Hi, my name is Nina and I left a cult in 2006.
If I told you the name of this church, you’d look it up and go “but Nina, that’s a normal branch of evangelical Christianity, which has its own problems but is not necessarily a cult,” and you would be correct, so we’ll leave the name out of it. This was one specific church that decided to spin right off the rails, in the same way that Westboro is “Baptist.”
It started when a new preacher came, and it started small. He and his wife made us feel special. We were family. Truth-seekers in a frightening world. And at first it seemed so normal. Christians shouldn’t smoke, for example, because the body is the temple of Christ. Okay, sure! Reasonable. It’s not anything that’s not backed up by medical science, even.
Then they started introducing this concept called “Bible quizzing.” It’s actually a whole thing with that denomination, basically teaching kids scripture by having them memorize it and take part in competitions. So far, so good—except that for some reason….if we failed a question, we got in A LOT of trouble. I missed one once because of a typo and I was DESPERATE to get the judges to change their ruling. And this was not a huge error, either. It was like “will enter in the kingdom” instead of “will enter into the kingdom.” The reason for the error did not matter (even though it was outside my control). The tininess of the error did not matter. Only the error mattered, and I was pulled aside by the pastor’s wife when we returned home from the competition to find out if I was “really serious about learning the word of G-d” or if I was “struggling in my faith.” She was “disappointed” I had “allowed Satan” to “confuse me.” And I was devastated. If I was a victim of Satan then I wasn’t special. I wasn’t one of the truth-seekers. I didn’t belong….and oh, I wanted to belong. I had no friends at school. At church I was part of a family. Everybody loved me. I couldn’t “fall away.”
Over the next few years, the weirdness intensified. It became unacceptable for girls to show their knees because it was a “temptation” to “our brothers in Christ.” I picked out a dress for the homecoming dance and was told I should “cover my knees and then get on them and pray for forgiveness” because the hemline of the dress hit mid-knee. I was shamed in youth group because one of our youth leaders said he was going to trace his genealogy all the way back to Adam and Eve and I said “but that’s impossible, even if your family had written records all the way back the ones from before the flood would’ve been destroyed.” The pastor began speaking of receiving “visions from G-d” telling him about the sins of the congregation, which he recited in detail while exhorting us to come to the front and pray. At one point I brought the whole service to a screeching halt by saying my grandfather was an atheist and I wanted to pray for his soul to find Jesus. (And oh boy did they pray.)
All of this culminated in me being kidnapped.
That was the point where I was starting to have doubts. Things between the old and New Testaments didn’t add up and also I didn’t understand how I was supposed to be going to hell for wearing jingly earrings when earrings were right in the Bible. At this point I was seventeen, and I stopped attending. My family moving made it easy; I had to find a 20-mile ride most weeks to attend, and it wasn’t easy. But then I started college literally within walking distance, and my previously-clockwork attendance remained patchy, and became moreso after I got enmeshed in what very quickly (like, two dates quickly) proved to be an abusive relationship. The pastor told me it was my duty to stay in this relationship because I’d been “chosen by G-d” to “heal this man’s soul.” I’d already tried to kill myself once for the sake of the church, because I couldn’t pray myself straight and I didn’t want to go to hell for lust.
So here I am, 18 years old, for the first time telling my pastor “I’m not so sure.”
Within two days the youth leader showed up at my door and told me I’d been sponsored to go to an event called Acquire the Fire. I said I couldn’t go because of midterms and was told that I would go, or they would tell my professor I’d had a family emergency and they’d pick me up.
I went. It was three days of hell—Christian death metal bands physically hurting me due to problems with my ears, and a “laying on of hands” right in front of the speakers while I sobbed because “the devil is in you, or the name of the lord wouldn’t be causing you pain.” (Spoiler alert, it wasn’t the name of the lord, it was the insane decibel level.) At one point the pastor’s daughter took me outside to get away from it. It was three days of being told so many lies, hearing that I should completely obliterate my identity in the name of Christ, being told AIDS was a judgment from G-d, cancer was a judgment from G-d, Starbucks was a tool of the devil, that the speaker could hear our thoughts and none of us were heavenbound.
I got back home and alerted campus security that I was under risk.
I never went back—that was one of many reasons, but it was the biggest, and I was done. But I spent another five years slowly deprogramming. “Our G-d is an Awesome G-d” is still a trigger for me. I’m religious (I eventually converted to Judaism), but walking into a church for any reason makes me profoundly uneasy.
And it all started with a lonely ten-year-old who wanted to be special and was told you are, you are, you are, that’s why you get to know so many special things, that’s why people are cruel to you, they just don’t realize the truth….and it ended with me nearly dying.
You may think this sounds wild. It is. But I’m still in touch with another survivor who’s here on Tumblr, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they make themselves known.
It isn’t a joke. It isn’t funny. It is a very real danger and the smarter you think you are, the worse it is, because these cults are savvy and they know just how to deal with people like you.
Don’t fuck with cults unless you want to die miserably, probably alone and in pain.
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