Introducing a New Podcast - "In God's Name: An Unseen Cult"

Today's post will be short.  I still owe a continuation of my series of posts on precarity.  I'm in So. Cal. right now helping an elderly family member with cognitive decline issues.  Perhaps on the plane ride home I can finish the post on frontiers on artificial intelligence...

But I do want to let readers know about an upcoming new podcast series focused on the experience some of us (including myself) had in the evangelical fringe cult of the Assemblies of George Geftakys.  The podcast is being produced by someone who was born into the cult and who left as a young child along with her family just before the Assemblies collapsed.  In recent years she has applied her university education to analyzing our cult experience and shedding light on the implications of that experience.  The name of the podcast is "In God's Name: An Unseen Cult" and the first episode will be out later this month.  

This podcast is one of several podcasts dealing with evangelical/Protestant cults and groups with cultic tendencies which I have discovered over the last few weeks.  To those former members of the Geftakys cult whose primary focus has been on the Geftakys cult experience, I would just point out that many of the things we encountered there - erasure of personal boundaries, hyper-competitiveness in seeking "ministry" positions, forced communal living, long meetings, excessive busy-ness, and child abuse - have by now spread far and wide throughout mainstream evangelicalism.  Thus there has been a multiplication of  podcasts and related books essays, and news articles which examine such groups as YWAM (Youth With A Mission), Teen Mania (now defunct, and similar to YWAM in its tactics and the trauma it caused), the continuing menace of cultic front groups on college campuses, the proliferation of teachings on child rearing that encourage child abuse (such as the books by Michael and Debi Pearl, J. Richard Fugate, James Dobson, and Gary Ezzo), the continuing menace and harm caused by Dominionism, the prevalence of sexual and domestic violence in evangelical churches, and the excesses of the American "troubled teen industry" - an "industry" which is for the most part extremely lacking in governmental regulation and oversight.

That such groups and phenomena are associated so strongly with conservative white American evangelicalism/Protestantism is not surprising.  These groups and their associated phenomena of asserting abusive control over those whose power of resistance has been taken away are a symptom of a larger problem within American society.  That these groups, teachings, and leaders are proliferating now is a sign of the insecurity of the dominant culture and of its willingness to hold onto its dominant position at any cost.  It is vital to understand how this expression of white American evangelicalism is affecting the broader society, and how both this expression and the larger society will evolve as reality continues to impose limits on the unrestrained exercise of American evangelical power.

The Distressing Mirror

Two men went up into the temple to pray, 

one a Pharisee, and the other a tax-gatherer.  

The Pharisee stood and was praying thus to himself, 

"God, I thank Thee that I am not like other people: 

swindlers, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax-gatherer. . ."

- Luke 18:10-11

Over the last week or so I downloaded an audio narration of another nonfiction book by Haruki Murakami.  (I already had his books Novelist as a Vocation and What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.)  Murakami has achieved fame as a novelist due to his complex, dreamlike narratives and complex, multidimensional characters.  However, I personally am drawn more to some of his short stories and nonfiction.  Also, nowadays I like to consume my fiction and narrative nonfiction in the form of audiobooks, since I can listen to them while exercising or doing housework or yardwork.  

The book I downloaded last week was Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche, and it deals with the March 1995 terrorist attack against Tokyo subway passengers which was perpetrated by members of Aum Shinrikyo (オウム真理教), a Japanese apocalyptic/doomsday cult founded by a certain Chizuo Matsumoto, known more widely as Shoko Asahara.  Over the years, Mr. Asahara had directed Aum followers to perpetrate a number of violent physical attacks against innocent Japanese citizens, including some who were critical of Aum activities and some who had been members of Aum but had since fled the cult.  (By the way, if you click on some of these links, you will be directed to webpages that are written in Japanese.  If you want to read them in English, simply copy the link address into Chrome or Chromium and right-click anywhere on the page.  An option will appear that says, "Translate to English."  Click on that option.)

