I Survived a Fundy Cult
I remember the precise moment I realized I had lost my faith. A teenager in a floral dress, I was on stage in front of the regular Saturday congregation, singing Amazing Grace to tinny, prerecorded music. Halfway into the performance, my eyes migrated from a random spot on the back wall to the audience, and that was when I lost it. Staring back at me, smiling politely, was a sea of white Midwestern faces, trusting in their placidness. And I was a fraud. I didn’t believe a word I was singing — the culmination of a lifetime of questioning — and my voice began to waver. I’m sure the churchgoers just thought I was nervous, continuing to gaze up with their pleasant smiles, but I knew the truth. It was the last time I ever sang in church.
Growing up in a fundamentalist church is to remain a shy small child forever. There is the protective bubble, the fear of outsiders, the clear authority, and the belief that you are special — so special, in fact, that God picked you, individually, to tell his absolute truth to, one of a handful of chosen people. Drawn in by a charismatic radio personality in the days before the internet, my parents joined an organization called the Worldwide Church of God, a group whose arbitrary rules slackened more and more over the years until the church itself dissolved into more than a dozen smaller factions with their own individual guidelines, carefully curated from the Old Testament by middle-aged white men.
Unlike mainstream Christianity, which generally believes that the forgiveness of Jesus Christ renders the Old Testament obsolete, Herbert W. Armstrong, the founder of this cult, believed that the entire book should be interpreted literally. Ironically, this meant encouraging followers to read the Bible themselves to fact check the church’s claims, thereby arriving at the same conclusions as individuals. It also meant no Christmas, no Easter, and definitely no Halloween, as mainstream holidays were invariably ‘pagan’ — a word that was thrown around regularly. It meant going to church on Saturdays, not eating pork, tithing 10% of one’s income, and being reminded weekly that the end of the world was catastrophically near.
My parents were deeply devoted to the institution. Instead of an annual vacation, we saved all year to journey to predetermined meeting areas (conveniently located in popular vacation destinations) for a seven day ‘Feast of Tabernacles’ in the autumn, which involved daily church services and mingling with members from around the country. To a child, it felt like a holiday, albeit one that involved dressing up every day and sitting still. I have many fond memories of this brainwashing, since they are framed by feelings of safe, family togetherness. My father would take meticulous notes in a tiny notebook to ensure we stayed within our $100 a day family budget, and at the end of the week he always left a one dollar tip for the hotel maid. It should be noted that members of the church were expected to save all year for this high holy day in addition to a general 10% tithe.
As you might imagine, keeping young people away from ‘the ways of the world’ when they are physically living in it is a monumental task. In elementary school, I was forbidden from participating in any holiday celebrations, including coloring worksheets featuring Christmas trees, and in middle school I wasn’t allowed to perform in school plays after sunset on Friday nights. As a teen, the ultimate goal turned to me remaining a virgin until my wedding night, after which sex would be “so much better,” an indoctrination that led to plentiful oral sex with my high school boyfriend.
When one is small, talk of God and demons — of unambiguous right and wrong — makes sense on a fundamental level. Around age six I became convinced that demons lived in our garage and started to wonder if my favorite doll, whose eyes stared back at me, unblinking, was actually possessed. Disliking the loud sound of flushing toilets, I convinced myself that demons lived inside them and that I needed to run out of the bathroom before the flushing stopped to avoid them. This evolved into a type of personal superstition. Only in the last few years have I been able to flush a toilet and not immediately run out of the room.
But as you get older, you start to question the absolute. Sure, my mom never ‘lied to me’ about Santa’s existence and I was sure that she herself never lied, but what if people were lying to her? There was only one way to find out, so I resolved to read the Bible, cover to cover, during church every week, as we were encouraged. Plunging past Genesis into the depths of the Old Testament, I read about slavery, rape, and warfare that involved breaking babies’ skulls against rocks. I was about eleven. When I asked my parents about these atrocities, they assured me that people were more violent during Biblical times and that those characters were just products of their time period. So then, I remember asking, how do you know that the entire book isn’t a product of its time period? The answer, uttered by my father, is so absurd that I’ll quote it here. “Because if you watch the news, the Bible’s prophesies are all coming true. That’s how you know it’s real, because the end time is near.”
The Worldwide Church of God, and the offshoot we ended up in called the United Church of God, are doomsday cults. The original organization suffered mass exoduses after predicting that the world would end in 1975, and by the time I could understand the sermons, there was no emphasis on specific dates — just vague affirmations that Christ would definitely return, probably in my lifetime, and institute his Kingdom after a period of worldwide suffering. Israel played a central role in this prophecy, so we were encouraged to stay abreast of world events and connect the dots. We were the chosen ones — the ‘first fruits’ — and we were in control of how we interpreted current events and their place in the eventual end of the world.
It’s easy to compare the church with the abuser in an abusive relationship. The first step is charming the victim — telling them that they are special and smart for being able to understand the church’s complicated dogma. The next step is isolating the victim, by not allowing them to play an active role in secular society. Lastly, the church used fear to ensure that people would not leave — in this case, a conveniently esoteric doctrine around hell, which went something like this: If a person never knew ‘the truth’ and died, that person would have a second chance to be resurrected during the second coming of Jesus Christ. But if a chosen person who already knew the truth rejected their faith and turned away from the church, that person would burn.
Did I have a happy childhood? It’s hard to say, because most of my most vivid family memories involve going to church, eating brunch after church, going on church vacations and the like. It’s difficult to extract those warm memories from the near-constant existential crisis that engulfed them. The feeling of being special, in some sense, never truly goes away, except now I’ve crossed to the other side; as an atheist, I occasionally feel superior to people who never question their faith. Though I’ve forgiven my parents for being brainwashed, and accept why they were primed to fall for it, I still don’t truly understand how they let the cult dictate their life choices for so long. My upbringing gave me a deep disrespect for authority, a persistent skepticism, and empathy for the underdog, but also that suspicion of being a fraud. Because I grew up in a fundamentalist cult, I will always feel like an outsider.
