So, You Want to Join a Cult - Follow Up - Part X - Everyone Else is Wrong

One of the hallmarks of political social media is the straw man. Someone posts something that they allege the opposition said, when a teeny, tiny bit of digging would reveal the lie. They attack the lie, and then a bunch of followers pile on and they attack the lie, which they assume is the truth. It's especially egregious when the offender posts a link to a news article and the headline contains information that is at odds with what's in the article. Not so different in the word of cults. 

One of the basic moves of any cult is a form of Gnosticism, they claim that there is special, hidden knowledge that is available only to the cult, sometimes only to the inner circle of the cult. Related to this is a misrepresentation of what the mainstream believes in order to mock it. One of the core beliefs of The Way is that Jesus Christ isn't God. They aren't the only self-described Christians to believe this, but they are certainly a tint minority. This is one of the doctrines which they used to set themselves apart, to show their followers that they were adherents of the truth that no one else believed. Like today's social media conspiracy theorists, they cherry-picked the available information to come to their conclusion. The Way's leaders employed insults, calling mainstream Christians worshippers of a three-headed God and other misrepresentations of what people who believed in the Trinity actually believed. Granted, the actual theological doctrine of The Trinity is pretty complex and evolved over centuries, and the average Christian had not the slightest grasp of the nuances. From my vantage point of a disbeliever in the inerrancy of the Bible, I can see that the problem is that different writers of the various books of the Bible had different opinions of who and what Jesus was, and there was an evolution in what people thought of Jesus even within the pages of the Bible. However, both The Way and mainstream Christianity were of the opinion that what the Bible said about Jesus was Truth, and they had to find ways to explain away the inconsistencies and contradictions. They each resolved these contradictions in different ways with different endpoints. They both insisted that they were right.

The difference, at least in modern times as opposed to the early days of Christianity when the term "heretic" was being thrown around willy-nilly, is that most churches are part of a tradition in which, in their minds, the question was settled 2000 years ago. The Way is making their differing understanding of the question a central part of their identity. Any deviation from this interpretation of Jesus' nature would result in the 21st Century version of accusations of heresy within The Way. There is no question that they are right and everyone else is wrong. 

Another tactic where The Way was similar to today's "do your research" crowd is their constant encouragement to...do your research. Just like today's YouTube "researchers" pontificate as if there had never been any legitimate study of virology, Constitutional law, or climate science, The Way embarked upon research by people totally unsuited to the task. If you had a Greek-English concordance and a working familiarity with parts of speech you were a Biblical researcher. I could spend thousands of words giving examples of amateurs interpreting Greek words in novel ways -but this enabled Way members to promote their supposed superiority over those poor dumb Christians who studied their whole lives and built upon the work of others going back decades or centuries, learning Biblical Greek and Hebrew. Of course John Doe high school dropout knew the truth. 

So yes, in a cult, everyone but you and the people who agree with you are wrong. Everyone else is a sheep. Just like on the internet.