Can We Call Evangelicalism a Cul...??
Reflections on power, control, and religious trauma
I was blown away by a training I virtually attended last weekend, called Foundations of Treating Religious Trauma. Not because all the information was new to me – actually, I was amazed at how much I organically wrote about in my own book showed up on those slides as well! – but at how real and validating the training made religious trauma feel.
That might sound a little silly for someone who writes about religious trauma a lot. Like, why would I need it to be made real?? Did I not believe it was really a thing?
I did, but there is something to the power of being seen and witnessed for the experiences you’ve been through. Hi: this is part of why therapy is so powerful. But it can work even when being ‘seen’ comes in the form of your childhood faith experiences being laid out on PowerPoint slides that explicate how those experiences could cause trauma. They get it. These experiences I’ve had are important enough to not be dismissed!
One of the early decisions I had to make when writing my [still unpublished] book was how exactly to classify the religion I grew up in, which was conservative white evangelicalism. I could just call it being “evangelical,” sure, but that felt so benign for what I was trying to convey. (I will say it seems that evangelicalism has been getting itself a worse and worse rap since then, but I still don’t think the word fully conveys the psychological impact it has on believers).
“Fundamentalist” also felt correct, but I wanted to clarify what I meant so people didn’t automatically think of homeschooling, mandated stay-at-home mothers, long jean skirts, and hair to my waist. We did call ourselves fundamentalists at times: “getting back to the fundamentals of the faith!” We took the Bible to be the literal, inerrant word of God. We went to a “Bible-based church” where we supposedly only used *our particular interpretation* of the Bible as our authority. And generally speaking, we were fearful and distrustful of “the world” and “worldly things.”
Additionally, I borrowed the term “high demand, high control religion” from the Religious Trauma Institute, which added nice nuance but also probably was opaque to someone who didn’t already understand what that meant. (For reference, it means a religion that both demands, as in requires, a lot from a believer, and that controls a lot of aspects of their life. Mmhmm…Check and check.)
But another aspect that I’ve written about in some places (see “Why MAGA and Christian Fundamentalists Are Super ‘Culty’”) but also danced around a bit is the cult-like aspect of my faith. Evangelicalism is SO mainstream that if you were to call it a cult, you would get a lot of funny looks. And you would get a lot of very offended looks if you said that within earshot of anyone connected to the church! So it’s something to tread somewhat carefully on…
Or is it?? Why should we continually dance around an issue to protect the powers-that-be that are extraordinarily invested in keeping people submissive and beholden to a faith power structure that prohibits questioning?
I think that’s part of why the training felt so validating. Because they were not talking about evangelicalism specifically. They were talking about any religious group that would cause religious trauma to a person, and they laid out the characteristics of a such a group.
It’s just that most of the characteristics match one-to-one with my faith of origin (like family of origin, but for faith). And if you don’t want to be called a cult, don’t act like a cult.
Cults can be dramatic and obvious, like extremist polygamous Mormon groups (the documentary “Keep Sweet, Pray and Obey” is good but oh-so-disturbing) or the People’s Temple led by Jim Jones. And as evangelicals, we called other religious groups, like Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses, cults (I’m not saying they’re not cults, but also, here’s a mirror, evies…).
But if we only pay attention to the obvious cults, we miss some essential insights.
Cults operate using tactics of power, control, and coercion. People feel forced to be part of it. They are manipulated or emotionally abused. They are isolated from the outside world.
None of those operating tactics are part of evangelical doctrine, right?? And yet…
If you’re told that you have to believe what the group says or you will spend eternity in hell, there is no free choice to belong.
It will take another post to fully get into the emotional abuse part, but part of emotional abuse includes the tactics of shame and guilt used to coerce people to feel and behave certain ways. If you’re shamed about your emotions, your thoughts, and your drives, and you feel guilty for doing anything outside the strict bounds of the church, then you have had shame and guilt used against you for purposes of control.
And in the kind of church culture I grew up in, I was isolated from the outside world. Not literally – I actually attended public school, though many evangelicals like me did not – but intellectually and spiritually. I essentially learned a separate science curriculum courtesy of Ken Ham and Kent Hovind (holler at me in the comments if this was you, too). I learned about the Christian worldview and how every other worldview except capitalism (which somehow, was Christianity) was of the devil. I learned that we were good and they (everyone except for our kind of Christians) were bad and sinful. And if we associated too much with them, we might start down a slippery slope straight to hell.
So you know what? I don’t think it’s too much at all to think of my faith of origin as cultish. Culty. A cult. Can I even say it?
Can you?
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🙌🙌 WE CAN SAY IT!!! (And so excited to see all the sass and hold-no-punches that Jaded contains!!)
I can say it. Evangelicalism is a CULT. I love all of this and I love that you’re writing a book about it. Can’t wait to read it!