My So Cult Life

  A lion doesn’t concern itself with the opinion of sheep,  because rarely are they in the same ecosystem. It would be a huge waste of time.  – Anonymous CS Lewis gave us the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Herbert Armstrong (he and his followers would have you believe) gave us The Lion, the Lamb, and the Little Child. In part one, I took you through the verbiage used in the logo for the Worldwide Church of God. In this post, we’re looking at the image itself to find some interesting clues as to what Herbert was really showing us in that illustration.  

Let’s take a close look at the Worldwide Church of God logo for a quick minute. I want to show you something [I know it's hard to read, but when this was made, high res didn't even exist . ]      The scroll at the bottom of the shield reads The lion shall dwell with the lamb and a little child shall lead them in the world tomorrow and beneath it is another smaller scroll presumably attributing the quoted text above. Isaiah 11:6           When I was a kid, I knew this logo inside and out. It was all over my home, on everything at church, it came in our mailbox at least once a week. In the fall, you could see it on bright green stickers affixed to the bumpers of cars and campers making their way to “feast sites” across America. Not to mention jackets, hats, T-shirts, notebooks, pens, and all the regular tchotchkes of the time.     I could draw it with my eyes closed. The circle, the shield, lion, kid, lamb, and Isa...

There's a Monty Python skit called "The Four Yorkshiremen" that is reminiscent of a common feeling among cult survivors.     Four rich sophisticated men sit around and discuss the hardships they faced growing up in poor working-class families. Each one trying to outdo the other three with increasingly elaborate stories as to which of them had the worst childhood.   That sketch feels oddly familiar to people who were in cults. The media's penchant for salacious sadistic stories makes living as a cult survivor much more awkward than it ever needed to be.  [Which, let's face it, is pretty damn awkward even without animal sacrifices and elaborate robes]   Me:  I was raised in a cult. Them:  How horrible was it?? Me:  What do you mean by horrible? Them:  Did you have to like, kill babies with a special kind of spoon, or something? Me: Did I WHAT?!??? Them:  Were there orgies every day?  Me: Why would you even.....

  When talking about my cult upbringing, people sometimes ask me what I would say to Herbert W. Armstrong if I were able to travel back in time and meet him. (He died in 1986 when I was 13) My answer is always the same. I would grab him by the lapels of his $2000 suit coat and shout in his face as loudly as I possibly could, “YOU STOLE MY POTENTIAL AND MADE ME AFRAID OF MY OWN FAMILY, ASSHOLE!” And then, depending on my ability to restrain myself, I might, possibly, spit in his face. Cult leader and Con Artist Herbert W. Armstrong, walking off his private jet on his way bilk his followers out of what little money they had left. But here’s the real kicker of the whole scenario… I don’t think that he would have had much of a reaction to our (hypothetical) confrontation. After all, we are talking about someone who, when confronted with accusations about his years long habit of performing incestuous acts on his youngest daughter, never once denied them and had even admitted abusing ...