Nobody Ever Joins a Cult

Nobody ever joins a cult. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t any cults, or that there aren’t any cultists. It just means that people believe that they are joining churches, hanging out with cool people, getting involved in worthy causes, attending lectures and participating in any number of innocuous activities, but they never wake up in the morning and, while choosing among their various hibiscus adorned shirts, type in on their Outlook calendar “join a cult”, or “get brainwashed”. Everybody wants to believe that they’re smart enough to avoid getting sucked into a harmful group, and nobody wants to admit that they’re actually in a harmful group until they leave. Either they look back, smack themselves on the forehead and realize that they have been duped, or rationalize that things changed after they got involved and that the group became a cult.

      Now ex-cultists are as easy-to-find as the hair on Danny Davito’s back. The internet and evangelical churches are full of people who used to be in cults. One might then surmise that the cult problem has been solved, everybody has been rescued from the cults and are safe behind their computer monitors or at the First Church of the Holy Baby Jesus in God in Christ the Lord Jehovah United Assemblies of Zion, Yukon Synod, Reformed Covenant of 1923®.

One of the problems with the issue of cults is that there is no universally accepted definition of “cult”. Obviously the people who are in cults don’t think that they’re cultists, but what about those who are vehemently against cults? Well, some folks, notably evangelical and fundamentalist Christians, define a cult as a group that claims to be Christian but doesn’t agree with them on the main doctrinal points of Christianity. Of course, exactly what the main doctrinal points are differs from denomination to denomination[1]. For example, Mormons are considered a cult by some, but obviously not in Utah. These folks, even though they can’t agree among themselves, see the holding of minority opinions as intolerable, reserving to themselves the privilege of deciding what is the correct interpretation of the Bible, because after all, some “good” Christian might get himself fooled by these heretics and put his soul in peril. Another camp among the anti-cultists is the secular cult awareness movement. These people see specific doctrines as irrelevant to whether a group is a cult; it’s the behavior that defines a cult. The secular cult awareness movement has kind of been invisible since the Cult Awareness Network (C.A.N.), was successfully sued by the Church of Scientology, which now effectively owns it. Are you confused yet? If so, you are in good company: 99.99% of America is as confused as you are, but most don’t think that they’re confused.

In December of 1977 I didn’t think I was joining a cult. I did, however, get invited to look at a Christmas card that my cousin had received from a co-worker. I don’t remember much about the card, but it was signed “God loves you and I do too”. That’s pretty dangerous stuff. I should have been tipped off right away that some serious evil was being perpetrated in tandem with Hallmark’s fourth quarter profit and loss statement. I should probably state at this point that we were Catholics. Not “we went to a Catholic Church”, or “we practiced the Catholic faith”, but that’s who we were, Catholicism in great part defined our identities, so anything that was not Catholic was bad. In light of this, my aunt took me aside to tell me that my cousin was attending a bible study in the home of the card guy. I know; it just sends shivers of fear rippling up and down your spine to hear it, doesn’t it? Like I said, this was the day I didn’t join a cult. Anyway, my aunt told me about this bible study and asked me to accompany my cousin to one of their meetings, “just to make sure she’s alright”, so I did my duty protecting my kin from the godless Protestants (surely it couldn’t be Catholics studying the bible) and attended one of the bible studies.

I should probably note at this point that I had long been dissatisfied with the spiritual answers that I had received in church. Although very devout as a youngster, it bothered me that there were competing versions of Christianity, all convinced that they were right. I visited several of the half dozen different churches that were in walking distance of my home, but the difference was among them was less than crystal clear[2]. After being exposed to Buddhism, Taoism and Hinduism in college, I became less and less convinced that there was any one, objective spiritual truth, let alone that I had been lucky enough to have won the celestial Powerball Jackpot by being born into it.

