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.