The attack that occurred on March 20, 1995, used a liquid sarin solution that was stored in plastic bags.  The perpetrators boarded the Tokyo subway trains, dropped these plastic bags, then punctured them with the sharpened tips of umbrellas.  They then fled the trains at the next stop after the stop at which they boarded, while the liquid sarin solution spread over the floors of the subway cars and the sarin began to evaporate into the air.  As the sarin evaporated, it began to sicken and kill passengers.  It also sickened (and in some cases killed) Tokyo subway workers who were dispatched to clean up the liquid on the floors and who did not know that the liquid contained sarin.  This attack was entirely unprovoked.  None of the people riding those trains or working on those train platforms had done anything evil beforehand to Aum or to Shoko Asahara.

In writing Underground, Murakami sought to correct certain biases which he observed in Japanese media coverage of the gas incident.  In particular, there had been a tendency toward sensationalism which obscured the unavoidable grainy uniqueness of the individual stories of each of the victims and bystanders who had been riding the Tokyo subways on the day of the attack.  This is why there is a large number of interviews of victims in Murakami's account.  

But Murakami also attempted to challenge and correct certain biases in the Japanese societal and cultural perception of the meaning of the gas attack.  This attempt is captured in "Blind Nightmare: Where Are We Japanese Going?", a series of essays at the end of the original edition of the book.  In those essays, Murakami challenged the evolving narrative in which a "right," "sane," "good" Japanese society was juxtaposed against an "evil", "insane," "diseased" adversary.  As time passed, this narrative allowed the birth of a mindset in which "most Japanese [seemed] ready to pack up the whole incident in a trunk labeled things over and done with." (Murakami, ibid.)

What Murakami wanted to do instead was to ask, What kind of society have we Japanese (that is, all of us) become that something like Aum Shinrikyo could have arisen and that something like the Tokyo gas attack could have occurred?  To quote him again,

"In other words, the shock dealt to Japanese society by Aum and the gas attack has still to be effectively analyzed, the lessons have yet to be learned. Even now, having finished interviewing the victims, I can't simply file away the gas attack, saying: “After all, this was 

merely an extreme and exceptional crime committed by an isolated lunatic fringe.” And what am I to think when our collective memory of the affair is looking more and more like a bizarre comic strip or an urban myth? 

"If we are to learn anything from this tragic event, we must look at what happened all over again, from different angles, in different ways. Something tells me things will only get worse if we don't wash it out of our metabolism. It’s all too easy to say, “Aum was evil.” Nor does saying, “This had nothing to do with evil' or 'insanity'" prove anything either. Yet the spell cast by these phrases is almost impossible to break, the whole emotionally charged “Us” versus “Them" vocabulary has been done to death."

In his closing essays, Murakami cites the abortive attempt by Aum Shinrikyo to win seats in the Japanese Diet during the 1990 elections, mentioning in particular an encounter he had with Aum rallies in the Shibuya ward of Tokyo.  He speaks of the discomfort behind the revulsion he felt toward Aum and how he asked himself why he felt that revulsion, that horror.  His answer was that he saw in Aum a mirror of Japanese society itself at the time, and of himself as a Japanese man.  True, the mirror had distortions, yet it accurately reflected elements of the shadow self, the indwelling corruption which each of us must deal with on a daily basis in order not to descend into nihilistic destructiveness. 

I don't know whether other Japanese voices spoke up in the same way as Haruki Murakami in the months and years after the Tokyo gas attack.  But I do see a parallel between the gratuitous, unprovoked destruction of innocent people perpetrated by Aum and the gratuitous, unprovoked destruction of innocent people (especially the poor and the nonwhite) perpetrated by the Global Far Right over the last decade especially.  In particular, I am thinking of the murders of unarmed African-Americans, the abortive wall at the southern border of the U.S., and the many, many deaths of poor and nonwhite people in the United States, Brazil, Britain, and similar places due to COVID-19 in 2020.  I think of how these deaths were aided and cheered by a cohort of largely religious people with an apocalyptic/millenarian/doomsday mindset that justified in their minds their active attempts to murder their fellow human beings.  I think of the cults of celebrity/personality worship that have been created or attempted by people such as Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Elon Musk.

