I Accidentally Joined a Cult: Part 4
Systemic Control and Why People Don’t Leave
In 2003, I accidentally joined a cult and stayed for 15 years. How does this happen? How does someone just accidentally join a cult? How does someone stay in that cult for 15 years?
These are questions I would spend the next few years in therapy asking. “How could I be so stupid? Why did I ignore all the red flags that something wasn’t right? Why didn’t I leave sooner?” Those of us who have left cults feel shame and embarrassment that we were duped for so long. We blame ourselves for not coming to our senses sooner.
However, the reason people stay in cults is not because they are stupid or gullible or bad people. Rather, cults exploit our good desire to help others, to be part of a community, and to find purpose and meaning in life. Life inside a cult feels really good most of the time. It feels like you are part of something bigger than yourself, and it feels safe to have others making hard decisions for you and telling you what to think.
Cults also convince their followers that they have the answers to life’s big questions and that the work they are doing is good for humanity. When I was a member of the Sovereign Grace cult, I really believed we were helping people. I believed what they claimed about our “gospel-centered” mission. I felt the exhilaration of having a transcendent, eternal purpose in life. I enjoyed the feeling of belonging to a tight-knit community and being known intimately by this community. Leaving my cult meant losing these good things, and the loss of them was incredibly painful.
From the outside, it might seem easy to leave a cult, but for those of us who have spent years within a community, leaving it can feel like losing everything.
Cults know this and use systemic control to exploit this vulnerability, convincing their members that they can never leave.
Systemic Control
In my previous posts, I explained why I believe SGC to be a cult. Sovereign Grace Churches has historically and consistently proven to fulfill the definition of a cult rather than a church. Namely, SGC was founded by a charismatic leader and his blindly loyal followers. Second, they espouse toxic teachings that are spurious and unorthodox, promising a happy and transcendent life to the harm of the vulnerable. Now we examine the third element of cults: systemic control of members. This control over members is why people don’t leave.
Steven Hassan and the BITE model
In describing the systemic control SGC wields over their members, I am borrowing heavily from the research of cult expert Steven Hassan, who appeared on the A&E documentary, Leah Remini: Scientology and the Aftermath. During our last few months in SGC, my husband and I binge-watched this series and marveled at how similar SGC is to the cult of Scientology. This was the first time I had ever considered that my church might actually be a cult. I began to see that SGC uses many of the same tactics that Scientology uses to control their members.
Hassan describes this systematic control of cult members as the “BITE model”:
Behavior control
Information control
Thought control
Emotional control
Behavior control
Hassan’s examples of behavior control include
“rigid rules and regulations; permission required for major decisions; financial exploitation, manipulation, or dependence; control types of clothing and hairstyles; dictate when, how, and with whom the member has sex.”
SGC uses each of these means of control. There are many rules and restrictions within SGC, ranging from mild to bizarre. The specific rules might vary from church to church, but in general, any former SGC member can list the strange rules and codes they were expected to follow.
SGC requires members to ask permission before making major life decisions, such as how to date (“courtship” is the only godly approach), whom to marry, where to live, how to educate their children, or even if and where they should work.
Members were required to meet with their pastors and “seek counsel” before making personal decisions. Pastors and pastors’ wives felt authorized and entitled to give their unsolicited opinions about members’ personal life decisions. If members disobeyed those opinions, they were badmouthed by others, sometimes even from the pulpit.
“Financial exploitation and manipulation” are common tactics SGC uses to control their victims. When my husband was a pastoral intern in Denver for four years, he was compensated just above the poverty line. When he appealed to them to pay him adequately to be the sole provider for a family of five in one of the most expensive cities in America, he was met with accusations of greed and discontentment. Their promises of “you will be well taken care of” amounted to a tiny two-bedroom apartment that violated fire codes for five people to inhabit. Being “well cared for” meant being fed from a food bank and donations of expired food from church volunteers. It meant submitting all of our personal receipts to our pastor, who judged every purchase we made, to “evaluate” what we “treasured in our hearts.” If I shopped at Target instead of Walmart or picked up Starbuck’s on my way to church, I was found to be frivolous with money.
I later learned that our situation was not unique. Employees on the lower rungs of the ladder in SGC are financially exploited, and when they ask for fair pay, they are accused of being discontent.
SGC strictly controls their members’ sex lives, dictating when, how, and with whom members were allowed to have sex. As I mentioned in Part 3, wives were required to have sex with their husbands whenever their husbands demanded it, no matter what. If parents found out their teenagers were having sex or were looking at pornography, often those teenagers would face extreme consequences and bizarre punishments, such as possessions being taken away and not being allowed to leave the house. Teenagers who were caught with pornography were sometime required to “confess” in detail to other church members or even the entire congregation. The psychological cruelty this cult inflicts against children results in lifelong impact. These forced confessions can also lead to grooming children for sexual abuse, when they are required to have frank conversations about sexuality with other adults that may not be safe.
