I think I was born into a cult. V1

I think I grew up in a cult. Not one of those ones where the kids are abused and the adults are all sleeping with each other but a cult nonetheless.

I was immersed in an environment of words and actions every day for 18 years that made no sense to me but dictated every decision that was made for me and every decision I made for myself for years following.

It never made sense. It never moved me. I never, ever got it. I watched other people feel ‘moved’ and I was entirely confused by it all.

People used words and phrases that rolled off their tongues with such ease. Words that made no sense to anyone but themselves but delivered with so much certainty, so much assumption it was impossible to ask what those words even meant.

It was an environment that stifled thought though outwardly encouraged questioning. We did this through answering tricky questions with ‘it is by faith’. An emphatic full stop to further questions. It is impossible to argue against faith and you cannot admit to not having faith, doing either is eternally fatal. 

The focus was salvation, our own personal salvation. Accepting the truth into our hearts.

We were encouraged to commit to ‘quiet times’ where we would read material on our own that directed our contemplation to the importance of our personal salvation.

Our schools were built by the same people who built our churches and were attended by the generations that followed.

Our social circles were contrived to ensure the least amount of pollution to our souls. We attended classes where we were taught our doctrine, with children whose parents and grandparents had received the same teaching. We attended schools, youth groups, camps, conventions and churches only with people who held our beliefs, ensuring we were so immersed it would be outrageous to question the beliefs of so many good people.

A Jewish lady came to speak to one of my high school classes. This is the only one time where I can remember hearing about another faith my whole childhood and I’m sure the teacher that arranged it only did so once. For the first time something of a religious bent seemed clear to me. Jews doesn’t have Jesus. This made so much more sense. No strange concept of a man dying a hideous death on a cross 2000 years ago because his Father ordained it in order for me to be able to accept God/Jesus into my heart and achieve my personal salvation. I was excited when I got home and spoke with my mother about it. I don’t remember what was said but I do remember the feeling of deflation and that it was an unsatisfying conversation. She was undoubtedly concerned I had been polluted and that she had sent me to that school to avoid such threats.

As a family we didn’t talk, we didn’t discuss, we held firm in our right-ness. As if a kind of mystery that only we, as chosen people, could fully understand. Any alternate view was seen as a threat. Thinking was seen as a threat. The threat that there might not be a sufficient answer and that if we thought too much about our lack of answers we would need to think further and if we thought further, we might crack the shield of certainty. Certainty is the backbone of our very existence; confidence is not enough; we must remain certain.

We must be right. We must be ‘chosen’. We can’t have put all of this puritan effort into being saved for it to be easily understood by any old person. We must hold the truth; we must be wiser. Do not think.

From the beginning of my existence I was taught I was better than the other children. I had two parents and they were married. I went to a private school with real values. I didn’t watch television with secular views like ‘other’ people. I attended church twice every Sunday and not just any church, it was the right church. We held services the right way, we read the bible the right way, we dressed for church the right way, and until our church became polluted by a drum kit, we sang the right hymns. 

My family had real values, we believed in something, we knew we were saved, not like those other families living their pointless lives without morals and principles, attending state schools with ‘broken’ families all searching for the truth in the wrong places like alcohol and secular music and television and movies and drugs and worst of all – sex.

We knew this because the bible via Martin Luther, told us so. The bible, that document which was put together by a committee of men over many, many years, many, many years ago is the living Word of God. It is the truth. The words of God given to us and thanks to Mr Luther and his interpretation of it sometime around 1500 we can now see the light. Despite the hundreds of years since and the evolution of science and society and thinking we still stand firm on Mr Luther’s interpretation that the bible is the only document we need and his interpretation is God ordained. We swapped the Pope for the bible and we got personal salvation.

But doing the right thing, which was the key principle of my upbringing and the focus of every day of my childhood, was not the way I would be saved. Contrasting to all of these actions and displays and commitments to our faith was that my salvation was apparently purely by the grace of God and nothing I could do would ever change that.

This contradiction was so striking to me. But we neatly explained this away with the theory that if we truly allowed God/Jesus into our hearts then doing the right thing would be the natural progression. We would want to be good for Jesus. Doesn’t everyone want to be good for Jesus? It’s like saying thank you to Jesus for saving my soul.

We couldn’t earn our salvation but yet this intolerable focus on how we lived our lives, how we were seen by others, the activities we maintained, the rituals we undertook could certainly imply otherwise.