I also think of how in the West (particularly the United States), while there have been so many revelations of the existence of destructive cults in our midst over the decades, there have been so distressingly few voices calling us to a time of collective self-examination.  This is particularly true of those who claim to study and write about malignant narcissism.  I think of how the description of malignant narcissism found in the DSM-IV was modified in the DSM-V over the last decade.  The DSM-IV could be summarized thus: "This is what a wolf looks like - and by telling you all what a wolf looks like, hopefully we can keep you from getting bitten!" But the message of the DSM-V seems to me to be more sympathetic to wolves: "A wolf is not really a wolf unless he experiences suffering as a result of being a wolf..."  This obfuscation has helped to distort the discussion of narcissistic pathology among rich and powerful people such as national politicians and heads of big business.  And those who claim to write as the victims of narcissists hid their eyes from the realization that many of these "victims" in 2016 and 2020 had pledged their allegiance to the very narcissistic types against whom they claimed to be angry.  They tried to hide from the fact that their own narcissism was reflected in the political candidates whom they chose for themselves and the collective aspirations they embraced.

I too am a victim of cultic activity - as a person of color victimized by a society which claimed a religious mandate to Make Itself Great by trashing me and my ancestors - and as a former cult member myself - yet I too find that I must engage in a time of self-examination in light of the fact that I live in a society (namely, American society) which tends to form cults as prolifically as mangy dogs produce fleas.  For I must admit that during my days as a member of a particular cult I did damage to other people, because the cult appealed to a latent desire in me to dominate other people, to have power over other people.  To fulfill a latent desire within myself to be A Big Part of Something Great, I surrendered myself to someone else's prefabricated narrative.  My story became similar to that of the Aum devotees described by Murakami:

In order to take on the “self-determination” that Asahara provided, most of those who took refuge in the Aum cult appear to have deposited all their precious personal holdings of selfhood — lock and key — in that “spiritual bank" called Shoko Asahara. The faithful 

relinquished their freedom, renounced their possessions, disowned their families, discarded all secular judgment (common sense). "Normal" Japanese were aghast: How could anyone do such an insane thing? But conversely, to the cultists it was probably quite comforting. At last they had someone to watch over them, sparing them the anxiety of confronting each new situation on their own, and delivering them from any need to think for themselves.

A time of self-examination - both individual and collective - is urgently needed, both in the United States and throughout the West, particularly in those countries that have become "Murdochified."  This is because the 21st Century has already begun to bring urgent societal challenges that will require intelligent responses on both an individual and a collective level.  But if we are going to combine safely and equitably in order to craft collective responses, we need to be mentally healthy.  We must, as much as possible, eliminate our susceptibility to the voices of cult leaders who appeal to the darkness within each of us in an attempt to turn us into an embodiment of the darkness that exists in these cult leaders.  My concern is that achieving this may be a challenge in the United States.

Another Expose of An Evangelical Cult

Here is a link to a couple of interviews of another former member of the Assemblies of George Geftakys, who describes the horrible upbringing she experienced as a child of one of the main leaders in this group.  The interviewer is also a survivor of the Assemblies.  These interviews were very interesting to me because of my former involvement in this unhealthy group.  They are also interesting because of how they illustrate the influence of bad men from the toxic evangelical mainstream, men such as James Dobson.  As I said a while back, all the assertions of the American Religious Right are utter crap.  A caution about these interviews: they contain strong language and deal with triggering experiences.

Man, You Got To Figure It Out Yo'self

(Pardon the title.  I've been listening to some old Billy Joel lately...)