Unconditional love does not exist in cults, and SGC is no exception. They “love” you as long as they can control your behavior, but as soon as your behavior goes against their many rules, that love quickly turns to hate.
Information Control
Steven Hassan describes information control as
“deliberately withholding information, distorting information to make it more acceptable, and systematically [lying] to cult member[s].”
SGC deliberately withholds and distorts information during what they call “church family meetings.” These very private meetings are not recorded, so there is no accountability for what is communicated to members. SGC has a strict “members only” policy for these meetings, complete with guarded entryways and a list of authorized members who are permitted access to the meetings. If your name isn’t on the list, you are denied access, with no exceptions.
During my time in SGC, I participated in countless church family meetings and heard pastors blatantly lie about why leaders and members had left their congregations, in an attempt to make it more acceptable to members. When I asked why these pastors lied, I was told that the church “couldn’t handle the truth.”
When Rachael Denhollander wrote her extensive analysis of evidence in SGC’s abuse cover-up, SGC held private church family meetings where they outright lied to members and accused Denhollander of dishonesty. They manipulated the information, distorting the reality and deliberately withholding the truth to make themselves appear innocent. They have flat-out denied involvement in their conspiracy to cover up child sex abuse, even as all the evidence points to their guilt.
When SGC has repeatedly been asked to allow a third-party, independent investigation, they have deliberately withheld and distorted information to make it more acceptable. They claimed they already conducted an independent investigation, so there was no need for another one. I will cover this at length in Part 5, but SGC failed to mention important information about why their own investigation was anything but independent.
SGC further controls the information through the use of propaganda, such as their regularly scheduled “mission videos.” “Look at all the good we’re doing in the world!” This is designed to distract from their scandals and mistreatment of others. “How could we be bad when we’re doing so much good?” This is a common tactic of other cults, such as Scientology, who produce their own propaganda videos about all the “good” they are doing in the world to distract from the testimony of the many whistleblowers who have left their cult.
SGC encourages spying on other members in order to police behavior, then reporting deviant members to the pastors. Often those members are brought in for questioning. In Scientology, these are called “knowledge reports.” In SGC, these are called “concerns” and “correction.” In my Denver SGC church, “coffee and correction” was a regular practice that was assumed to be a normal part of church life. One member would invite another member to go to coffee, for the express purpose of “correcting” them, i.e., criticizing their life. This leads to the constant feeling that everything a member does is being watched and monitored.
Thought Control
Hassan describes thought control as
“requiring members to internalize the group’s doctrine as truth; use of loaded language and cliches which constrict knowledge, stop critical thought, and reduce complexities into platitudinous buzz words; encourage only ‘good and proper’ thoughts; teaching thought-stopping techniques which shut down reality testing.”
SGC executes every single one of these thought control tactics. They extensively use “loaded language and cliches which constrict knowledge.” As discussed in part 3, they use the phrase “better than I deserve” to teach that one should never complain about abuse or mistreatment because we are sinners who deserve hell, and anything better than hell is mercy. This silences critics and shames those who raise red flags about this organization’s abuse.
SGC members are repetitively told “be suspicious of your own heart” but “assume the best” about their leaders. This amounts to ignoring your gut instincts that something’s not right. It means SGC leaders effectively teach their followers to gaslight themselves. SGC members internalize this message and assume any red flags they see are not valid but rather a sign of mistrust or divisiveness, and therefore must be repented of and denounced as sin. “Assuming the best of others” means not thinking critically and objectively about their teachings and actions. It is another form of gaslighting designed to remove any kind of investigation into the leaders’ conduct.
Another phrase they use to manipulate members from speaking the truth about their actions is “leaving a church well.” They teach about leaving well, i.e., leaving silently, without telling anyone the truth about the spiritual abuse you endured in SGC. Anyone who leaves and tells the truth about SGC’s abuse is viewed as “not leaving well,” and therefore, is dismissed and shunned. “Leaving well” is a manipulative teaching that SGC purposely uses to convince their members that those who leave their church are sinning and should therefore not be trusted.
SGC “reduces complexities into platitudinous buzz words” by reducing every issue in life to a “sin issue.” This is demonstrated through their hatred of therapy and the mental health field. In the 1993 book, “How Can I Change?” C.J. Mahaney writes,
“Scripture reveals that our most serious hindrance to growth is sin against God. The [therapeutic] movement, on the other hand, insists that unmet needs, pain, damaged emotions, or low self-esteem are the root of our difficulties. The two conclusions are irreconcilably opposed…. The therapeutic model misdiagnoses our root problem, and thus proves incapable of providing an effective solution (C.J. Mahaney, “How Can I Change?” p. 42).
