Random Sunday Ramblings, Part 2

As readers can guess, I'm still in the midst of a busy period, and am trying hard to tame my schedule.  So today's post will be short.  But I want to mention that I just finished listening to the latest installment of the podcast "In God's Name: An Unseen Cult."  This latest episode dealt with the abuse perpetrated against women by the fringe group known as the Assemblies of George Geftakys.  It is well known that the Assemblies largely disintegrated after the revelations of the horrible domestic violence perpetrated by George Geftakys' son David and the fact that George and his lieutenants covered up this abuse for over two decades.  But the latest episode of the "In God's Name" podcast also sheds light on a number of cases of domestic abuse among rank-and-file members of the Assemblies that did not at first attract notice because they blended into the toxic cultural miasma of these groups.

It's interesting to note how the Bible was used to justify this toxic culture, as well as to note how extreme even some of these rank-and-file cases became.  I can imagine how much of an aversion to the Bible many women might now have after suffering the long-term experience of a group such as this.  I am not a woman but a man, and yet as a Black man I can tell you that over the last few years I too have struggled at times with the same aversion.  The aversion is triggered by the experience of encountering prominent people behind pulpits who waved Bibles in our faces and said (in so many words, even though they would deny that this is actually what they were saying) "THIS BOOK SAYS that God has given US the RIGHT and the MISSION and the MANDATE to MAKE OURSELVES GREAT by trashing everyone we can get our hands on!  Therefore it is the WILL OF GOD for you who are not of our tribe to willingly submit yourselves to us so that we can turn you into our toilet paper, our vomit buckets, our spittoons, our diapers, our doormats on which we can wipe our feet, our beasts of burden, our crates full of china dishes that we can fling against a wall whenever we need to get our angries out, our furniture that we can kick, our clay pigeons, our punching bags!!!"

Regardless of what white evangelicals might say, this has been the message of white American evangelicalism for far too long.  And my, how prominent white evangelicals (and some nonwhite evangelicals who have drunk the same Kool-Aid) have perverted and bastardized Scripture to justify their message and their treatment of the rest of us.  Eventually, however, even the most passive of victims gets tired of being treated like a clay pigeon.  Which is why I'm not attending church today and haven't attended a church since March 2020.  I still read the Bible, as can be seen from the posts I've written for this blog over the last six or seven years.  But I'm figuring things out for myself.  And I have abandoned treating other people like clay pigeons.  I am now ashamed of the times in which I was guilty of dishing out such treatment to others, especially women.

One last note: as has been mentioned frequently, the Assemblies are by no means the only misogynistic conservative evangelical group to appear in American culture.  According to a recently discovered source, Grace Community Church in Southern California has been obstructing the efforts of women in its congregation to obtain protection from abusive husbands.  Grace Community Church is pastored by John MacArthur, a man who has publicly denied that the Bible contains any mandate for social justice toward the poor and those who are not of the dominant culture.  MacArthur seems to be yet another evangelical doofus who has perverted the Gospel of good news for the poor into a message of dinner time for the rich and powerful.

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.