LURED Excerpt, Part 1: Introduction
LURED Excerpt, Part 2: Definition of a Cult
It would only be years later, however, that I realized what a panic my parents were experiencing to hear that now, their oldest remaining daughter had joined a religious cult; was speaking in tongues, believed that VPW, Doctor, The Teacher (as he was called) was the man of God for the 20th Century. Their daughter was encouraged to not have relationships with those unbelievers who denied that truth.
Growing up with an unmedicated Manic Depressive father was enough of an emotional roller coaster for a lifetime. When my sister was diagnosed with Schizophrenia when I was about 14 years old, I took advantage of the chaos, and decided I was lucky enough to be completely ignored. At a time when a budding teenager certainly doesn’t want or need overly attentive parents, I could come and go as I pleased. And, for the most part, I did. I started smoking cigarettes at 15, pot at 16, and sex at 17. My sister committed suicide when I was 17, maybe that’s when the emotions shut down, though I believe that probably happened years before. The short story is that I became promiscuous, and experimented with many drugs but, nothing I may add, that involved a needle. And to my benefit, it seemed I didn’t have a very addictive personality, just experimental. Maybe you have to be more emotional to be addictive.
I also never had much of a father figure to look up to. Was that why I was now looking to God? Was the love I was feeling in that Bible study room what I had been longing for all my life? Well, I went back and then went back again.
I found myself returning with Ellen, sometimes twice a week and no one was forcing anything down my throat, though I was still very much on guard … just there to observe, sitting in the back of the room, but I found myself going home each night with this peaceful feeling in my heart. These people seemed to sincerely like me. I was used to guys pretending to like me just to get me into bed, but these guys were different, and that got my attention.
After some weeks I decided that it couldn’t be a bad thing to clean up my life a bit. They had this class called Power For Abundant Living. That’s all they ever talked about. It was the class that changed their lives because “it taught the bible like its never been taught before.” Well, since I’d never read the Bible before, I wasn’t so sure how impressed I would be, but in order to do what all my new friends were doing, and in order to keep this nice peaceful feeling that was creeping up in my heart, I decided to do it. And, besides, I found the Bible Study leader quite attractive.
“I was manipulated to believe that I had made my own decision.“
“Just as most soldiers believe bullets will hit only others, not themselves, most citizens like to think that their own minds and thought processes are invulnerable. ‘Other people can be manipulated, but not me,’ they declare.”
~ Margaret Singer, Ph.D.
The culmination of the class was that everyone spoke in tongues. From what I read in my friend’s Jesus People book, speaking in tongues was a kind of moved-by-the-spirit experience, not something that you could call on at will. But this class showed from the scriptures that speaking in tongues was the proof that you were born again and God gave us free will, so of course we could do it whenever we wanted. Lots of things didn’t make sense to me, but I was new to all this, so I figured I’d be patient. It all still felt good.
The more I learned, the more I realized that my old life style was probably not too pleasing to God. I moved out of the commune and, for the most part, stopped doing drugs. One subject that always came up in these bible study meetings was that we lived in the age of grace. We were not under the law anymore like they were in the Old Testament. We didn’t need to follow the Ten Commandments (though the higher law was the law of love, so therefore, we wouldn’t be going around breaking the Ten Commandments!). Made sense ( I guess). So one night after Bible study, I went to my leader, the cute guy, and said I needed to talk about some things in my life. I was curious to find out just what God thought about sex, and alcohol, drugs, cigarettes. All those things that you would think a real religious person would stop doing. Almost 3/4 of the fellowship smoked cigarettes, and they would often go out for a drink afterwards, so what was all this grace stuff? Did we have to follow the rules or not. To this day, almost 38 years later, I cannot remember anything we talked about, just that I wound up in bed with the bible Study leader that night. Whew! That set me back a bit. I was here to change my ways and clean up my act, so to speak. What the hell just happened?
I was always SO proud of myself for NOT being mentally ill in my mentally ill family, that I denied for a long time that The Way was a cult, as that would make me less of a strong, independent person. Strong and mentally balanced individuals … do not join cults.
The term cult is very subjective. We conjure up images of the Moonies or The People’s Temple at Jonestown or Hare Krishnas at the airport. I’ve heard said, “One person’s cult is another person’s salvation.” I thought how true this was. My joining this group changed the course of my life from drugs and promiscuity to the Bible. That’s not a bad thing. In hindsight, however, I can now see that what it did was take away from me something huge. The ability to think for myself. The ability to question or doubt; to trust myself. I wound up putting all my trust in a person, not God, even though it was made to look that way.