In other words, you can either have the Bible or you can have therapy, but you cannot have both. In Sovereign Grace, to claim trauma or abuse is tantamount to being “worldly” and an unbeliever in your thinking. In fact, they handed out lists of “unbiblical terms” that were to be avoided:
Notice the words that are considered “unbiblical” and therefore forbidden: “abuse” is number one on the list. Forbidden words also include: “bad day, competitive, control, depressed, disorganized, ‘I’m a victim’, ‘I’m hurt’, nice, observer, stage fright, private, quiet, shy, sleep, success, tired, anger, and upset.”
Imagine you are a depressed, shy, quiet, tired, abused woman with sleep deprivation, stifled anger, and disorganized thoughts as a result of your trauma. You are forbidden from speaking any of these words out loud and will only be met with SGC’s classic spiritual cliches: “What are you craving? Where is your sin in this? What is the idol in your heart?” It was an open secret in my former SGC church that there was a long history of women who suffered from suicidal ideation and no wonder! They are forbidden to even identify their wounds, much less seek help from licensed therapists who know how to treat these wounds. It is difficult to put into words how damaging SGC’s thought control tactics are for hurting, vulnerable people.
Again, is it any wonder that there is a decades-long abuse epidemic and cover-up within this cult? Why would victims come forward and speak out in an environment that demands that they identify only as the worst of sinners and that denies the existence of abuse within their community?
Emotional Control
Steven Hassan describes examples of emotional control:
“manipulate and narrow the range of feelings- some emotions and/or needs are deemed as evil, wrong, or selfish. Teach emotion-stopping techniques to block feelings. Make the person feel that problems are always their own fault, never the leader’s or the group’s fault. Promote feelings of guilt or unworthiness. Instill fear, such as fear of thinking independently, the outside world, enemies, losing one’s salvation, others’ disapproval. Extremes of emotional highs and lows- love bombing and praise one moment and then declaring you are a horrible sinner.”
Again, these are verbatim the tactics SGC uses to control their members. As previously mentioned, some emotions and needs are deemed evil. They teach emotion-stopping techniques to block feelings, such as “preach the gospel to yourself” and “Don’t listen to your feelings.” One of SGC’s worship songs admonished us to “Arise my soul, arise! Shake off your guilty fears and rise!” In other words, snap out of it! Be happy!
Like any cult, SGC begins their relationship with new members by “love bombing” them, that is, being excessively flattering and welcoming to the potential convert.
Once this member is committed, the ritualistic shaming and indoctrination begins. Once the convert is indoctrinated into the group think, they are strategically molded into the culture and formed into the cookie-cutter image of the ideal SGC member.
SGC deliberately instills fear in their members in many ways. Parents were warned of the dangers of public schools, and pastors provoked hysteria about schools’ influencing children with their “gay agenda,” and evolution and peer pressure. Homeschooling was the correct way to protect your children from the outside world (and, incidentally, from concerned teachers and caregiver who could report abuse).
SGC also implants fear of the government coming to take your children if you discipline them the “biblical” way, i.e., physical abuse. I heard teachings about how to avoid detection of physical abuse: Avoid leaving bruises before taking your child to the pediatrician and only allowing church members to babysit who wouldn’t report abuse. Outsiders wouldn’t understand that physical abuse is “biblical,” so they couldn’t be trusted.
SGC pastors also instilled fear by teaching that God is relentlessly angry at sinners. Their many teachings about our innate sinfulness and God’s wrath over our sin are overemphasized and hyperbolic. Conversely, they are silent when it comes to the Bible’s teaching about our innate worth, our value as image-bearers, and our ability to partner with God in the good work He is doing in the world. This is a deliberate strategy to keep members in line, to keep them down, and make them “grateful” for whatever mistreatment they receive from their cult. Remember, any suffering we experience is “better than we deserve.”
Finally, SGC employs the common cult strategy of instilling fear of leaving the group.
To leave a cult is to lose everything: your identity, community, family, friends, and your certainty in life.
There is also the threat of hell if you leave. SGC does not value churches outside their denomination. SGC believes their “churches” are the best, most correct, and closest to God, so to leave a Sovereign Grace “church” is tantamount to leaving Christianity, which means facing hell.
Why Don’t People Leave?
This leads us back to our original question: “Why don’t people just leave?” The systemic control that the cult of SGC wields over its members keeps them in a kind of mental prison. It is no small feat to undo years of conditioning and systematic control over your entire personhood. I left SGC five years ago, and I still have physical symptoms of PTSD as I write this.
