My So Cult Life

I am 8 years old. My heart is firmly planned in my throat. The warm breeze from the open front seat windows hits the thin plastic of the dry cleaning bags and makes them buzz like a nest of angry hornets. I am all at once terrified, heartbroken, and confused. My stomach starts to hurt. My chest gets tighter with each passing mile. I sit, sweating and smothering, between a full rack of plastic wrapped dresses  and a poorly designed quadrilateral backseat car window that folds out instead of rolling down.  The Dallas suburbs gradually give way to open Texas prairie before performing a subtle  transformation into the hills and pines of northeastern Texas.  My pulse is racing. This is the familiar route to our assigned feast site of Big Sandy, but the Feast of Tabernacles is still  months away.  My mother hangs on every word of an unfamiliar voice emanating from our car's cassette player. The man speaks words I can't quite make out over the sounds of buzzing pl...

If you were to talk to my and other family members of Armstrong Cult Survivors who still hold strongly to that faith, you'd hear the same argument over and over again. "I love them too much to ever hurt them. None of what they say is true. We aren't in a cult, we just have the truth." But being "loved" by family members loyal to the teachings of Herbert W. Armstrong is often a very painful experience. For some, that "love" was even LETHAL. Sometimes it's easy for people to forget that CHILDREN of cult members are often the ones who suffer most. Below are some highlights from firsthand accounts of what life was like in the WCG and its resulting splinter groups. I don't know what it's like for you to read these, but for me it has a kind of reassuring comfort coupled with intense fear and dread. Like wrapping up in your favorite blanket and watching the scariest movie imaginable alone in a pitch black room. The familiarity of the blanket ...