The Clever Badger I'm not dead yet!

Cults

A couple of weeks ago I picked up a copy of the weekly newspaper of the local MegaChurch.  One of the articles featured on the cover was the account of a woman named Jennifer Heck and her involvement with a "cult".  The article states that it is excerpted from her booklet What You Don't Know Can Hurt & Destroy!, although I've been unable to locate any other references to that booklet.  (I was unable to find the original article online.  There is a follow-up of sorts here that doesn't really add much except a few more Bible verses apparently intended to scare any would-be "false teachers".)

According to the article, she's been a Christian for 23 years¹ and is a graduate of "Bible college".²

The story told in the article is about how she became involved in a Bible study group led by someone identified as Damien (a pseudonym).³ Apparently "Damien" led some sort of Bible study group that the author got involved in, and over time began to introduce some unusual interpretations to the study.⁴

These interpretations set off our author's warning bells:

After several months, I began to see that Damien's entire belief system centered on pride and power.  He had two underlying themes. First, we all are "little gods" with power to speak anything into existence just like the big God.  Second, Jesus saves everyone's spirit, but we must save our own soul through good works and unconditional love for everyone.

The first "theme" reminds me a little of what $cientologist$ seem to think happens at some of the higher levels,⁵ but the second "theme", at least the way Ms. Heck puts it, doesn't seem to be much more than this Damien character rejecting sola fide, which isn't terribly uncommon among modern liberal Christianity.

She goes on to say:

Damien not only mixed truth with error; but his teaching also mingled the Bible with material from other books and with other people's experiences that claimed divine revelation.  He supported everything he taught with Bible passages, but I soon discovered that when a person takes the "text" out of context, the only thing left is a "con"

While she doesn't specify which other books or experiences "Damien" used, I find it somewhat disturbing that she gets twitchy about these things.

To the first issue:

In the broad sense, any topic one studies benefits from different viewpoints.  It's reasonable to assume that in her time at "Bible college", she might have encountered a textbook.  Even if the text is nothing more than an annotated translation of the Bible, there is some interpretation going on.  Unless Ms. Heck is fluent in the original languages of the Biblical text (as opposed to just being able to pronounce, for example, New Testament Greek), she's ultimately relying on "material from other books" to provide her with what she has been taught to consider the correct interpretation of the Bible.  Unless "Damien" was using Dianetics or something like that, it sounds like Ms. Heck could have been overreacting to the fact that he was presenting material that wasn't necessarily wrong, but was simply different than that which she believed.

To the second issue:

I've seen many, many instances where someone has taken the microphone and proceeded to talk for 20 or 30 minutes about their religious awakenings.  These often include accounts of conversations with God, or of God nudging them down a path or whatever.  These witnesses or testimonies seem to be a really big deal to the point where if you don't have such a story,  you might feel inferior.  What are these stories if not "other people's experiences that claimed divine revelation"?

All of that said, I don't disagree in principle with her last statement about taking the "text" out of "context".  However I strongly disagree with her implication that the Bible provides its own context.  It categorically doesn't.  But you'd never know that if you haven't developed some independent background in relevant areas of study.

Apparently after a few months with "Damien's" group, Ms. Heck confronted him with her concerns, at which point he admitted that he had been using her.  After this, she experienced the not-unexpected emotional turmoil of having been betrayed and lied to.

There are hints in her story that her relationship with "Damien" may have been more than "spiritual".  In any case, if her story is true, she's had to deal with some pretty bad times and she has my sympathy.  "Damien" sounds like he needs to be locked up somewhere and left to rot.

The rest of Ms. Heck's article deals with how to identify cults and avoid them.  I've got a number of issues with her advice here, and most of those issues stem from the fact that she conflates a narrow theological definition of "cult" with the more familiar secular definition.  This leads to the suggestion that pretty much any religious belief other than strict, fundamentalist Christianity is a cult.

She defines cults almost entirely in terms of her own brand of Christianity.  I think I can understand why she might do that, but in doing so, she implicitly sweeps in pretty much every non-Christian religion as well as more liberal branches of Christianity.  Some characteristics of cults (or "false teachers" - she uses the terms almost interchangeably) are:

• They focus on human tradition and principles of the world, appealing to human desires such as pleasure, comfort, power, success, financial prosperity, controlling the timing of events, and absence of disease and suffering.
• They purposely avoid telling people about consequences of sinning and rebelling against God.⁶
• They create false hopes within the minds of their unsuspecting followers.
• They hide aspects of their personal lives from the public and their followers.  Although masquerading with exemplary faith, evil behavior eventually surfaces.  These individuals' true character reveals itself through their lifestyles, characterized by sin rather than righteous transformation that comes through a genuine relationship with God.

These traits gather in many of the more prominent religious figures - Ted Haggard comes to mind - and quite honestly I think one could make the argument that just about every religious denomination or group exhibits a number of these qualities to varying degrees.

Now, Ms. Heck cites several works as references for information on cults:

• Fast Facts on False Teachings by Ron Carlson and Ed Decker
• Unmasking the Cults by Alan Gomes
• The Kingdom of the Cults by Walter Ralston Martin and Ravi Zacharias
• Correcting the Cults: Expert Responses to Their Scripture Twisting by Ron Rhodes and Norman Geisler
• Handbook of Today's Religions by Josh McDowell and Don Stewart.

