So, You Want to Join a Cult - Part X

My parents, years after I left The Way, claimed that I had, in some vague way, changed after I had become involved. In some respects they were correct. I was no longer devoted to Catholicism, but not because I had rejected God and the Bible, but because I believed that Catholicism didn't represent God and the Bible as closely as The Way did. For years I had been searching for deeper meaning and for "proof" that Christianity was "The Truth". The signs were all there - my visitations to local churches, my curiosity about non-Christian religions, my questioning that wasn't satisfied with vague appeals to authority. The truth is, most religious people have only a surface understanding of the doctrinal details of  their religion and are ill-prepared to counter specific and enthusiastic challenges to their beliefs. Looking back from the vantage point of 40 years in the future, I realize that the "research" presented by The Way was, for the most part, pretty shoddy and its conclusions were often based on tenuous connections and misunderstandings of Greek and Hebrew grammar, as well as the works of theologians of the past. But at the time, the only people that I knew who were even attempting to make sense of Biblical contradictions were the people of The Way. 

As my third "ministry year" in The Way began in August 1979 (Way year went from August to August) several influences flowed together to cause me to become more involved, more committed, to The Way. My parents were becoming more hostile to my involvement in The Way, especially since I had stopped attending church. The community had become overtly hostile to any group that they considered a cult in the wake of the Jonestown Massacre in Guyana. Deprogrammers were more open about their practices and often had the cooperation of local police departments. Outside attacks generate, in general, one of two responses. One is to to disassociate oneself from the group that is attacked. Persecution has the effect of weeding out those who aren't committed. It also has the effect of strengthening the resolve of those who choose to stay. That's the effect that it had on me. The leadership of The Way encouraged that mindset. People who left "tripped out", they were weak. Those of us who stood strong were in the same league as the apostles who persevered in the face of opposition. Being the focus of persecution made me feel like I was actually accomplishing something for God. 

A second influence was the example of some of the "believers" around me. During Way year 1978-79 several of the people that I knew set up "Way Homes" that were the focus of outreach in their neighborhoods. Groups of Way folks were travelling to Ohio, Kansas or Indiana (Way headquarters and the locations of Way Corps training) to take "The Advanced Class". During the previous year I had "witnessed" to my childhood friend Joe. Joe took the PFAL class and at Rock of Ages in 1979 was sent to Fremont Nebraska as a WOW Ambassador. Others whom I knew entered Way Corps training. There was a lot of peer pressure to step up and "do something for God". What I decided to do was move into a Way Home. 

The Way Home was an interesting concept. You were part of an organized program, but weren't locked in for a set period of time, like the WOW Ambassador program or the Way Corps training. One person was designated by area leadership as the Way Home Coordinator. The household members decided among themselves how to handle their finances, how to divide up chores and when to schedule Twig Fellowships or witness in the neighborhood. Most Way Home members worked whatever jobs they chose, or attended school. The expectation was that the Way Home would be a hub of Way activity in the neighborhood and the members would focus much of their free time on bringing in new people and running PFAL classes, along with weekly fellowships. 

The Queens Village Way Home, where I went to live in late August 1979 had four of us living there. Bernie, an electrician in his forties who was in the same PFAL class as I was in March 1978 was the designated leader, Wanda & Beverly were newly minted PFAL grads and me. I was still attending Baruch College in the evenings and working at EF Hutton, the stock broker, as a clerk during the day. It was my first experience living somewhere other than under my parents' roof, but since I hadn't changed jobs and was still in school, there was some continuity with my previous life. 

But before long, there would be some major disruptions. 

Start from the beginning

https://aesduir.blogspot.com/2019/10/so-you-want-to-join-cult-part-i.html

Part XI

https://aesduir.blogspot.com/2020/12/so-you-want-to-join-cult-part-xi.html

So, You Want to Join a Cult - Part IX

"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 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 own 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 was soon out of the picture. 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, but not just yet. 

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 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 deconvert 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. 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. 

Start from the beginning

https://aesduir.blogspot.com/2019/10/so-you-want-to-join-cult-part-i.html

Part X

https://aesduir.blogspot.com/2020/12/so-you-want-to-join-cult-part-x.html

So, You Want to Join a Cult - Part VIII

So far I have addressed  briefly how the perception that something "makes sense" influences people to get involved in cults and touched upon how participants are made to feel that they are involved in something greater than themselves. Now we're going to look at how outside pressure, perceived as persecution, serves to cement someone's decision to remain in a cult. 

