earlier, you got the feeling that this group would be just as loving, just as organized, if there was half a million people. 

The six days that I spent there got me one giant step toward getting entangled in a cult.  

Start from the Beginning: Part I

So, You Want to Join a Cult - Part VI

Why would someone stay in a cult? Aren't the mind control aspects of a cult obvious enough to drive off all but the stupidest among us? The involvement in all details of your life? The crazy teachings? Why would anyone continue to involve themselves in something so harmful? There are several reasons:

* What the cult is telling you, on some level, makes sense

* You feel like you belong to something greater than yourself

* Outside pressure serves only to confirm the "us against them" narrative the cult has been feeding you

* The perceived benefits outweigh any problems

* People don't like to admit that they're wrong about anything

One of things that people who have never been in a cult point to is how "outlandish" cult doctrine seems. One of the main deviations from mainstream Christianity in The Way was the belief that Jesus was not God, but was "merely" a man. Many Christian denominations point to this doctrinal aberration as prima facie evidence that a group is a cult. Some will include established denominations like the Mormons in their definition of "cult"  due to this deviation from the norm. While it is true that the vast majority of Christians believe that Jesus was both God and man, there have always been outliers. Having a different doctrinal position no more makes a group a cult than a preference for white shirts and ties instead of clerical collars does. What most people fail to do when it comes to religion, is to apply the "outsider test" to their own faith. Would your own beliefs, if examined by someone outside your religion, make sense? Or would they be considered outlandish, or even ridiculous? 

Most people underestimate the influence of their culture on what they believe. In the United States, it's not only their family's specific religious tradition in which they were raised, but the common belief that there is a God who created all that there is, that you could pray to him, and that there was an afterlife consisting of heaven and hell. Even people who don't belong to any religion or denomination generally acknowledge these things, even if they reject the specifics of religious doctrine. For these people it's not a matter of rejecting God, but rejecting organized religion. For the "nones", all it takes to get involved in a church is for something to make sense for them. 

My own cult experience is limited to just one cult (that was more than enough!), although I have dabbled in other religious traditions without actually joining anything. The Way's method of indoctrination wasn't designed to convince anyone who was an atheist, agnostic or a skeptic. You already had to have a grounding, however shallow, in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Their PFAL class was built upon the premise that the Bible was the Word of God and the only "proofs" that were offered used the Bible itself to solidify that claim. I was brought up, as I stated in an earlier installment, in the Catholic Church. For the most part, Catholics don't think about the Bible too much. They believe it, without knowing much about the details. I was no exception. I wanted it all to make sense, but wasn't equipped to make sense of it all on my own, and neither was anyone in my immediate circle. 

As I related in Part IV I didn't actively seek out The Way, nor did they actively seek me out. My cousin Kathy was attending their Bible studies and my Aunt Peggy, Kathy's mother, asked that I go with her to make sure she wasn't getting into anything harmful. But once I had experienced a Way fellowship I was immediately impressed at the way these people, not a theologian among them, were able to intelligently discuss the Bible, and were able to point to specific scriptures to back up what they believed. No one that I knew was able to do this, or even thought it was important. One exception would have been my father's brother, a Catholic priest, who presumably was educated in Biblical doctrine, but the finer points of Catholic theology was never an after dinner topic of discussion at family gatherings. I mentioned in Part III how I had approached my parish priest about the discrepancies between what the Catholic Church and The Way taught and got the brush off. In later years I realized that the "Biblical research" presented by The Way was pretty weak and rested on shaky assumptions and ignorance of the basics of Biblical languages and even simple English grammar. At the time, however, they were the only ones that I was aware of who even made the attempt to reconcile various contradictions in the Bible and to provide any kind of proof that the Bible was true. 

It made sense to me. 

Start from the Beginning: Part I

Part VII

So, You Want to Join a Cult - Part V

When I first agreed to take the Power for Abundant Living (PFAL) class I was unaware that the Bible study that I had been attending was part of a larger organization. Up until that point I had not attended "branch" meetings, or met any Way people outside of the group that met at Tom & Joe's apartment.

The PFAL class would be taught in approximately three hour increments on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday over four weeks at a home in the Flushing neighborhood of Queens. As I have mentioned in earlier installments, the PFAL class had been taped in the late sixties, but at the time I did not realize I would be watching a recording. Wierwille was talked about as the "teacher" of the class. I had also heard about someone named Jerry, who was mentioned as the class instructor. Unaware that The Way called someone who coordinated and oversaw the running of a PFAL class an instructor, I conflated "instructor" and "teacher" and thought a guy named Jerry Wierwille from Ohio would be teaching the class in Flushing. What was actually happening was that Jerry McSherry (his real name) would be in charge of running the class for me, my cousin Kathy and seven other students. He would be assisted by several other graduates of PFAL who had responsibilities such as parking, refreshments, and audio-visual (actually just audio). We would be listening to cassette tapes of Wierwille. (A video version, on Betamax of all things, was only run if there were 12 or more students.) Charts and illustrations that would ordinarily be part of the video, would be shown to us by a class crew member who sat up front with a flip chart.