These books all, curiously, seem to be out of print.  I'm not familiar with the books themselves, but some of the authors (Zacharias, Geisler, and McDowell) are familiar to me as well-known Christian apologists.  Ms. Heck quotes McDowell and Stewart:

Cults offer certainty and easy answers to those who are unsatisfied with the present state of their lives.  Individuals who experience and identity crisis or have emotional problems are particularly susceptible to cults.

There is a certain irony to that statement, perhaps best exemplified by the following elements of the "What We Believe" page of the above mentioned MegaChurch (which is fairly typical):

I believe in the Bible and God's Holy Word, Scripture. I believe God inspired the autographs (original writings) of the Scripture and those autographs were consequently without error.
(Mark 12:36; John 14:26; 16:12-15; Acts 1:16; 1 Corinthians 2:12-13; 2 Timothy 3:14-16; 2 Peter 1:20-21)
I accept the Bible as the final authority for all matters of faith and practice.
(Isaiah 40:8; Matthew 5:18; 24:35; Romans 15:4; Hebrews 4:12)

It doesn't really get much more certain than that.

She also cites FACTnet, which was one of the key informational websites in the early 1990's when the Church of Scientology was waging war against internet critics.⁷

The most directly relevant page on FACTnet is the list of characteristics of destructive cults.  This list pretty cleanly pegs the group Ms. Heck found herself caught up in, but pegs it based on the manipulative and domineering behavior of "Damien" rather than on the extremely subjective criteria of "false teachings" that Ms. Heck focuses on.

There are some good points to take away from Ms. Heck's experiences - be mindful of what you're getting into, be aware of changes in the character of groups you belong to, realize that some people have motivations that are not in your best interests - but by casting the subject of cults entirely in conservative/fundamentalist Christian terms, she's managed to include several Christian denominations that aren't normally considered cultish, and she's under-emphasized groups that typically are.  Perhaps more significantly, she's managed to define the issue as a matter of avoiding anything that might make you question your existing beliefs, which I personally consider an intellectually suspect thing to do.⁸  

I've had some interest in cults and various fringe religious groups for a long time, basically since Jim Jones and the business in Guyana in 1978.   There are some extremely dangerous authoritarian sects out there, and some of them are very adept at identifying potential members and recruiting them.  Young people going away to college or individuals living in new areas can be vulnerable if they don't have a good support system in place.  It's not a bad idea for people in such situations to be aware of techniques used by such groups to draw people in, but they should realize that not every group with different beliefs is out to indoctrinate them.

-Jay

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¹I find it interesting and a little puzzling that articles like this often mention how many years someone has "been a Christian". The implication seems to be that having been a Christian for a while gives one some sort of intrinsic credibility.

²There's no mention of which "Bible college", which would seem to be a relevant nugget of information. I'm fairly confident in concluding that the reference is to any one of the network of Bible colleges under the general umbrella of the Independent Christian Churches/Churches of Christ. This lets us draw some general conclusions about what she would have been taught - it's likely to have been a conservative course of study that doesn't include the more critical modern developments in Biblical studies. I will continue to refer to "Bible college" with quotation marks because for all the information provided in the article, she could have been doing a self-study course from a diploma mill. Ms. Heck's lack of specificity undercuts her position, in my opinion.

³I doubt that it's a coincidence that Damien is also the name of the antichrist child in the Omen films...

⁴"Unusual interpretations" is on of those phrases that means something different to everyone that sees it.

⁵If the antics of one of their most prominent adherents are any indication, other super powers include the ability to jump on couches on daytime talk shows, the ability to stare at people for long periods of time without blinking, and the ability to believe in huge amounts of incoherent bullshit.

⁶Growing up Catholic, I was always taught that one's actions spoke loudly. In other words, doing good works was at least as important as declaring your faith in Jesus. The sola fide thing always seemed wrong to me. It seems almost like a "get out of jail free" card. I can't help but think of the occasional stories of death-row conversions where someone facing execution finds Jesus at the 11^th hour. The notion that some calculating serial killer might get into Heaven based on a choice made on his way to visit Old Sparky while his victims might not seems seriously screwed up to my way of thinking. But, at the same time, if you pick your Bible verses the right way, that's exactly what you get. In fact, if you use the right proof-texts, you can make a case that once you accept Jesus, you can get away with pretty much anything. I don't know anyone who actually takes it to that extreme, but the fact of the matter is that you could.

⁷I highly recommend spending some time on FACTnet. I would suggest avoiding the Cult Awareness Network (CAN). CAN was another site critical of Scientology, but had legal and financial troubles. The organization was bought out by a Scientology lawyer in 1996, and is now an arm of that organization.

⁸The short explanation of why I consider it intellectually suspect is that if your beliefs are worth having, they're worth subjecting to some critical scrutiny. It's far easier not to do this, because if you do, odds are that you'll find that some of your beliefs don't have much support behind them, and some of them may be clearly wrong. It's uncomfortable to have to deal with realizations like that, but that doesn't mean you should go out of your way to avoid the situation.

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