Cult Recruitment: An Insider’s Perspective

Even if you don’t know that much about cults, you’ve probably heard about the famous mind-control of brainwashing. It’s the process whereby new members have their identity broken down and cult values and a cult personality implemented instead. It sounds like a sensational process, requiring torture and weird machines.

Karl being brainwashed in Lost

The truth is, it’s not. If it were that obvious, people would be much less likely to join a cult. Brainwashing is a simple process of manipulation that is so subtle that new members don’t notice the destruction of their sense of self.

I know how the process works, intimately. Recruitment is an essential part of most cults (outside of the handful that stopped recruiting in order to kill themselves off), and the IFB is no different. However, I’m finding a disconnection between some of the scholarly understandings of recruitment and my own experience.

It’s not that the breakdown is wrong, per se. The mechanics are all there—targeting emotionally vulnerable people, bombing them with love, and offering them hope. All of that is entirely true.

So where’s the problem?

It always sounds so sinister. In Cults in our Midst, Margaret Thaler Singer describes the process as “deliberate,” and to some extent it is deliberate, but it’s not intentional-deliberate (“I’m going to brainwash someone”) or malicious-deliberate (“I want to ruin her life”).

In the IFB, we absolutely targeted emotionally vulnerable people (children, military, grieving family and friends, the lonely, etc.). We had any number of programs to reach out to those in difficult places in their lives, those less fortunate, or those simply confused and dissatisfied with where their life was going. We promised them answers and meaning and showered them with love. We had both subtle and blatant ways of worming into their minds and planting the idea that their misery and trials were due to their sin. We were trained on how to approach people, how to gauge their receptiveness to the message, and how to gently push them into accepting our beliefs.

I think I still have a bookmark in my old Bible with my script cues written on it!

But we did it thinking we were doing the right thing. We would have never called it “recruitment,” “brainwashing,” “mind control,” or any of the other clinical terms.

We called it witnessing, sharing our faith, spreading the good news, and sharing the love of God. We saw ourselves as missionaries of good. People were dying and going to hell because of their sins, and we had the cure. It was our duty to offer them a chance for salvation.

“The most sobering reality in the world today,” Bob Jones III would often prompt in chapel.

“Is that people are dying and going to hell today,” the students would chant back to him.

I would have never admitted it because it was horribly taboo, but I never liked witnessing. I hated approaching a complete stranger and trying to find a way to trick them into talking about God. I hated asserting that they were sinful and needed to be saved or else they would go to hell. I even hated knocking on apartment doors and asking parents if I could take their kids to my Bible club when I was at BJU, often wondering what kind of parent would let a complete stranger take a child away simply by claiming to want to tell them about Jesus?

Every time I witnessed, I felt like a pompous jerk.

But I did it because I was led to believe that I was responsible for the lost souls of those I failed to witness to. Choosing not to try to recruit someone was tantamount to murdering that person. How could I possibly bear the guilt of watching them burn in hell for all eternity simply because I was too embarrassed to approach them?

Today, when I watch documentaries like “Jesus Camp,” I shudder to see the brainwashing tactics in play. When I hear about how Missions to Military (which has connections to the IFB, for the record) waits until soldiers are at their most broken point in boot camp before approaching them to witness, I get sick to my stomach to see vulnerable people being targeted.

But not for a single second would I ever think that the people doing the recruiting had bad intentions at heart. They believe in what they are doing 100%. That’s why they’re so seductive. Cults are insidious and destructive because victims believe in them. Brainwashing doesn’t end when you join—it’s just beginning. You can lay out a map of behavior for cult members to look at and point out exactly how they fit into that map, and they still won’t think they’re a cult because they’re convinced they’re doing the loving thing, the right thing, the only thing they can do.

Why am I writing about this?

Because it’s not good enough to just identify the behavior of cults and how they are destructive or even how that behavior is used in the grand scheme of control.

Cults are monsters, and the people in them can be monsters. But if you’re looking for a monster under your bed or hiding in the shadows, you’re not going to find it. All you’re going to find is a smiling face and a human being who desperately believes they are doing the right thing.

If researchers are truly going to expose cults and protect people from them, they need to be able to recognize that the most important part of the recruitment process isn’t the part where they break down the recruit’s identity—it comes long before that, when they lull the recruit into letting his/her guard down. The claws and fangs are there, hiding under the mask, but no one will see them until they try to leave.

Recruitment is a golden road to a physical hell paved with someone else’s good intentions.

Halloween: Facing Fears and Breaking Taboos Part 2

I tried desperately to write more about my personal journey last week, but I just couldn’t manage to get it out. Some things were still too deep to be articulated. But after a week of continued meditation on my Halloween crafts, I think I’m to a place where I can express some of the personal symbolism. In a sense, I created a haunted house out of internal pain, picking decorations that held personal horrors in addition to general horror.

This is where the journey began, gently bringing myself to a meditative place with symbols of death and the underworld.