Tom & Joe, who ran the bible study in my neighborhood, rented a small duplex apartment, looked pretty ordinary, had ordinary furnishings in their home and had a record collection typical of most guys in their early twenties in 1978. They wore regular clothes without a hint of saffron, although Tom did favor sandals and played guitar, as well as sporting a full beard and little round glasses. If I had been looking to join a cult that day, I would have passed these guys by. These guys were vanilla pudding without the sliced bananas and Nilla wafers. That is until the bibles came out. The participants in this particular bible study were fanatical about the bible, not in a wild-eyed, drooling, the-end-of-the-world-is-coming way, but with a calm intellectual confidence that they knew what they were talking about. Specific questions were referred to specific sections of the bible, contradictions were explained; esoteric truths were unveiled. This was different. Maybe there was a one, objective spiritual truth and unlikely as it seemed, maybe these guys had it.

In line with my plan to not join a cult, I continued to attend the bible studies several times a month. Soon I started hearing about a class that they were offering that would lay out the basics to bible study; the goal being that graduates of this class would be able to research and understand the bible on their own, without needing bible scholars or priests or gurus to tell you what it said. Now this was something that I was interested in. Everybody I knew claimed to believe in the bible, but I didn’t know anybody who could read it and make any sense out of it. Sure, there are parts of the bible that seem to proceed in a linear fashion and tell stories that everyone seems to know, but not really know about, like Noah and Jesus and Adam & Eve, but there didn’t seem to be an easy look up system, an index where you could look up the answers to questions like “Is masturbation a sin?”, or “Will you go to Hell for smoking dope?” (Both were important questions to a nineteen-year old). But these people acted like you could get answers like that after taking this class. By this time I had noticed some differences between what I had learned in Church and what I was hearing at these bible studies, small differences theologically, like how many people were crucified with Jesus and on what day he died and big ones, like was Jesus Christ God or wasn't he? Or were the dead in some semi-alive state after death or consciously inhabiting heaven or hell? My parish priest was no help, pointing out that the Catholic Church had 2000 years of history on its side, but providing real no reason other than longevity why I should stay away from this bible study and stick with The Church.[3] So I immediately went out and didn’t join a cult, but put down $100 and signed a green registration card for the bible study class, which was called Power for Abundant Living.

Unknown to me at this time, there was living in Ohio a guy named Victor Wierwille, a former Evangelical & Reformed Church pastor who had in 1953 started teaching a class called Power for Abundant Living (PFAL). The class, initially titled Receiving the Holy Spirit Today, was about having God’s power in your life. He taught it to friends and relatives, to members of his church, and eventually started traveling around the country teaching it. In 1967 it was put on film. This was the class that I had signed up to take. At the time I didn’t know anything about Wierwille, PFAL, or for that matter, Ohio,[4] so I wasn’t too impressed with this skinny tie-wearing farm guy with the funny accent (That’s right, a New Yorker, complaining about a funny accent) and the cheap seventies rec-room paneled set with the picture of White Jesus with the long flowing hair and the faraway eyes.

PFAL was presented over the course of three weeks, with classes running from 7:00 – 10:00pm Monday, Tuesday, Thursday & Friday. We started out with an orientation, which took place at Jerry McSherry’s house (his real name). We watched a video called Changed which consisted mostly of testimonials about how people’s lives changed after taking PFAL. At this time, some confusion that I had regarding who was teaching this class was cleared up. Jerry was what they called the class instructor. I was under the impression that “instructor” was more or less synonymous with “teacher” which is what they called Wierwille, but the “instructor” was just the guy who made sure that everything was in place, including finding volunteers to cue up the tapes, bring snacks, set up the chairs and make sure that there was plenty of coffee (I did mention that these classes went for three hours?). I had been under the impression that the class was being taught by Jerry Wierwille who moved from Ohio to Flushing Queens!

Now the teacher wasn’t even in the same room, or for that matter the same state as us. The class had been filmed in 1967. This facilitated distribution, since shipping videocassettes was easier than Wierwille driving all over the country personally; but we weren’t even going to get to watch a film, no, you needed 12 people to see PFAL on video, and we had only nine, so we listened for three hours to cassette tapes of a disembodied voice teaching the bible every night, supplemented by slides of the charts that we would have seen in the video class.