Throughout most of 1978 few people had heard of the term cult, especially as it applied to Christian groups. Certainly there were fringe groups, notably the Unification Church, colloquially known as "The Moonies", and the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKON), which most of us knew as "The Hare Krishnas", but it wasn't until the mass murder-suicide at The People's Temple outpost in Guyana in November 1978 that there was an awareness of "cults", that not only were they different, but that they were dangerous. A cottage industry of "cult experts" sprung up, with numerous books about cults, as well as those billing themselves as "deprogrammers", who, for a fee, would un-brainwash a loved one and "free" them from the cult. More on that later, but first my own experience with pushback from my own family. 

As I related in a previous post, I was raised Catholic. The neighborhood where I grew up was predominantly Catholic, and Catholicism was, even for the non-religious, part of the background noise of life. All through high school all of my friends were Catholic, and if I knew any Protestants, I can't remember any of them. (I did date a girl for a few years who had a Catholic father and a Jewish mother, but other than that...). Catholicism was assumed. So, when I began to move beyond casual attendance at Bible studies and toward replacing my Catholicism with membership in The Way, my parents began to get concerned. Not, I emphasize, because they thought I was in a cult, that term had yet to become popularized to describe fringe religious movements, but because I was involved in something not-Catholic. 

When you're excited about something new, whether it's a new love in your life, a fun hobby, that alternative band that no one has ever heard of, or really anything that's new and fresh and exciting in your life, you want to share it with others, you want to talk about it. You're excited about it. And I was without a doubt excited about what I was learning in the PFAL class. Understand that at this stage I wasn't considering leaving the Catholic Church, but was pretty psyched about seeing details of the Bible that I hadn't known about before. Most Catholics don't bother overmuch with the theological details and couldn't care less about the minutiae of the nature of Christ or what happens to you after you die, or how apostolic succession works. I certainly never thought about it, but once I was presented with these details I was won over. After the initial few sessions of PFAL that hammered home the premise that the Bible was the Word of God and inerrant, the second week of class started throwing out information that was new. I'd come home from class bubbling with enthusiasm about what I was learning. My mom, more often than not, would be in the living room watching television or reading a book and I'd be excited about telling her what I was learning "Did you know...?" I'd gush about some obscure bit of Biblical lore that had been presented that night. Mom's reaction was disappointing at best. Rather than sharing in my excitement, or at least exhibiting polite interest, her reaction was one of barely disguised discomfort at what I was saying. This may not seem like much, but I had always been able to talk to my mother, and was closer to her than to my dad, who seemed to have more in common with my younger, more sports-oriented brother. Tight lipped indifference from mom was as bad, in my mind, as overt condemnation. Of course, this parental disapproval was hardly persecution. But The Way played on this, pointing out verses where Jesus said that true followers would have to leave their old lives behind, leaving their parents and siblings for the gospel and portraying disapproval by family as proof that we were on a godly path. 

As I moved into my second "Way year" (Way years went from August to August, I took the PFAL class in Way Year 1977-78) in the Autumn of 1978 I started to become more active. A few months previously I stopped attending church, seeing enough of a disconnect between what I was being taught in The Way and the positions of the Catholic Church. This caused a confrontation with my father, who, when he deigned to express his opinion, did not leave any room for doubt about his position. Where my mother would express her disagreement with uncomfortable silences my father was more volcanic in his disagreement and let me know in no uncertain terms what he thought. He did not approve. Even though I became aware at the 1978 Rock of Ages that The Way was The Way International, and not just some local Bible study groups, it was still possible at that time to be involved only peripherally. The local Twig Fellowship that had met at Tom & Joe's apartment in our Rosedale neighborhood had dissolved. Tom had left to serve as a WOW and Joe had moved to a Way Home (several Way roommates dedicated to running fellowships and classes, similar to the WOW program with fewer rules) in the Queens Village neighborhood. While at the Rock of Ages I stayed in a hotel room with two guys, John Lalor and Joe Meehan, who had been WOW Ambassadors the previous year and were returning to their home neighborhood. Joe, John and I, as well as a handful of other Rosedale "believers" would occasionally drive up to Queens Village or to Bayside to attend Way fellowships, but mainly we would meet in a public park or mall (we all lived with our parents) and "witness".  

