I’ve “come out” in posts on this blog as a survivor of sex trafficking and various other kinds of child abuse, a lesbian, a non-Christian, a teacher who isn’t always happy with the way schools are structured or organized, and a former mute. I have one more confession.
I was born and raised in a religious cult.
2×2 “workers” (ministers) at Santee Convention in about 1985. This was around the time I “professed” and became an official member.
I never thought of it that way growing up, but then most people in cults don’t consider their religion a cult until they are out of it. I never thought of it, really, at all until almost 20 years after I tore my Bible in half, threw it down on the front porch, stomped on it, and announced I wouldn’t be attending services anymore.
I thought the Christian sect I grew up in was a little weird, a little repressive, and not what I wanted in my life. But I never thought in any more depth about it. Until I did.
What’s defining about cults is not so much their methods—although you can find lists of these online that often do more or less coincide—as the ways in which they affect their members. The common characteristic of cults is that they work to isolate their members from outside forms of support and information so that members become entirely dependent on the cult for meeting all or almost all personal and emotional needs.
As a part of this, cults usually attempt to dissolve the ego boundaries of members, so that they are no longer sure who they are or what they think as individuals. Tactics include “love-bombing” and public confessions of transgressions—both serious and minor.
For an adult, the loss of a sense of self is hugely damaging, and those who exit cults usually need to spend a long time rebuilding those normal psychological boundaries. For children born into cults, it means their egos start out distorted and they often lack any internal sense of what personal boundaries should be in the first place. Recovery from my religious upbringing is part of my work towards normal.
Jeanie Davies (Left), who said I was old enough to make up my own mind.
I left the cult for a simple reason: Charlotte Brown, our minister that year, told us week after week in services that we needed to be obedient: obedient to our parents, obedient to the ministers, obedient to God as the cult understood Him. My parents stressed the same message when I got home. But obedience, in my case, was clearly going to get me killed—quite literally.
I don’t blame Charlotte. I’m sure she was well-intentioned. (and I’m also sure she has now passed on). But something was wrong with that picture.
And, like I said, I didn’t think beyond that for 20 years. You could say I had more pressing concerns.
But now I realize all of the small ways growing up in a cult has affected me. I’m afraid to disagree, even with my students, despite the fact that it’s my job to make the rules and then enforce them. I’m afraid to do something better than someone else. I feel anxious when I wear a shirt with very short sleeves. I put off getting a hair cut as long as possible, even though the split ends annoy me and make my hair look a wreck. I’m afraid of a lot of really stupid things—minor things and really important ones. What I learned from the cult was fear.
I should, perhaps, give a little more background here. The cult I was raised in claimed not to have name, but refers to itself (modestly) as “the truth” or “the way.” It doesn’t have a written or clearly articulated doctrine. Which is clever, actually, because then everyone is constantly worrying about whether they have the right beliefs in mind. Lack of clearly articulated doctrine keeps people insecure and guessing, ready to be told what to think.
Tharold Sylvester - Ronan Convention 1973 – “God has given us a better Way, a perfect way, the Narrow Way. Enter in at the Strait Gate. Strait means difficult. God’s Way is difficult.”
They are often referred to as the 2x2s, the Cooneyites, or the Friends and Workers religion. If you do a quick web search, it’s not that difficult to find fairly accurate information about it. As it turns out, a lot of people have exited the cult, and some of them have written about their experiences or dug up the history of the cult or created message boards to support other former members. So I won’t go into it in depth here.
The 2x2s don’t advocate mass murder as Charles Manson’s The Family did. They don’t push women and children into sex trafficking like The Children of God (now known as The Family International). They don’t really stand for anything worse than dressing like you live at the turn of the century. But, like all cults, the 2x2s destroy the individual’s sense of self and worth.
A Unification Church wedding ceremony. Photo credit: AP/Ahn Young-Joon.
Recently, Higher Thinking Primate posted this very excellent short talk from Ted Talks about a former cult member. During the talk, Diane Benscoter says she understands how a group of people could be convinced to commit genocide and mass murder. She says cult members become capable of anything. I know what she means.
Although the 2x2s were more concerned with what we wore and how we looked than how we treated other people, I do think that if the way to salvation became committing acts of violence and terror, we would have done it. We would have been obedient, because that was our place and we wanted to fit in with God’s chosen people and with God’s way.
