Cult of Christianity: How A Youth Group Blurred the Lines Between Christ & Cult

Down and Outskirts

Think back to your childhood. Maybe you were ten or eleven years old. Who did you consider to be your friends? There was the best friend. There are the friends you'd immediately invite to your small slumber party when your mom or dad put a limit on the number of people. Then there are the people who could be fun, but weren't always so you said hi to them in the hallways or hung out with them while you waited for you mom after church. Beyond those people who do you think of? The weird kid with the stutter that you were nice to and knew nothing about? Or the girl so incredibly shy that she didn't answer when someone spoke to her? Or how about the fat kid that was always friendly to you and yet never registered as inside loop of worthy candidates?

These are the people I found myself among. I was never a part of anyone's "in crowd." That included the weird Bible-Thumpers. I've been the fat kid since I was nine years old. People would talk to me. My mother was involved in all the church activities, which meant all the other kids who were forced to hang out and wait for their mothers were a part of the same group. We would sit and mess around in the pews during choir practice or roam the church. We became intimately acquainted with any room that wasn't locked. Eventually we even learned to drive in the parking lot when no one was looking. But that didn't mean that I was acknowledged with more than a hello when I wasn't in a forced friend situation.

I didn't think anything of it at the time. That was how life was. I considered a few girls over those years to be my best friend. They were the ones that paid me the most attention. They willing sat next to me during services or sought me out after. They chose to come and talk to me over someone else. I was even invited once or twice to their small birthday parties. There always came a time, though, when I would again be ignored and I would realize that while they were my best friend I wasn't theirs. I would hold out hope for a period and then retreat. once again, into my books, waiting.

It might have helped had I been characteristic, pretty, or especially social. But I was introverted, awkward, and the fat kid. Given the right environment all of that could have been changed and I would have found my place, my own social group. I didn't get the right environment to grow properly. Instead, I had the personality to be led. I had a desire to fit in somewhere and to be a part of something that was bigger than myself. It left me open and vulnerable as an adolescent. In my church it meant I was willing to go with whatever was fed to me in order to fit in. Outside of church it meant that while I was the fat kid before I grew into the fat kid who carried her bible and always tried to get people to come to church with her.

I was picked on and made fun of, but never outright bullied by the people I went to school with. There were other church kids, but I became weird even among them. I carried around my lime green bible, reading it all the time. My introversion made it hard for me to bring people into church because there was no way to convince them that it wouldn't be as weird as I had become. I kept trying though, because I yearned to be accepted. And to be accepted you had to bring in the non-believers so that they might be converted before the end of times.

Yes, you read that correctly. The end of times. While our church was not a doomsday cult, it preached about how we were living in the "End Times." Feeding this idea was a series of books that came out at the perfect moment: Left Behind by Jerry B. Jenkins and Tim LaHaye. They were extremely popular. It seemed like everyone was reading them or had read them. And we ate up every word. There was even a book series for kids released. I was so jealous of the kids that always seemed to have the new novel while I had to wait until the library released the next volume. And we all seemed to absorb the idea that we were in fact living in the last days.

Our preachers were quick to point out that "We know not the time," absolving themselves if it was another fifty years before the lord came back get get all of us. But the idea that we could be "going home" kept us all in line, behaving as we waited for the celestial judge to take us in the first wave of people who were worthy or to leave us to atone in blood for our sins while we waded through the muck and the ruin that would be the world without all of the Good Christians. If we weren't a part of the Good Christians our lives may as well have been over. So we tried our hardest to get people to come. During services we often recommitted ourselves to God, since we are all sinners and could not possibly have kept our commitments in the first place.

That was how it started. An urge to belong to the inner circle that would eventually be created. It is how all cults begin. Someone wants more. More money for the church, more people saved, more of some thing or another. And they are charismatic. They rise to a position that gives them a little leverage, a little influence. They begin to use tactics that control the people who want to belong. And before long, they are pushing harder, using methods that would have seemed crazy before. Until it all comes to a head and either something bad happens or the person is deposed from his position of power. In The Family International their leader died while much of the unconscionable behavior was still going on, only to be replaced by his son who was arrested. Once deposed, his mother took over and much of the former behaviors have since seemed to cease, though they are still considered a cult to this day. The People's Temple was legally dissolved in the years following the Jonestown Massacre, where 908 people were convinced, or forced, to drink a mixture laced with cyanide. It was the largest loss of American life until the World Trade Center. Luckily, our church never took such drastic turns, but it used many of the same tactics before our Youth Pastor left for greener pastures.