Finally the class began. Sitting in metal folding chairs facing a wall where a teacher might have been standing if there was one physically in the room, were the nine students, none of whom were joining a cult. Besides me, there was my cousin Kathy, a year younger than me, who worked with Tom, one of the bible fellowship guys; Tina, a tiny, aspiring dancer; Bernie, who worked in the building trades; Kevin, a fellow Baruch College student; Herminia, an older Puerto Rican lady whose children had talked her into taking the class; a married couple whose names I can’t remember to save my life; and Jim, a tall, dark haired guy who dropped out before the class was over. I don’t know why the other eight people were sitting in those chairs, but I was one of those searchers, people who want to know what’s going on and why, and are willing to put some effort into finding out.

Like most people in the United States, Christianity was the default spirituality for me. I grew up hearing about the God of the bible, Jesus Christ, the saints and all that; it was the background noise of our culture. For most of my life it seemed like there was only two choices: believe in God (and by extension the bible) or don’t; there was no “other” that you could latch on to, not legitimately anyway. From my narrow little world I couldn’t see the incredible array of choices that lay beyond the horizon. Until I went to college, the people that were different from me were the tiny number of Protestants, who as far as I could tell weren’t all that different than us, and Jews, who most Christians viewed as people who just didn’t keep up with the latest developments in the God business. Culturally I was conditioned to believe that practicing Christianity was essential to be a “good” person; exposure to various world religions in college introduced me to the concept that there were other choices, but viscerally I still felt that the biblical God was the God and that if I was going to live a good life, then his way was the way. [5] Tom and Joe’s bible study group with their PFAL class were the first people who offered to show me how and why the bible and the God described therein was the way.

The first several three-hour sessions of PFAL were variations on the theme of “The Bible is true”. There were segments [6] on “The Integrity of The Word”, “The Greatest Secret in the World Today is that the Bible is the Revealed Word and Will of God”, “The Word of God is the Will of God”, “How We Got the Bible”. There were teachings on how the bible was “god-breathed”, i.e. given by inspiration of God, that it interprets itself, not being of “private” interpretation, how “The Word” is faithful, how God gave us the bible…on and on, hour after hour. Even though he wasn’t really presenting much new information in these first several sessions, Wierwille was establishing his bona fides as somebody who knew his way around a bible, as a teacher who cared deeply about what was written in the pages of the bible and whose greatest goal in life was to make the lessons of the bible accessible to everyone, not just the seminary trained, or the great theologians. Wierwille, like all good salesmen, first got us to trust him. And trust him we did when he finally began unveiling the points where he disagreed with most other Christians.

Part of how Wierwille really cemented that nascent trust into place was by his teaching in session four, “How the Word Interprets Itself”. It was presented as a lesson on how to apply certain keys to researching and studying the bible. The keys were simple, even simplistic; they boiled down to “Read What’s Written”, and admonitions to understand the words in the way that the writers understood them, which wasn’t necessarily the way that the same words would be used in the present day. Wierwille starts this teaching off by reading various sections of scripture, sometimes pointing out how what is clearly written contradicts most of he called “denominational Christianity”. He starts out slowly, at first pointing out minor discrepancies, each time taking the students to the bible itself, where it is as plain as the nose on your face that what most Christians believe is not what you can read for yourself in black and white. The whole time you are being convinced, little by little, that Wierwille knows what he is talking about and the churches do not. After all, you’re reading what is written, and what is written contradicts much of what you were taught back at your family’s church. The student is now convinced that Wierwille is trustworthy, that the churches are not, and that you too can be privy to the truth as it hasn’t been known since the First Century when the apostles of Jesus walked the earth clad in sandals, togas and truth.