So I wonder now if Islamist terror cells function in exactly the same way as the 2x2s, and if Al Qaeda isn’t mainly a violent religious cult—the Moonies with RDX and instructions for how and when to use it. I wonder if there is an angle on this we are missing in our War on Terror.
Because terrorism is rarely about only violence, or only politics, or only hate. It is usually about beliefs. Terrorists, like most people, really want to be good people, and they want to do good things. They often want to save the world, which is a higher ambition than most of us can claim. The problem is, if you’re a terrorist, saving the world often means killing people–usually a lot of them.
Al Qaeda fighters taking aim at the UK, American, and Israeli flags. Photo credit: Kent News & Pictures Ltd.
We know fairly well by now why so many young men (and it is mostly young men) have turned to terrorist organizations in certain parts of the world. Times are hard. Life is uncertain. Poverty and unemployment are rampant, and there seems to be little realistic hope for the future for many young people. Ideology offers certainty during times of uncertainty.
But I wonder if we don’t know well enough how ideological groups work, or what happens to people after they are drawn into them. I just wonder.
I wonder if there isn’t a lot more we could be doing, a lot more that we actually know already from the massive amounts of cult activity we experienced in the US in the 60s and 70s, and if we just haven’t put it all together yet.
I wonder.
Further reading:
Hockman, J. (1990, April). Miracle, Mystery, and Authority: The Triangle of Cult Indoctrination. Psychiatric Annals. Retrieved from: http://www.rickross.com/reference/brainwashing/brainwashing14.html
The Lying Truth. http://www.thelyingtruth.info/?f=
Telling the Truth. (2008, August 2). http://www.tellingthetruth.info/home/
Via: The Road from Bondage to Freedom. http://www.votisalive.com/
No one, not even God is forcing you to believe what HE said, but He said that eternal life is a GIFT. And you either accept a gift or reject a gift – you do not do any work to deserve or gain a gift or else a gift is not a gift, but rather is wages for something (like obedience to parents or others even obedience to God). You have freedom to receive that gift by believing God, or to reject that gift by disbelieving God – it is your choice and your choice alone. But certainly, tearing your Bible in half and stomping on it is a very common 2×2 response to the false teachings of their Workers tooted by them as the only correct teachings on earth having been taught by only them as if from the Bible. And if you no longer have a Bible to check those erroneous teachings with to see for yourself that the Workers’ teachings were and are false, you have left yourself with no measuring stick at all – again, your choice and only your choice.
Posted by gray | October 13, 2012, 11:51 pmThey are harmful. That’s the yardstick.
Posted by ashanam | October 14, 2012, 5:02 amYou called the 2x2s a “Christian sect” which shows that you know little of what is and what is not “Christian.” And having tossed your Bible, THE measuring stick of “Christianity,” you are substituting “harm” for “truth.” And worst of all, you will be seen as an expert by some readers who will, like you have, falsely blame God for the false teachings of cults. I doubt that you could wriite a clear definition for the word “cult.,” as “cult” where used in connection with “Christian” indicates false teachings – i.e., NON-Christian teachings (doctrines). Cults in the context of “Christian” are NOT Christian, not “Christian sects” or anything close to “Christian.”
Again, your clear rejection of God’s gift offered to you as to everyone else, simply means that you do not have His gift.
I was also raised in the 2×2 group – and I wonder at the vast difference between my response to the Workers’ false teachings and your response to their false teachings.
Posted by gray | October 14, 2012, 7:29 amMy faith is between me and God.
Also, my understanding of what constitutes a cult is very different from yours. The key elements of what I understand as making a cult is not the truth or falseness of its teachings. It is the effects they have on their members, which is to destroy their individual selves.
Posted by ashanam | October 14, 2012, 7:41 amSorry, I made a mistake in my wording, “substituting “harm” for truth.” Perhaps have been much better if I stuck to “measuring stick” instead of “truth.”
By the way, since I am one of the administrators of votisalive.com, I wish to thank you kindly for posting a link to our website under your title, “Further reading.”
I would also ask your permission for us to copy and post your fine photo of Workers in our gallery – thank you kindly if that could be permitted.
Posted by gray | October 14, 2012, 7:58 amI appreciate the work you have done on the votisalive site. I spent a lot of time on that when I first started looking into the 2x2s more recently. (I left it about 25 years ago.)
I presume the copyright for those images is held by the photographer, but they are actually from your site. I probably should have more explicitly linked to the image file, but weird things seem to happen when you put a website into a caption.