As I mentioned, each class session was approximately three hours. Two hours of teaching, a break, and a third hour. The first few sessions were pretty hard to get through. Imagine trying to sit through that much talking without even anything to look at other than some cheap flip charts. But part of what kept us going through those first few sessions was that we had paid for it. $100 was a lot of money for a barely employed college student in those days. We lost one student halfway through, but the rest of us stuck it out. 

The first three or four nights were variations of the theme of "the Bible is true". He really hammered into us the premise that what the Bible said was the standard for everything else. I sort of already believed that, despite not knowing much about the Bible. Toward the end of the first week, two things got my attention and piqued my interest. One was that the Bible interpreted itself. You didn't need someone to interpret it for you, because if you just read what was written, in context, the meaning would be crystal clear. The other was that by the end of the class, Wierwille would provide undeniable proof that Jesus Christ not only existed, but rose from the dead. After that I was all in.

In retrospect, the approach was brilliant. Even if you didn't believe that the Bible was divinely inspired before you took the class, twelve hours of verses on the subject was bound to wear you down. Looking back, it was pure circular reasoning, but he wasn't trying to convince the skeptical. His oratory wasn't going to convert an atheist, but if you had any tendency toward a Bible-based mindset, his teaching was going to sweep away any doubts about the heavenly origins of the Bible, and therefore it's veracity. And that set the stage for the second week, when things really got serious.

Now that we "knew that we knew that we knew" that the Bible was true, we were ready for some crazy stuff. In the midst of all the "The Bible is the Word of God" stuff, we were admonished to read what was written, not only right in the verse, but in the context, how words were used before, how words were used when the King James was written, and be aware of customs in Biblical times. This made sense, you really couldn't argue with it. But Wierwille then started showing us parts of the Bible where what we had always been taught was wrong...according to him. 

He started out by simply pointing to a plain reading of the text where it contradicted what "everyone knew" about the Bible. He started off with some fairly innocuous things, where the "accurate" reading didn't make much difference in how we lived our lives, or even touched on contentious doctrinal issues. This was brilliant. Since we had already been convinced that the Bible was true and accurate, how could we argue against what we could read right there in the pages of the Bible?

Eventually, however, the stakes got higher. After several sessions of having much of what we always thought we knew shown to be false, any confidence in what our priests or ministers had been telling us had been undermined. Ostensibly, this was to show us that we had to read the Bible as written and allow it to interpret itself. The real reason, as I saw much later, was to set up Wierwille as the authority, despite the encouragement to read and study ourselves.

The final week of the class was devoted to what Wierwille called "the manifestations of the spirit", which most denominations called "the gifts of the spirit". The most well-known of these was speaking in tongues, although other "manifestations" were touched upon. Wierwille billed speaking in tongues as proof of the truth of the Bible. 

For most of the third week we were regaled with instances of speaking in tongues in the Bible culminating with a group speaking in tongues session right at the end of the final session. In contrast to the dry pseudo-intellectual tone of most of the class, this final session was emphatically emotional. Wierwille asked the class rhetorically, just before we were "led into" speaking in tongues, "don't you want to speak 'the wonderful works of God'?" before having us stand and, in unison, and backed by the crew and other graduates of the class loudly speaking in tongues themselves, speaking in tongues as Wierwille's recorded voice encouraging us. 

For many people, including me, it sealed the deal. Not only had I been led, step by step, through an intellectual shedding of previous beliefs and acquisition of a new perspective, but it all came together with an emotional capstone. 

The Way had successfully got me to change what I believed about God and the Bible, but I still wasn't committed to regular involvement. I wasn't in a cult...yet.

One of the words you hear associated with cult involvement (not just religious!) is "brainwashed". Those who have not been involved in a cult (or believe that they haven't) picture cultists who have been made to accept new, obviously wrong beliefs against their will through some kind of mind control. It's more complicated than that. People who are in cults always choose to change their beliefs and choose to elevate the cult leader's ideas above what they previously thought. This article lays out how The Way set the foundation for cultish control through a step by step appeal to logic and rationality, even though its conclusions wouldn't stand up to close scrutiny. For more on brainwashing, see this article. 

Start from the Beginning: Part I