We undertook rituals in a manner that any outsider would clearly assume we were striving our way into salvation.

My father would come home from work in the foulest of moods, he would trip on one of our school bags and throw it out the door into our front garden. He would walk directly to the radio and switch off the Christian music radio station and turn it to Classic FM. He would cold shoulder us all including our mother with the exception of barking orders to set the table for dinner, clean up our mess and tell us to be quiet. And then we would sit down to dinner at a table, like God intended, and we would fold our hands and close our eyes and he would deliver a prayer of some duration in calmness and thoughtfulness. We would eat our dinner in suspended fear keeping our elbows off the table and when speaking we ensured our mouths were completely empty. And once our unbroken family had finished eating, my father took a bible off the shelf nearby and without ever missing a meal, he read from the bible and a devotional and we sat with our arms crossed and listened silently. Then we would pray again. Then silently we would get up from the table, no discussion, no questions, no follow-on, and do the dishes.

Regardless of the mood he would read the bible and a devotional and pray twice. It mattered not that one of us had just taken a verbal bollocking for not much reason or that someone was crying in distress or that someone was angry with someone else, we stringently maintained reading a bible passage and associated devotional in the order the book we were reading contrived. This ritual was completely unrelated to the goings-on of the day, we would hear what the bible was telling us as relates to whatever topic the author had decided to write about next.

If only we had spent this time applying the bible’s teaching on patience, love and kindness and our time praying for the same. However, I’m sure those that were travelling were grateful for our prayers when they arrived safely to their destinations and that our food tasted better for the thanks for it.

All of this effort we put in to demonstrate to God/Jesus, and to the rest of the community, that we have accepted God/Jesus into our hearts, is all ultimately for one cause – to get into heaven, or probably more importantly, to stay out of hell.

It is a shame that this dedication to prayer and bible reading won’t win me my salvation because by pure measure of time spent, I would have secured an ensuite room in heaven with an ocean view.

So how can it be that we are accepting this doctrine and living this life purely by grace when the threat of hell looms large above us. Is it really grace when the alternative is hell?

Two things the threat of hell seems to breed; arrogance and fear.

The arrogance of certainty that we are going to heaven and we have avoided hell, this complete self-interest in one’s own personal salvation comes at the detriment of all others. We don’t care anymore for the trifling’s of this life; we are heaven bound. We don’t need to worry anymore about earthly things for we are saved. We are so completely at peace with this world being a hell hole and full of evilness that we are more than comfortable pulling ourselves away from it. We don’t commit to social justice causes because we’re going to heaven soon and this won’t be my problem. Jesus might even return before then so it’s probably not worth putting the effort in to make things better for others. In fact, I think it’s best we protect our salvation and just hang around our own kind, better not risk it.

Fear. I don’t doubt at all that people cling on to belief systems that are non-sensical because of the fear of hell. Our church didn’t like talking too much about hell because it was a bit outdated, we preferred to focus on grace but hell always hung about like the elephant in the room. I mean sure it might not be true but what if it is? What if we get to the pearly gates and we’re wrong? Rather be safe than sorry, rather go along with it and do the right thing than run the risk. How then is it by grace when we believe out of fear?  What better way to control the masses than promote the fear of hell, it’s been happening since the dawn of time. What better way to get your kids to behave than to teach your youngsters they are sinners and due for eternal damnation. If as a child you could draw a dotted line between bad behaviour and going to hell than you sure are going to try your darndest to be good.

Carrying all of this into adult life has certainly not made it easy.

The impact of the teaching that we can never be enough on our own, that purely by the grace of God do we achieve anything worth measuring, is a significant damaging influence on ones sense of self in the real world. I was raised being told I was a sinner; a miserable speck of dirt. Any achievements I had were not of my own making and therefore I should take no pride; it is all by the grace of God. My sense of worth and recognition of my abilities so squashed that I made the bad decision of allowing other people to make decisions for me. I swallowed my ambition, ambition is not valued, not praised and not encouraged, it sits very uncomfortably with our doctrine and yet there was no denying I had it. I just had to keep it under wraps, my parents had no interest in discussing my dreams and ambitions, what frippery next to the weight of my eternal salvation.