I have been following Cosmic Connies' blog Whirled Musings for a while, and I really appreciated her latest post.  The first part of that post deals with Ginni Thomas, the crazy-mixed-up wife of crazy-mixed-up U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence (Uncle Tom) Thomas.  It appears that she got involved in a cult during her young adulthood, then saw the light and got out of the cult.  After leaving the cult, she did some very good personal work which helped to build an exit path for others who had been sucked into cults.  But much later, she fell into the present day cult of white supremacy and the conspiracies that have been manufactured to express the existential fears of white supremacists whose supremacy is now fading away.

A few observations.  First, I think that the cults which hapless rubes fall into tend to reveal a lot about the motivations and values of those rubes.  I am thinking of those who fall into money cults, for instance.  That Ginni Thomas could fall into the cult of Trump and the associated cults such as QAnon does not speak well about her inner motives and values.  But let's consider the issue of cults from a larger perspective.  It seems to me (having myself fallen into a cult once and gotten out of it after many years) that people who fall into cults are looking for a certainty in life that simply cannot be guaranteed.  Therefore they look for gurus who will show them the minutest details of a supposed "One True Way" so that they can regiment every aspect of their lives to fit this supposed "Way" without having to do any thinking of their own.  Gurus tend to be people who lay out every detail of all the steps which the lives of their followers should take, including what to eat, what to wear, whom to marry, and where to work.  The guru's false promise is that if you follow all the steps which he (or sometimes she) lays out, you will never make any mistakes.  Cults provide both leaders and followers with an illusion of control.

But life can't be controlled the way the cults promise, simply because although we can know the past and experience the present, we cannot know much about the future except in its broadest brush strokes.  In many cases, all we can do for the near and intermediate future is estimate possibilities and probabilities.  There are general principles (especially moral principles) that we can and should apply in navigating those possibilities and probabilities.  And we can be confident that sooner or later, the moral principles will always work themselves out.  But we can't always know in advance the precise details by which this working out takes place.  People probably shouldn't expect a voice telling them to buy a certain lunch from a certain restaurant on a certain day.  You'll have to figure that out on your own.  

So in my own post-cult life, I have had three main priorities.  The first is to un-learn the malignant ways which I learned in while in the cult.  The second is to figure out for myself the general moral principles which I should follow.  Let me explain this one a bit.  I am a Bible-believing Christian and I intend to stay that way.  But I have had to realize that most of what I was taught by mainstream American evangelicalism is completely false.  (How could it be otherwise, when so many white evangelicals refuse to obey the Sermon On The Mount, when they are armed to the teeth, when they vote for slimy politicians like Trump?)  So I need to construct my own theology.  It is a work in progress.   The goals of that theology are that I myself may become a decent person, and that I may not get fooled again.  The third priority is to recover some of what was stolen from me.  To borrow a bit from Shawn Colvin,

I have lost too much sleep

and I'm gonna find it.

And as for the one in five Americans who still believe in QAnon or the Americans who still belong to the cult of Trump, I can only say that by their own evil they have made themselves the willing victims of "a politician who has fallen into populism and begun to make impossible promises...Naturally, his lies will come to light before long." (The Courage To Be Disliked, Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga)  Some of the lies which have come to light have come from the anti-vaxxer and COVID denialist members of that group, many of whom are now pushing up daisies because they became victims of COVID.  Based on my reading of trends, I think that life is about to serve up a number of other painful contradictions of the things which these people believe.

Tying Two to Two

I have been thinking today about a Greek word I encountered a few weeks ago during my daily Bible reading.  It is found in Matthew 13 and Mark 4, shortly after the Parable of the Sower, and it is the word συνίημι ("syniemi"), which means literally "to send, bring, or set together."  In a metaphorical sense it also means to "put two and two together," that is, to understand the meaning and implications of a thing.  The passage in which this word appears reads thus:

For the heart of this people has become dull,

and with their ears they scarcely hear, 

and they have closed their eyes, 

lest they should see with their eyes, 

and hear with their ears,

and understand (σῠνῑ́ημῐ) with their heart and return,

and I should heal them.