The most profound example I can give of SGC’s systemic control is a story my husband Keith Daukas described:
“While serving as a pastoral intern, my office was directly across the hall from where the coffee maker sat. Whenever a pastor would get some coffee, I’d open the door, walk out, and initiate conversation/small talk. However, one day one of the pastors initiated a conversation with me. Pete Payne (from Virginia Beach) looked at me and asked, ‘Keith, do you know how to train a baby elephant?’ My obvious answer was ‘No,’ spoken with a hint of confusion in my voice. He then proceeded to tell me the following:
‘When an elephant is a baby, they tie a rope around its ankle and attach it to a peg in the ground, so the elephant can only walk in a circle. Then they whip the baby elephant over and over while it helplessly walks in a circle, unable to flee. This is done so that when the elephant grows to be an adult if it becomes unruly, they simply place the rope around its ankle, and it immediately is conditioned to become submissive.’
So much for small talk.
I didn’t know what to say or even understand why this story was being shared with me.
I didn’t understand until four months later when Pete and the other two pastors held a meeting with me. He told me that since I didn’t spank my young unbelieving children for not standing and singing during our corporate worship and since I didn’t spank my special-needs children for not reading the Bible on their own, they were very concerned over my theology. I was even accused of owning heretical parenting views (ironic since I had just passed our church’s ordination exams and boards). I assured them I was not a heretic and that they were either misunderstanding my views or they were the ones with the questionable parenting doctrine.
Two weeks later, I emailed the pastors a paper I wrote defending my views on parenting, displaying that my views were Biblically sound and orthodox.
In the next meeting with all the pastors, they refused to discuss my paper. Instead, they accused me of being ‘defensive’ and arrogant for writing the paper. Then, in front of me, Pete said this to the other pastors:
‘If Keith had grown up in Virginia Beach, we wouldn’t be having this problem.’
In other words, if I had grown up in Virginia Beach as a baby elephant, then at the moment I began disagreeing with the pastors, they could put the proverbial rope around my ankle to shut me up and get me in line with their unbiblical, evil ways. Pete was lamenting that they couldn’t control me. Let me repeat: He lamented that he couldn’t control me. Corrupt pastors will do anything to remain in control and keep power.”
People don’t leave cults because they are conditioned to believe that they can’t. They are conditioned to think that they will lose everything if they leave. Often, this is no empty threat. If you leave, you will lose everything you have ever known and loved inside this community you have devoted your life to.
However, you will also gain everything. When you leave a cult and begin to process through the trauma and brainwashing you suffered, when you grieve the losses and lies, you ultimately make it to the other side. What lies on the other side is freedom and fresh air and love and compassion for yourself and others. What lies on the other side is joy and laughter and a lightness to life, the ability to appreciate the little things in life without the constant anxiety that you might be sinning or displeasing God or “wasting your life.” What lies on the other side is love and acceptance of others, without the constant need to filter everything through a theological lens, but the ability to see people as worthy of love and empathy, regardless of their adherence to the “right” doctrines.
The Familiar Devil
“It’s easier to live with the devil you know.” My former close friend used to say this about why she chose to stay in the cult. Yes, this place is evil, but it’s a familiar evil. At least I know what to expect. Some people stay in cults because to leave the familiarity is too daunting. Familiarity can be quite the drug.
Some people stay in cults because they believe they can help “fix the system.” They want to be “part of the solution.” I used to tell people I wanted to stay “because if everyone leaves, nothing will ever change.” I stayed because I believed God wanted me to help bring about change and restoration.
However, I now see that the only way someone can “fix” a cult is to leave it. As long as a cult has willing participants, they will never change.
As long as SGC gains and retains their followers, they will continue to abuse the vulnerable in Jesus’ name.
They have been appealed to and asked to change repeatedly, and have consistently proven that they are more interested in holding onto their power, authority, and wealth than in changing their ways. They will not change because their abusive teachings and policies are baked into their very foundations. Their consciences are seared, and the many of us who have appealed to them privately have been ignored and silenced.
In part 5, we will look in-depth at SGC’s long, sordid history of actively covering up child sex abuse, and their unwillingness to participate in a third-party, independent investigation.
Lastly, in part 6, we will look Jesus, the Good Shepherd, who is nothing like those who claim the title of “shepherd” and abuse the sheep. We will look at the Good Shepherd’s heart for false shepherds, and his heart for his lost sheep.
I accidentally joined a cult, but thank God I escaped! If you are stuck in the cult of SGC, or any cult, you can leave! It will cost you everything the cult has given you, but you will gain back everything the cult has taken away from you.
(This is part 4 of a 6-part series. Please also read part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 5. Part 6 is forthcoming).