I had no sense of the real world. I entered it thinking all other people were aimlessly trying to find meaning in their lives but didn’t come to Christianity because it was ‘uncool’ or that Satan had them under his control. This notion that we were somehow smarter, was swiftly destroyed when I met people who had beliefs that were actually well considered. People who could articulate why they believed something and why they didn’t. People who had families and were happy and content and had values with not a hint of a fear of hell and damnation making it so. They were living fulfilled and happy lives making an impact in the world and valuing the lives of others. It was a complete lie that we were the only ones who had it right and everyone else was a mindless, virtue-less wanderer without a cause.

I wanted to learn, I wanted to discuss issues but my black and white, heaven and hell, right and wrong upbringing did not equip me well to do this. I entered conversations thinking one of us had to be right and one wrong, I was combative because I knew no other way to put my point across. If everything you have ever questioned or asked has been met with disdain, if every question you had went unanswered, if you were given a hard time for always asking ‘why?’, two things happen; you lose confidence and you get cross when you’re not heard. I still have a physical response to not being heard. I don’t care that I’m not agreed with but I do care if I’m not heard and my stomach turns and my face gets hot. I still can’t bear being dismissed, with not being given the time and respect of a listening ear. And my confidence was shattered. Every time I spoke up at home and asked a question I was treated as if I was very difficult. ‘Why can’t you just accept it like your sister?’ ‘Why do you always have to question everything?’. The vibe I received day in and day out was that I was making things up, that I was questioning to simply annoy my father, that this was a stage, a teenage thing, I should be given no space for it, ‘she is just being rebellious’. And so going into adult life I often didn’t speak up, most definitely not to men in authority positions. I put up with behaviour I just shouldn’t have because I doubted my own intelligence and sense of things. I assumed too many times that I was going to be told I was wrong and my opinion was worthless so I didn’t say anything to avoid the shame of being put down or not heard.

The pressure to conform was immense. You can’t be smarter than all of these people, surely they have all thought this through and questioned it so they must be right. No one wants to be the odd one out. I was told for many years I was ‘the black sheep’ in our family. I was the rebellious one and it was clear I was irritating my parents, they made that very clear. Once I bought navy blue nail varnish and wearing this around my home town was akin to having tattooed my forehead. It was seen as such a statement of rebelliousness. To be clear, I tried marijuana a few times, got drunk a few times but I never came home after any of it, I stayed at friends houses. I always went to school. I didn’t swear in the house or break things. I had a job that I held down from the age of 14. I saved enough money to buy a plane ticket overseas. I passed all of my exams. And most importantly I still went to church twice a Sunday. I was a good kid. But I wasn’t the same as the other kids and I knew it and they knew it but didn’t know what on earth to do with it. They were plum out of ideas.  So, I tried to conform, many times I buried my personality and tried to do things I thought were the right things to keep people happy, to make my parents like me. I got married at 19 entirely under this pretext. Utter, utter madness.

I was a child of pillars of the community – I didn’t want to embarrass my parents, there would be consequences, and they certainly didn’t want me to embarrass them. They had done everything right; I was the problem not the system. The pressure of the community watching, the judgement was incredibly intense. There was a moment where I thought hang on a minute, maybe I’m not the only one who feels suffocated here. I was underage and in a bar in town one Saturday night and I came face to face with the minsters wife.  She was young and a second wife to the minister who took on his 4 kids and had another 3 of her own. We looked at each other and I must have had a look of complete terror on my face that my freedom was over and soon my parents would know and I would never taste life again. She looked at me, smiled and winked and put a finger to her lips ‘shhh’. The sheer relief! We had an understanding and I couldn’t have appreciated that wink anymore, my small modicum of freedom was still in-tact and someone understood me, it was a beautiful feeling knowing I wasn’t the only one who needed to leave the suburb and get a drink in.

I finished year 12 in November of 1999 and I was on a plane to London in January 2000. I was 18 and when I arrived and I breathed and I knew I was where I should be.

Not that much has changed in the cult. My sister’s, their husbands and their children attend the same church I did. The children go to the same schools I did. I went to school with their spouses, our parents went to school with their parents and so it goes on. My eldest nieces both have boyfriends who have the same surname as my youngest sisters married name… and it isn’t Smith.

Believing or not believing it now is neither here nor there; the damage is done and we have to move forward with our lives, finding ourselves, shedding guilt, building confidence and defining our own values. I still fight against the narrative I was taught and it often still creeps into my brain despite the hours of therapy.