Here we have a picture of a people who were diseased - and who indeed were suffering from their diseased condition - yet who were doomed to remain in their suffering because of their refusal to put two and two together.  Consider the many forms of suffering that arise from this willful refusal to put two and two together - a refusal that is one of the hallmarks of addiction or of cultic thinking.

And consider those nations which have historically identified themselves as the Global North.  Note how the cultures and political discourse of so many of these nations has been hijacked by the ideology of predatory laissez-faire free-market capitalism, the worship of wealth, white supremacy, and the selfishness of "libertarianism" and "conservatism."  Those who promoted this hijacking have loudly and insistently preached the message that there should be no limits or restrictions placed on the "liberty" of individuals for any reason whatsoever.  They failed to mention that they are most concerned about preserving the liberty of those individuals in a society who have the greatest economic and political power, who are thus free to indulge their selfishness by stepping on the toes (and any other convenient body parts) of all the rest of us.  Yet what is both noteworthy and tragic is that so many of the rest of us have bought the same message and drunk the same Kool-Aid which is sold to us by the wealthiest and most powerful members of our society.

But in recent decades, a number of crises have emerged as a result of this thinking.  I will consider only two of these today.  Let me mention that both crises could have been mitigated or avoided entirely had our society held a more collectivist mindset - that is, had we been the sort of people who value the common good above the unrestrained exercise of individual "liberty".  The first crisis is that of manmade climate change.  Yes, I said "manmade."  Other accurate phrases or terms would include "anthropogenic" or "human-caused."  We have known for decades that industrial activity was altering the earth's atmosphere in ways that would alter the climate - yet the defenders of "liberty" have loudly and insistently denied such knowledge.  Why?  Because to admit the impact of human industrial activity would have forced these people to confront a moral choice.  They would have been faced with the choice of "understanding with their hearts."  And that choice would have cost either a numbed conscience or possibly lots of money.  The Global North does like its money, doesn't it?  (The white American Evangelical/Protestant church really loves its money!  Must be why so many of its members and leaders can't seem to put two and two together...)  And in addition to the numbing of conscience, these nations chose to continue the destructive chasing of economic gain because many of their citizens told themselves that the consequences of their choices would never fall on them.  They said, "What do we care about polar bears?  Or about poor island people drowning in rising seas?  That's so far from us!"

Except that now it isn't far away at all.  Last year was the first year of my life in which I lived in the midst of a widespread, potentially lethal climate event.  It was an event for which to escape, many of us would have had to travel up to a thousand miles to the east.  It was an event during which the amount of free oxygen in the local atmosphere dropped to such levels that dangerous levels of carbon monoxide were produced.  And it was caused by wildfires that raged from Southern California to southern Canada.  We are about to experience another potentially lethal climate event, as daytime temperatures over much of the American West will exceed 100 degrees for several days, and nighttime temperatures will not drop below 70 degrees.  (See this also.)  Moreover, there will be few places to which to escape, because much of the rest of the United States is also experiencing climate crises including severe weather.  And both the heat and the severe weather are likely to recur several times this summer.  Would you like a little fire with that order?  Or maybe you have enough money to escape to Europe for a while.  Except that Europe is enduring its own heatwave (especially Eastern Europe), and parts of Russia have turned into a bit of Hell.  (See this also.)

There is also the ongoing crisis of the coronavirus pandemic.  What is noteworthy about the United States is the large number of people who have not yet been vaccinated - especially in southern "red" states - as well as the number of people who continue to refuse to wear masks in public.  I ran into one such gentleman this morning when I made a quick dash to buy some groceries.  I pointed him out to one of the store clerks, who told the man to put on a mask.  He protested, saying that he had been vaccinated.  Then the man looked at me and announced that he had been to Afghanistan.  I don't exactly know what reaction he hoped to get out of me - he was fat and had gray hair, and if he was really a vet, it was obvious that it had been a long time since he had graduated from the college of violent knowledge.  I just looked at him.  Had he caused trouble, he would have been able afterward to boast that not only had he been to Afghanistan, but he had also been to jail.  He did put on a mask.  People like him are the reason why the United States is so slow in returning to any semblance of a pre-pandemic "normal."  

