"Brainwashing" is a term that gets brought up a lot when it comes to cults. Although there is room for disagreement about whether those of us in The Way, or any other cults for that matter, were brainwashed or not, let me define the term as I understand it.
Brainwashing is not a scientific term, and actually has no widely accepted meaning. But the way I understand it, it would involve the forcible conversion of an individual from one set of beliefs to another set that they would not have changed to without physical, chemical or mental coercion. Brainwashing could involve torture, it could involve sensory or sleep deprivation, it could involve threats to family members. None of this, not even a hint of it, was present during my time in The Way. On the contrary, conversion to The Way's point of view was slow and methodical and involved eyes-wide-open decisions at every step. Which does not negate the abuse inflicted upon Way members, nor it's cultishness.
One of the counter arguments against brainwashing in The Way is the ease with which people were able to leave The Way at all stages. The person who introduced me to The Way was my cousin, who ended her involvement several months after completing the PFAL class. Why did she leave when I didn't? I can't really say. In conversations with my parents after the fact she claimed that I was brainwashed, but could not account for her own resistance to the supposed mind control. Perhaps she wasn't as eager for answers as I was, perhaps she didn't have the need to stand out from the crowd as I did, maybe she was uncomfortable with speaking in tongues or just didn't like the people. The person who got her involved left New York as part of the WOW program shortly after my cousin and I got involved. The point is, nobody stopped her from leaving nor was she subject to any pressure to remain. Over the years I saw many people walk away for various reasons, and other remain for their own reasons. I'll be getting to the reasons why people stay later in this series.
The Jonestown Massacre at The People's Temple in Guyana in November 1978 was a turning point. It was the point at which family members of people who were involved in alternative religious movements began regularly using the epithet "cult". It was the point where the assumption was, not just that someone's kids had converted, but that they were involved in something dangerous. It was the point where people were considering forcibly removing their loved ones. People calling themselves "deprogrammers" sprung up, promising, for a fee, to extract cult members and convert them back to their old beliefs. In general these deprogrammers used tactics that looked suspiciously like the brainwashing that they were ostensibly saving cultists from. I was aware of several Way members who stayed with The Way after deprogramming attempts. They described being abducted, restrained, isolated, and being subjected to sleep deprivation.
My own parents, according to what a sibling told me years later, consulted with a deprogrammer. Fortunately this man was honest enough to tell them that if it didn't work, I would likely be estranged from them for the rest of my life and they abandoned the plan. To my parents' credit, they made an effort to understand and accept me from that point on. They visited me in Sidney Nebraska when I was a WOW there in 1980, and regularly came out to Nebraska after I was married, even attending a few Way meetings. Even though the perceived familial opposition had softened, now there was the cultural opposition, and in many ways, actual persecution that accompanied the anti-cult scare that followed the events in Guyana.
So, if not brainwashing, what caused people to completely change their belief systems and loyalty, often leaving their own lives completely behind? I think what made my parents think I was "blinded" or "brainwashed" was their perception that I had somehow "changed".
There's nothing like the enthusiasm of the newly converted. Whether it's religion or politics or the newly sober, it's the new recruit who is loud and in your face about it. And I definitely was in everyone's face about it. It started out during the three-week introductory class. I'd come home excited about some new thing I had learned and want to talk about it. To be clear, this wasn't some doctrine spun about billion year-old space aliens storing souls in a volcano, or Jesus appearing to the native Americans, this was stuff that you could trace directly to a Bible verse or two. Of course I was excited, this is what I had been searching for: answers! In response to the obvious discomfort that my parents had with what I was sharing, my mode became less excited and more arrogant that I had The Truth and they didn't. I suppose I had changed.
What my parents didn't know was that in addition to my search for spiritual truth, I was also kind of drifting. I had no real goals, was doing poorly in school (due mainly to lack of ambition) and was drinking a lot. I wasn't taking any hard drugs, but it's likely that I would have gone that path if not for The Way. Being involved in The Way gave me a sense of direction that came of being intimately involved in something greater than myself. I had a mission, I had purpose that I didn't have before. Making "moving the Word", i.e. proselytizing, my priority seemed weird to my family, and evidence of an unwelcome and unhealthy "change", but I don't want to see that alternate history where I didn't have that set of goals.
After a year I moved into a series of "Way Homes" with other Way people, and a year later left the state as part of the missionary-like WOW program. I had planned on entering the Way's leadership program, The Way Corps, but was unable to put together the tuition. A lot of people, including my family thought that my wanting to cut ties and move to another state as a WOW was prima facie evidence that I was in a cult. The truth was that only a small percentage of Way members at any given time were part of any of their programs, and some never were involved beyond the twice-a-week "Twig" meetings. The heavy involvement was mostly people in their late teens or early twenties. People with children at home, or retirees, or men and women with professional careers tended to live "normal lives", indistinguishable from non-Way people. In my early days I saw few attempts at controlling the daily lives of Way members by the leadership, and there was no concerted effort to keep people from leaving.
Why does anyone stay in an uncomfortable, or even dangerous, situation? Why do people stay in crappy jobs or women with abusive husbands? I had decided, at least early in that ten-year period, that an accurate "true" teaching of the Bible was worth something. Right or wrong, I thought that The Way taught the Bible correctly, and I didn't know of any church which taught it any better. Certainly not the church of my youth, my return thereto being the subject of many family prayers. The abuses and attempts at control didn't come all at once, like the proverbial frog in the pot of boiling water, and it was a while before they came for me. For me, I was balancing the pros and the cons every day. For me the cons outweighed the pros.
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