In using the word Christian, I really only mean someone who believes in Christ–whether that person follows Christ well or badly isn’t for me to say.
I am also distinguishing between cults that involve a belief in Christ and those that involve other belief systems. For example, Osho, which seems like it probably qualifies as a cult, although I know significantly less about it.
I also assume you can be wrong about who and what God is and not hurt anyone. But cults hurt people. An important part of the process is isolation and limiting access to information. People who have other emotional and psychological resources and who have access to a wide range of information will not usually submit to the kind of brainwashing that cults engage in, and they don’t usually tolerate the verbal and other kinds of abuse that usually go on in cults. They are also in a better position to notice the deceptions that usually goes on.
So that is my yardstick. Not whether we should or should not send out missionaries in pairs, or whether we should baptize by immersion or sprinkling. They could be right about those things and I would still call them a cult.
Thank you for reading and commenting.
Posted by ashanam | October 14, 2012, 8:24 amNow, to respond to your definition for the word “cult.” Your definition is just fine in a secular context, but is very ambiguous in the context of the word “Christian.” And in its better secular application, even the best of our modern education systems could be classed as a “cult” simply because those education systems have a tendency to “destroy their (students’) individual selves” — i.e., if the students were left to teach themselves, they would undoubtedly grow up to be very different “individual selves.” But your definition is correct in a secular context – any “group” can correctly be called a “cult.”
Posted by gray | October 14, 2012, 8:15 amAnd you are absolutely correct in saying that your faith is between yourself and God. That is precisely what I stated in my first reply.
Posted by gray | October 14, 2012, 8:21 amGray, I completely misunderstood your first comment. You seem to have unintentionally stood on my old 2×2 wounds.
But I do think even without the Bible, there is still a fine yardstick for right and wrong, and that is common sense and a concern for others. I was 15 that day when I tore up my Bible. I haven’t forgotten, however, entirely what it said (I had read it sequentially and nearly cover to cover 2 or 3 times) and I have re-read the gospels since then. However, I think even without a reference to the Bible at all, the harm the 2×2 system does to its members is self-evident. You can be completely religiously illiterate and see that it is wrong.
To me, it is not about buns or hem length. Those things are subterfuge and are mainly there to keep people from noticing what is really going on, which is mainly domination and control for its own sake.
Posted by ashanam | October 14, 2012, 8:41 amI had no intention to stand on your wounds, but those wounds All too often my method of dealing with basic facts get’s misunderstood in that manner. However, it seems that you now understand that we are somewhat on the same page with regard to the historically destructive factors of 2x2ism. In fact, the ONLY good that I could credit 2x2ismn with is its introduction to the Bible – but it certainly did not represent the content of that Bible, which eventually led me right out of their influence.
All too often the word “Cristian” is applied in the manner you have applied it. And with the frequency of that type of application over timer, people generally accept NON-Christians as if they were Christians and thus the name of Christ is blamed for all manner of merely human failures – very similar to tearing up a Bible, blaming it for the Workers false teachings as if they did teach from the Bible as they have always claimed.
I am sorry if my replies seemed offensive because you are indeed free to set your own beliefs in order from any source you may choose. But if you reject the Bible as the measure of Christianity, you will unavoidably fall into the same category as William Irvine did – and I would wish THAT upon NO ONE.
We would love to include the photo in our gallery, but if that is not possible for you to permit, thanks anyway.
Posted by gray | October 14, 2012, 10:49 amPlease pardon me. In a bit of a rush at the moment my last contains several typos and bad grammar – also ignores the fact that you copied the photos from VIA – we have NO opposition to people copying ANYTHING from VIA, but merely ask that source credits be provided in the process – and now that you have done that, our request is met sufficirently – thank you.
Posted by gray | October 14, 2012, 11:12 amI am rather sensitive to any implication that I am being told what to think or what to believe, and I’m afraid I reacted rather from that.
I think where we may differ is our reasons for leaving the 2×2 church. It sounds like you were driven from (perhaps liberated would be a better word) by theological concerns.
I left because it was driving me mad, which is really what the Bible-tearing episode says to me. I went off the rails there.
Granted, it was a King James Bible (which I suspect cults often use because it is so difficult to understand that it’s easier to misrepresent) and it was also the Bible my parents gave me when I professed. So, it did have a symbolic value as a 2×2 object to me, if that makes sense–when I have read the Bible since then, it was one I could understand better, and it was certainly not one that represented my decision to profess. But really I just got so angry I lost control of myself. And that is generally my issue with the 2x2s. I think they drive people mad–to one degree or another, and in a variety of ways.