During this time I was still living a "normal" life. I was attending college, going out to see local bands on weekends, dating, and drinking too much at times. We managed to convince a few people to take the PFAL class including my girlfriend Lori, my childhood friend Joe, and a couple of musicians - Mike and Billy. I was living in some respects in two worlds. I still had my old friends, my old bad habits, was attending college, living at home. My friends thought I was weird, my parents disapproved...mildly, but I was, on the side, engaged in an enterprise that I viewed as important: speaking what I believed was "The Word of God" and bringing others into that knowledge. It was, in many ways, the perfect balance.

Of course it couldn't last. 

Four months into this phase of life 918 people died at a remote settlement near Georgetown, Guyana and things were never the same. 

Start from the beginning

https://aesduir.blogspot.com/2019/10/so-you-want-to-join-cult-part-i.html

Part IX

https://aesduir.blogspot.com/2020/11/so-you-want-to-join-cult-part-ix.html

So, You Want to Join a Cult - Part VII

In Part VI I discussed 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", 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 return to Ohio in one year and a second wave sent out in August 1972. Hence 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 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 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

https://aesduir.blogspot.com/2019/10/so-you-want-to-join-cult-part-i.html

Part VIII

https://aesduir.blogspot.com/2020/11/so-you-want-to-join-cult-part-viii.html

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 one cult, 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

https://aesduir.blogspot.com/2019/10/so-you-want-to-join-cult-part-i.html

Part VII

https://aesduir.blogspot.com/2020/11/so-you-want-to-join-cult-part-vii.html

Killings: Of Police/By Police

I've never had the kind of job where it was possible that, as part of my job, I would be killed during my shift. I have never served in the military and I have never been a police officer. I would imagine that it would be a priority for a police officer to be diligent and aware in order to come home (alive) at the end of the day, but I really can't imagine the stress that a person is under in those circumstances. And not just the police officer, but the officer's family as well. It's really no comfort to surviving family members to hear that it was a part of the job, or "he knew what he was getting into" after a loved one is killed in the line of duty. 

But it is part of the job that a police officer signs up for. 

I know that sounds harsh, and I don't mean to make light of police being killed, but when an unarmed person, who is complying with an officer's demands, and at worst is accused of a misdemeanor or traffic offense is killed, the reflexive response by law enforcement supporters is to tell us how tough a cop's job is, how they never know when someone might pull a gun on them, or how often police are killed in the line of duty. 

All of that is objectively true, but the subtext seems to be that a police officer is completely justified in proactively killing someone who might be a threat. Does this happen all the time, or even most of the time. Probably not. But the position of most police departments seems to be that the life of the officer is the most important thing in any contact between the police and the public, and if official policy is otherwise, the saying "I'd rather be judged by twelve than carried by six" carries the day. 

There is a fundamental difference, therefore, between a police officer being killed in the line of duty and a civilian being killed  by police. In the first instance, it is by definition being done by a criminal. If caught, the killer will be arrested (if lucky - cops really pull out all the stops for cop killers) and put on trial and likely convicted. Someone killed by the police is usually demonized - if they have ever been arrested, that's brought up - their actions prior to being killed are questioned - and rarely is a police officer tried for killing someone, and even more rarely, convicted. Innocent people have been killed because a cop claims that he "feared for his life" without having to produce any evidence, or even articulate any reasoning, why he thought his life was in danger. The "us vs. them" mindset that paints non-police as enemies is perpetuated by the courts. 

It's a tragic thing when a police officer is killed, as it is when a firefighter dies in a fire, or a soldier is killed in combat. In a perfect world, it wouldn't happen, but in each case of a police officer being killed, it was done by a "bad guy". But police are supposed to be the "good guys". They're not supposed to kill 12 year-olds with toy guns, or men reaching for their wallets according to police directive after informing the police that they were armed; they're not supposed to restrain suspects until they suffocate; they're not supposed to shoot women in their sleep; they're not supposed to shoot social workers who are on the ground with their hands raised. 

I don't want to see any dead cops. I do want to see cops refrain from killing people who aren't trying to kill them. 

Life Isn't Fair

 

Life Isn't Fair

Bad Things Happen Sometimes

But So Do Good Things

A Lot Is Beyond Our Control

Things Don't Happen "For A Reason"

Or According To A Deity's "Plan"

(Unless That Deity Is A Sadistic Jackass)

Do Your Best

With The Cards You Are Dealt

Bluff If You Have To