My So Cult Life

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.....

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...

  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 ...