How did you get out?
Questions people ask me and other cult survivors.
As an archivist, I always encourage students to look beyond the addresses in a directory. Design choices and paper quality for a directory can tell us about the time period and resources available to the publishers. Many city directories will include advertisements for local businesses and other helpful contextual information. Does a directory advertise alcohol during Prohibition? That warrants more exploration. A directory can be a line in the sand—it tells you who is in and who is out.
The person who designed the cover of this church directory in 1988 probably intended it to be cheerful. The wooden manikins smile kindly as they help to reassemble their bodies. “We need each other to stay together” could communicate an appreciation for community.
My experience at this church colors my interpretation of the directory; I see something far less cheerful. While wooden manikins sometimes function as decor objects, their usual purpose is to help artists with their figure drawing techniques. Much like my childhood experience, manikins are manipulated and posed by an external hand. They do not have a will of their own.
Even the phrase “we need each other to stay together” reads differently when you know that the church trains members to view everything outside the church as a threat. Safety comes in staying together—and away from the outside world.
The first page of the directory contains a list of church leaders. Some of them are still around, but most of them left for one reason or another. I scan through the list of familiar names—that man challenged the senior pastor and was kicked out. Another man had a career failure and moved to greener pastures. Their names are forgotten by those who came after; once people leave the church, they cease to exist.
The students who attend the two colleges in my hometown have many coffee shops to choose from, but the Venn diagram of students who frequent the two long-standing coffee shops is two distinct circles.
One coffee shop is owned by leaders from my childhood church. The aesthetic is minimalist, trendy, and the patrons are likely to wear polo shirts. The men roast their own coffee, make their own bagels, and offer a tithe of their profits back to the church.
The other shop flies rainbow flags, sells food from all the local bakeries and kitchens, and participates in the county poetry and art community.
The tale of the two coffee shops is a microcosm of the relationship between my childhood church and the surrounding community. Despite protestations of wanting to “serve the local community,” substantial interactions between church members and people outside the church are rare. The people who live in the town year-round see what the college students do not—that the church is actually a cult.
For 50 years, the church grew primarily by luring vulnerable college students from out of town. My dad and his peers came to the area colleges from all over the northeast, became entangled in the church, and stayed.
Staying is easy. Leaving is harder.
The question comes in many forms: desperate, grieving, morbidly curious.
What made you start questioning?
When did you realize it was a cult?
What was the point where you snapped?
The myriad questions boil down to “How did you get out?” and “is the process replicable?”
Some who survive cults and high control groups can identify a particular moment when the blinders fell off and they saw clearly. That isn’t my story.
As a child I envied Christians who could give testimony about a dramatic conversion experience. Their stories were compelling because they had a narrative arc. There was a clear before and after.
I don’t remember a time when I didn’t claim the label of Christian. According to my parents, I was 3 or 4 when I “accepted Jesus into my heart.” Did I say the sinner’s prayer? Did I understand what I was doing? I don’t know.
I do remember that during Vacation Bible School one church dad enthusiastically approached me with his bracelet of gospel-story beads and I shot him down with a condescending “I’m already saved.”
I feel this pressure to conjure up a conversion moment, a point in time where the hands on the clock freeze and I finally see. Oldest daughter that I am, I want to help. I want to give people a clear path that they can follow out of the confusion.
I hope that you find my journey instructive. But after years of therapy, I’m no longer taking responsibility for anyone’s story but my own.
The value of a story is not so much that it is a boilerplate for others to follow and replicate but that it is a portion of an overall narrative, a piece of a mosaic that one can see up close and appreciate as an element but when viewed from the bigger picture perspective becomes part of a more wholistic understanding of - well, almost anything, really. In the collection of these elements, somewhere an individual will see themselves and say, "Hey, that's me - I experienced it too". Then again, they might say, "Well, I didn't experience that myself but now I have a better awareness of what others have gone through", which helps make the mosaic all the more clear.
Jim K.
Staying is easy - leaving is hard. So true.