There’s something haunting about abandoned places that echoes my own fear of abandonment. That sense of something having been there, now gone, can be overwhelming. What isn’t there is just as haunting as what is there. And the attempt to sterilize and cover up the abandonment makes it even worse.

Although I still play the violin, I can’t bring myself to play this violin. It’s haunted with too much from the past. As my grandfather’s violin, it comes attached with all the expectations and dreams of my family. Even though violin wasn’t what I wanted to make a career out of, it was what they expected my career to entail. It went with me to Bob Jones University, where it picked up the negative energy of my teachers as they told me I might as well quit if I didn’t enjoy playing Mozart and that I was one of those people who just didn’t have what it takes to play. I think I shed more tears over that violin than anything else during my three years in that hell. And though I didn’t fully understand the magnitude of what I was choosing, the day I told my parents that I didn’t want to study violin anymore because I wasn’t interested in clinging to a safety net, I abandoned more than just their dreams and my hopes for graduating from BJU. It began my exodus from fundamentalism, but it was also the day I stopped abandoning myself.

This next one is complex. Originally I started creating this vampire scarecrow baby simply because I find babies slightly scary. They really are the closest to actual vampires that we have, living off the bodily fluids of another—that is after they’ve lived inside someone for 9 months like some sort of alien parasite. If some women find that idea appealing, that’s great. I find it repulsive.

But I soon realized that this particular doll was so much more than just an expression of my aversion to children. The dress was made by my dad to put in my hope chest. It symbolizes yet another area where I fail to live up to my parents’ hopes as well as the expectations of fundamentalism. Fundamentalist Christianity is not a nice place to women. This is essentially the extent of their “role” in so many teachings, and in that sense, I think children do more than just suck on their mothers—they suck the life away from them. Children are the chains that I as a Christian woman was taught to want, even when I didn’t want them.

Moving away from the living room, we enter the kitchen, which I transformed into a torture chamber and apothecary. The tools of the trade are all there for slicing and dicing. A shrunken head hangs drying from a hook. And closer to Halloween, the pumpkin will be receiving a lobotomy. The instruction book propped open is actually a Bible.

I can’t think of a more effective weapon within fundamentalism than brainwashing. First you scare someone shitless, then you convince them that the only way to be safe is by cutting themselves off from their thoughts and emotions. Once you have them mindlessly following you, you can shape their behavior into whatever you want. And fundamentalist Christianity is an expert at this.

Just for good measure, check out this video for how accurate the shrunken head symbol is.

Perhaps the most cathartic of all my creative enterprises was the desecration of family pictures. This is the one that felt the most taboo and the one that I wanted to hide, thus the one that I needed the most. It’s easy to acknowledge that BJU left emotional scars. It’s easy to see the loss and feel the anger towards the institutional abuse inherent in fundamentalism. What’s harder is allowing myself that much honesty with my family.

I have a feeling that desecrating my “ancestors” is taboo, even during Halloween. And I certainly didn’t start out with the idea of turning a family album into a blasphemous display. Part of me was horrified. Here I was tapping into and revealing something in me that made me uncomfortable, which really was the whole point of the underworld journey, right? Facing my shadow side, letting go of shame, letting something I was afraid of come to the surface.

The faces aren’t really blacked out in any of the physical pictures. I just prefer to keep faces off the Internet. The mouths are sewn shut because children are so completely and utterly silenced within fundamentalism, both by peer pressure and teachings.

Family pictures often look so happy, even if the family is so dysfunctional, the only time they ever stop trying to destroy each other is while the flash is going off. But underneath every happy smile, there’s always problems—problems that it’s natural for families to want to hide from the memory-making. And for some families, it probably runs deeper, with more sinister problems than others. But society tells us to pretend that families are happy, safe, blessed places. We’re not supposed to talk about or show that they’re not.

The needle I used to sew over the mouths is inserted in through the hand of this one because, sadly, no matter how good the intentions, it’s the adults who silence children.

I’ve got pretty select friends with whom I’ll discuss family problems, but for the most part, I succumb to the pressure of the photograph—the pressure to pretend that there are no problems when presenting a face to the world. I hadn’t even realized how deeply I was denying some of the anger towards my family until I began destroying pictures. There’s a lot that happened—a lot that was said—as I dug my way out of fundamentalism. There’s a lot that is left unsaid now after having come out as bi. We talk, but the conversations are about as real as the smiles. We’re so busy pretending things are okay that we can’t even get to the point of making them okay.

As with all Underworld journeys, the point isn’t to go down into the depths and stay. There’s a journey back up to the world, back to life. And I’m definitely on the upward swing. I’ve learned things about myself that I hadn’t yet realized. I’ve reminded myself of lessons it’s easy to forget about during the bloom of spring. But more than anything, I’ve discovered that life, even the painful parts (and yes even death as part of life) is beautiful and worth living.