The United States ignored for a while the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic, and as a result, the American economy was badly damaged even as our leaders prioritized profits above dealing with the crisis.  The United States is now no longer the strongest nation on earth.  The Global North has ignored the implications of climate change until now, and as a result, the differential in power and wealth which the Global North has built with respect to the rest of the world is eroding.  Could it be perhaps way past time for some of us to start putting two and two together?

A Bad Place To Lie

These days, I find myself battling a recurrent addiction - the addiction to reading the news.  This morning I know that I have a ton of things I need to do.  Therefore, I will most definitely stop Web surfing in a few minutes, grit my teeth, and get on with doing what I need to do.  No more binge surfing.

Yet in my semi-compulsive news browsing, I have discovered a few things.  First, it appears that Trump has finally stopped blocking the Biden transition (even though he still falsely claims that the election was stolen, which it wasn't).  Second, it appears that Biden is picking a capable and competent leadership team to assist in cleaning up the monstrous mess left by Trump.  Third, it also sadly appears that the United States remains deeply divided.

As I wrote previously, this division is the result of America's original sins combined with the engineering of a right-wing social movement over the last 45 years - a movement aided and abetted by a powerful right-wing media machine exemplified by the media empire of Rupert Murdoch.  And one of the sharpest evidences of this division is the national response to the COVID-19 pandemic.  By now, the states known as red states all have higher levels of COVID-19 infection than those states classified as blue states.  And the most conservative of the western or prairie or mountain states have the highest levels of COVID-19 infection in the nation (and in the world).  (See this also.)  These states also contain populations whose flawed notions of liberty make them the most resistant to science-based guidelines for reducing the risk of infection.  

Some of those stories of resistance to science are truly breathtaking.  We have Republican governors finally, grudgingly, mandating that people in their states start wearing masks.  Yet these mask mandates have so many loopholes that they are effectively worthless.  We also have public health officials in a town in Wyoming who were shouted down by angry residents during a recent meeting in which these officials were discussing ways to limit the explosive spread of COVID-19.  We have widespread regions of the United States in which the wearing of a mask is seen as a personal affront to "conservative" values.  We have a U.S. Supreme Court whose newest member has helped to eviscerate the ability of states to impose limits on religious gatherings in order to limit the spread of COVID.  We have an upstart right-wing "news" network (a network that is even farther out in fantasy land than Fox News) which was recently suspended from YouTube for falsely claiming a "guaranteed cure" for COVID-19.  And we have people in red states who are dying right now in hospitals, yet who refuse to believe that it is COVID-19 that is killing them.  According to a South Dakota nurse interviewed by CNN, "They tell you there must be another reason they are sick.  They call you names and ask why you have to wear all that 'stuff' [personal protective equipment, or PPE] because they don't have COVID because it's not real.  Yes.  This really happens."  There are nurses in other parts of the country who tell similar stories of being harassed (and even coughed and spit on) by Trump supporters and other right-wing types who are hospitalized.

And that last item reminds me of the power of cultic thinking.  For it appears obvious by now that the people who identify as members of the Global Far Right or who are aligned with white supremacy or whose worldview has been shaped by right-wing media have all the hallmarks of people who have been indoctrinated into a cult.  One of the hallmarks of a cult is that it convinces its members that the cult is good even while the cult is actually killing them.  It boggles the mind that there are actually patients in hospitals in the rural U.S. right now who are insulting the doctors and nurses who are taking care of them because these doctors and nurses actually dare to wear PPE.  It's almost as mind-boggling to read of patients who are dying of COVID-19, yet who refuse to acknowledge this fact.  A deathbed is a bad place to tell lies.