My So Cult Life

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.....

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 ...