The Death of Cults

CRASH! Tingle jingle, squeak...BaM!mmm

^That's me^ As if I wasn't already smashing through many gumdrop forests talking about incredibly sensitive topics like obedience and death, I'll be digging another grave for a tender, heart issue. Probably why it's taken two nights falling asleep in front of this screen to coax these letters out of keyboard shadows. 

It's something that took two decades to be able to admit, and not feel like lightning was going to strike me for doing so: my family was involved in a cult until ~2009.

Now, I must tread carefully here; and not just because some of the people who will inevitably stumble across this post were/are still involved with it. Know that it is not my aim to defame or belittle my parents, or to bash the cult that can neither respond to my accusations nor heal the wounds it has caused for many. 

(((Bear with me, and if you have any questions please do not hesitate to ask.)))

Before going any further, and risking all sorts of mental images, the dictionary definition:

Cult

• a system of religious veneration and devotion directed toward a particular figure or object
• a relatively small group of people having religious beliefs or practices regarded by others as strange or sinister
• a misplaced or excessive admiration for a particular person or thing

One other pertinent note about the origin of the word cult: it comes from the French culte which means "worship" and earlier from Latin cultus, "care, labor; cultivation, culture; worship, reverence." 

According to this, what makes a cult comes out of the same root as idolatry. 

"You shall not make for yourself an idol...You shall not worship them or serve them, for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, on the third and fourth generations of those who hate Me, but showing lovingkindness to thousands, to those who love Me and keep My commandments" (Exodus 20:4a-6 NASB). 

The cult my family subscribed to had a lot of solid, Biblical truth, but overlooked grace. It worshipped the "ideal." It was laborious. It cultivated its own culture that wanted to isolate from the world. It was characterized by a heavy sense of seriousness. 
To children, above absolutely everything, it preached o-b-e-d-i-e-n-c-e. 

For those outside my family and/or did not know me as a child, I was incredibly willful. I didn't need any help being that way; and I don't blame my sin on the cult. The number of days where I sat in front of a stack of books with nothing but my stubbornness and a pencil to keep me company for hours and hours when I could have been playing and actually having a childhood if I had just obeyed are shameful. 

But it literally felt like I was incapable of obeying, or even mustering up the desire to. And trust me, I had plenty of time to think about the philosophies of it. I also had four older siblings who tried various tactics to break me like a pony out of Oregon Trail. But there was very little progress, no matter how soft or hard the efforts from any source.  

See, I felt like obedience was a threat and insult to my independence 
and intelligence (there were a lot of fallacies in the cult doctrine). 

If you remember, the cadence I landed on in the last blog was that the sons of disobedience are dead (Ephesians 2:1-2). 

But I had a problem: I looked around and didn't see anyone who I knew for sure was alive.