I think you may have understood the Bible-tearing as being about blaming Christ for the misdeeds of human beings, but that is no way what I think. We are all individually responsible for our actions. I don’t blame God for what people have done.
I think we may also differ in what we find interesting or of value about understanding cults. I have no interest in judging anyone’s Christian-ness, or Godliness more in general. We will each need to answer to God and our own consciences on that count.
In addition, as a practical matter, most people are really very wedded to their beliefs–right or wrong. Nothing much ever seems to be gained through theological debate.
But the psychological processes that are used to attract and keep people in destructive groups interest me greatly, because I think that can help us understand how to combat them.
It sounds like the theological basis of cults does interest you very much, and you see that as the way to combat them. It is fine that we have a little bit of a different take on this.
We are, indeed, very much on the same page about the destructiveness of the 2x2s. And being able to civilly discuss our differences is part of what it means to be an ex (and not a 2×2).
Posted by ashanam | October 14, 2012, 11:37 amMy whole interest is, just as all of the administrators of VIA, to try to help former 2x2s understand what Biblical Christianity offers. That is why biblical comments are added to Workers’ sermons that are posted on VIA, often quotations of Bible verses that expose the error the Worker is trying to teach – i.e., to briefly contrast the Workers’ ideas with what the Bible teaches.
And through this discussion with you on your site, it is my only aim to help YOU to understand what Biblical; Christianity has taught for over seventeen hundred yeas steady. The very bottom line of Christianity is the gift God offers to all, which each one can accept or reject as they please. And confusing 2x2ism with “Christianity” is 2x2ism’s first TRAP.
You are quite correct about 2x2ism driving people mad – it proposes a list of ridiculous rules that are ever-changing as the ‘only’ route to heaven. And as its adherents TRY to keep those ridiculous rules thinking they are earning heaven by doing so, the changes in those rules fit the common military quip, “B.S baffles brains.” And THAT ‘brain-baffling’ is common to religious cults especially those religious cults which claim to be “Christian.”
I would not have recognized my concerns that led me out of 2x2ism as “theological” concerns at the time – I did not even understand the word “theology” after years of Workers’ lessons. What drove me out was the Workers claim to be the “only way,” while John 14:6 had Jesus claiming to be the only way (etc). I began to see all kinds of complete opposition to Scripture in the messages preached by Workers. And they failed to scare me with their clap-trap about other churches. So once I began to notice the discrepancies in Workers’ messages, I had no difficulty in going to see what other churches believed – wow, what a bunch of bald faced lies about the other churches. Of course at this time, I not only recognize that my concerns were “theological,” but I attribute the very notice of the discrepancies to fervent prayer that God would show me WHAT the real gospel is in such a way that I would never suffer any further doubt – prayers year after year often in tears of anguish when I failed to notice that the very observation of those discrepancies was THE positive answer of every one of those prayers. And when I finally saw 1 Cor. 15:3-4 as the clearest and most concise description of the “gospel” I shed pure tears of JOY in my new-found freedom in the fact that Jesus, the perfect lamb of sacrifice, died for my sins in my place so I could be free – such love I had never before known.
It is THAT message of complete freedom I most want you to hear – but what you do with that message from the Bible is still up to you alone. No one can even try to force you to believe ANYTHING.
I now understand that tearing your bible occurred at 15 years of age and does not necessarily reflect your present thoughts. And I would encourage you to read the Bible in a non-KJV version because the KJV has been drummed into you as if it were the 2×2 Bible alone – and will naturally bring back poor memories, misunderstandings etc. with each KJV verse I’m sure. Try the newest English translation free of charge (downloadable free) at bible.org, the NET Bible translation which comes with over 60,000 translator’s notes explaining the choices of English words used to convey as close as is possible the meaning of the Greek and Hebrew manuscripts. Also know that the NET Bible is a translation of manuscripts that are 1000 years older than those used for the KJV – you might notice like I did that the manuscripts remained so close to the same for that 1000 years when Bibles were all copied by hand. Don’t try top tell me that accomplishment was out of human ability please.
And for what this is worth to you, I am not trying to tell you what to think, believe or do. I am trying to help you out of the old 2×2 snare (with all of its miseries for you in the past) in the same manner as I was helped out if it.
Posted by gray | October 14, 2012, 12:33 pm