Well, I spent 14 years of my life with this group. No one was standing at the door telling me that I could not leave. The only thing standing in the way was fear. It was the teaching of The Way that made me fearful that terrible things would happen to anyone who left. We would be outside the protection of God and would be in some sort of terrible accident, etc. I actually had a friend who was killed by a semi truck while hitchhiking in New Mexico on a mission for The Way and it was said “well, he must have been out of fellowship with God, must have sinned in some way, for this to have happened.” End of story.
Fear is the backbone of cultic control
Fear of those outside the group
Fear of failure, ridicule and violence inside the group
Fear of spiritual failure
Fear of the disintegration of your belief system
Take Back Your Life by Dr. Janja Lalich (1)
I was at the point in my life that I feared if I strayed away from the group and didn’t adhere to its teachings and beliefs, I would be fodder for the devil. Had they told me this the first day I went to the Bible study with my friend Ellen I would have run the other direction as fast as I could. No, it was a very slow process, this indoctrination.
Steven Hassan, in his book, Combating Cult Mind Control, describes several features of mental coercion used by groups like this. One of which is making followers fearful that terrible things will happen to them if they disobey leadership or leave the group. Leaders say that if followers disobey, they will be outside the protection of the household, outside the protection of God. they could be involved in a terrible accident, and the reasoning would be that the person walked away from God’s protection. Anyone who (dared to) question the teachings of the leader was thought to be possessed with devil spirits.
Mind control is a slow process that
involves intensive indoctrination while instilling guilt and fear
– victims are unaware of the process.
Combating Cult Mind Control by Steven Hassan (2)
So life goes on. I’m caught up in the day to day of my life, job, and the work of the ministry. Running classes, sometimes 3 to 4 nights a week and not taking too much time to doubt. The devil loves a doubter, you know. If I am out from under the protection of God, something awful could happen to me. Life wasn’t so bad, right? It could be worse! There were good times! These were the conversations in my head.
My marriage was troubled from the start, and that only made things harder. Divorce was frowned upon. I knew that walking away from that commitment, the one I made before God, would cost me more than a relationship. It meant losing my community, my friends, the people I had come to rely on.
And the way Rev. LCM* put it, there was no gentle exit. If I stepped away from God, I would “be a grease spot by morning.” That kind of threat wasn’t just fear-mongering—it was psychological shackling. The message was clear: stay and suffer, or leave and be damned.
I didn’t just feel trapped in a bad marriage; I felt spiritually cornered.
On the night of June 23, 1987, however, my husband and I said we quit to the State leader of The Way. I remember the date because my first daughter was born the next day. The reasons for our final departure will become clear in a later chapter. 1987 saw a mass exodus from this group all around the globe.
I married a man just because he was in The Way and any two believers” could make it, it was taught, as long as they believed God. Leaving my marriage and breaking my commitment to God was probably the worst thing I thought I could do, so I would pray harder and try to be better, try to submit like the Word of God said. That accounted for the first 10 years of my marriage. The second 15 years = 3 kids, no means of support and nowhere to go! Can anyone relate?
I take full responsibility for my decisions. I made the decision to continue going back to the fellowship meetings, take the classes, marry the man I married, without whom I would not have the wonderful children and grandchildren that I have today. I learned a lot along The Way. Perhaps the biggest thing I learned was to think for myself and if it took 15 years for that, well, that’s okay. Some people never learn.
The Way saved a lot of people from worse fates, I was one of them.
But, as all false prophets, the spiritual abuse of good people can’t last,
and didn’t. The Way fell apart because like all cults, it worshiped the leader.
Undertow by Charlene Edge (3)
(1) Lalich, J. and Tobias, M. L. (2006). Take back your life: Recovering from cults and abusive relationships. Bay Tree Publishing
(2) Steve Hassan, Combating Cult Mind Control: The #1 Best-Selling Guide to Protection, Rescue, and Recovery from Destructive Cults 30th anniversary ed. (Newton, MA: Freedom of Mind Press, 2015).
(3) Edge, C. L. (2017). Undertow: My escape from the fundamentalism and cult control of The Way International. New Wings Press, LLC.