As the class progresses the stakes get higher and the doctrines deviate from orthodox Christianity further and further as Wierwille dazzles the students with his knowledge of the bible. What the student almost invariably failed to realize[7] is that Wierwille is no longer simply reading what is written, but reading into what is written. He is bolstering his case for novel interpretations not with what is plainly written, but with recourse to translations of Greek and Hebrew words that appear in no lexicon, to documents that no one but he has seen, to texts that he says must exist,[8] but that no one has ever found, in short he is doing what he has accused every other church of doing, putting forth his own interpretation of the bible, but he is doing it while convincing the student thoroughly that he is simply reading what is written.

The details of what these deviations are is irrelevant, after all, disagreements among Christians goes back to five minutes after the apostles lost sight of the bottom of Jesus’ sandals, but this class was billed as a way to avoid the common trap of having to rely on someone else for your knowledge of God, to let the bible interpret itself, to understand it using easy to understand “keys”, but it was just another man’s interpretation.

The biggest pitfall in Wierwille’s teaching was that, since the bible was self-interpreting, then anyone, utilizing the research keys taught in PFAL, would naturally come to the same conclusion as he had since the bible wasn’t subject to “private interpretation”; and since Wierwille had utilized those keys and had come to certain conclusions, and since Wierwille, by the time of the filming of PFAL, had been teaching those keys for 14 years and had been intensely studying for another 11 years before that, if you came to a different conclusion than Wierwille did, you were wrong. While on the one hand Wierwille taught that we were all to read the bible ourselves and convince ourselves of what it said, as a practical matter it was what Wierwille said that was treated as the final word. If you disagreed you either weren’t properly applying the keys, or you just needed to wait until you one day understood it. [9]This would have been bad enough if one’s connection to Wierwille ended after sitting through PFAL, if PFAL was merely a tool used by bible study groups to help their participants along, if people were still able to study and come to their own conclusions, but what you were being recruited to by taking PFAL was an organization, worldwide in scope, with groups of local bible studies being just the tip of the iceberg. Clusters of these bible study groups were organized into local branches, which in turn answered to a state organization usually led by a graduate of a centralized leadership training program. People in this organization from all over the country and world gathered together once a year to hear Wierwille teach live, they sent their people out on one-year missionary program, they joined the leadership training program, and it was all based on the words of one man.

I guess I was wrong, I did join a cult.

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[1] I’ll never forget the textbook that my kids used during their home schooling days. A section on the Catholic Church started with “A false religion…”

[2] Growing up in a Catholic family, attending Catholic school and not having many non-Catholics in the general neighborhood, I don’t think that I realized that there were so many Protestants out there. Martin Luther was portrayed a bad guy where I came from!

[3] I have since heard this argument from other Christians who point out that Christianity has survived while many of the pagan religions of biblical times have died out. When I point out that Buddhism and Hinduism are still around, the longevity argument is usually quickly abandoned as irrelevant.

[4] As a New Yorker I subscribed to the worldview illustrated in Steinberg’s New York, a New Yorker magazine cover which shows everything west of the Hudson River as uncharted wilderness,

[5] Many people practice some form of “Pascal’s Wager”, wherein you gamble that believing in God is relatively harmless if he doesn’t exist, but not believing can land you in Hell if he does. Of course the wager is a false dilemma and assumes that there only two choices, while there are many alternatives to being a believing Christian that don’t involve being an atheist.

[6] Each segment was 30 minutes, six segments made a ‘session’

[7] This is not to suggest that there is some insidious brainwashing going on, many people get uncomfortable with what is being taught and walk out before the class ends. However, in my experience, very few people were able to challenge what was being taught in any meaningful way - it was just different than what they were used to.

[8] One of Wierwille’s signature moves was to present an interpretation that was not supported by any scripture in any existing text. He then, despite talking incessantly about how any doctrine must be backed up by scripture, decides that there must be a lost manuscript out there somewhere that backs up his position.

[9] He called this “holding questions in abeyance”