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.
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