How I (almost) joined a cult
My neighbors invited me to a bible study. But things started to get weird.
(The ICC, the group involved, strongly denies being a cult, and appears to have written their own wikipedia page. That said, I don't think it's possible to read this story and come away with the impression that they're anything but. Same goes for this. Or this. Or this. I stopped attending (although they keep inviting me!) before things got to dangerous-cult-territory, so reading this post may not be enough to convince you they're a cult. I just wanted to share how much easier than I expected it is to unknowingly get sucked into a cult! And also why strong bible education is very very important in Christian communities!)
*all names have been changed - partly to preserve other people's privacy, but mostly because I'm really bad with names and don't actually know some of them*
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"Would you like to come to our bible study?"
If you know me well, you know that I am a huge bible nerd. I like reading it devotionally. I like reading it historically. I like following the debates on whether Mark really thought Jesus was divine and whether Paul really wrote Ephesians and whether the book of Isaiah is really one book or two-to-three. So if you invite me to your bible study, even if you're a stranger pulling your car up next to me as I'm walking home, I'm probably game.
Which is how I met John and Linda.
I missed the first two weeks of their study --- one week I was preparing for some math department skits, and the next I was sick, but John continued to text and call me each time to "guarantee" that I would "be encouraged", so on the third week I finally showed up.
I was about half an hour early, since John gave me the wrong time, so I spent a while sitting in our host Steve's kitchen with John and his friend Jason, feeling pretty uncomfortable. We talked about what we liked, and when I said I studied math they responded positively. We talked and joked, and I ignored some of the weirder comments ("You must be great with Greek, since that's the language all math is published in"), chalking them up to their attempts at inclusivity.
We had dinner together before reading the bible, and I felt extremely welcomed - everybody, it seemed, wanted to meet me and be friends with me, and it felt really good to be building relationships with people outside my usual bubble. (My church has made serious efforts at diversity, and it's paying off in important ways, but it's a long process and for now the church remains majority white and majority either-upper-middle-class-or-college-student.) John told me he saw this bible study as an "appetizer" - reading a little bit of the bible to encourage people to go more in depth in one-on-one or two-on-one studies, which he hoped I would attend.
We finally got to studying the bible, reading chapter 23 of Matthew's gospel. It's a fairly intense fire-and-brimstone sermon by Jesus about how the religious leaders of the day were hypocrites, teaching a harsh, legalistic worldview to sound smart and holy without actually seeking God's heart or following their own commands! "They tie up heavy, cumbersome loads and put them on other people’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them."
There was no time devoted to our own questions or thoughts on the passage. Instead, Steve led us through a very scripted series of questions with one-or-two word answers ("What does Jesus call the Pharisees?" "Hypocrites"), that led to a completely untenable interpretation of the passage. ("We need to be harsher about calling out other people's sin" -- possibly true, but a weird lesson to get out of a passage about people being harsh on other people's sin and not on their own!) But, I figured, this church didn't seem aimed at university students, so maybe other people just don't like in-depth literary discussion of passages or debates about meaning. And so, since I liked the people, I figured I'd let it slide, and I could keep attending the study this summer to build more relationships!
After the study, Steve and John cornered me to ask how I'd liked it, and again to advertise the two-on-one studies that formed the "meat" of how their church did bible studies. I attempted to express that I wasn't really interested and that actually I was already a Christian and didn't feel the need to do an "intro to Christianity" course, but they very quickly moved from "would you like to do this thing" to "what times are you free to do this thing" and I'm really bad at saying "no" to salespeople, so somehow I ended up agreeing to do the first in a series of eight (?) bible sessions right then and there.
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The first session was on "seeking God with your whole heart", and it seemed to be a mostly orthodox exposition of Christian teaching on following God: God should be the most important thing in your life, you should seek to follow God all the time (not just on Sundays), and so on. The use of the bible was atrocious (we'd flip around randomly to pull verses wildly out of context to support the points Steve wanted to make), but that happens at plenty of "real" Christian churches too, so I was vaguely annoyed but not super worried.
Near the end of the study, Steve asked me if I was following God with my whole heart. The answer, of course, was no: there are still ways I seek my own self-interest, times I'm mean-spirited and unloving, and ways I could be praising and giving glory to God that I'm not doing. And this is literally always true of every single non-Jesus person. The fact that we're not perfect and will continue to have deep-rooted sin is literally the whole point of Jesus' crucifixion, the single central event of Christianity. (This doesn't mean we shouldn't try to be better! It means we should accept that "striving to be better" will be a lifelong process.)
Steve shook his head and, without outright stating it, strongly implied that I wasn't a real Christian. This probably should have been some sort of warning sign for me --- I'm pretty sure the goal of this study is to get Christians to start to doubt whether they're "really" Christian so they can slowly be brainwashed into joining the "one true church", the International Church of Christ. But, I'm too trusting, so instead I chalked it up to him having oversimplified something and maybe this is just how some churches work, so I agreed to come back in a few days for the next "lesson."
The next session also seemed mostly orthodox, although even more dangerously oversimplified. This session was called "The Word of God", and was focused on "What the Bible says about itself". Once again we jumped around the bible pulling things out of context, and once again we had "discussion questions" with one-or-two word answers.
One of the first questions was: "Who wrote the bible: God or people?" and, to be clear, this is a super interesting question with a really fascinating, nuanced answer, because it's kind of both! As Christians we believe the bible is inspired by God, meaning in some sense the Holy Spirit guided the authors in what to say to make it infallible with regards to doctrine, but at the same time the human authors clearly contributed --- each has their own point of view, writing style, and personal interests. In Ecclesiastes you can watch the author's personal battle with depression play out through their words. In Paul's writings you can see his anger and frustration fairly unfiltered (even describing his wish for his opponents to castrate themselves!). And the result the bible is this super interesting interplay between the divine and human and both sides are there and both sides matter, and I got super excited talking about this when the question was asked.
"Nope, the answer is God."
At this point I started to get pretty frustrated. This was very much not "us discussing the bible and seeing what we found". It was "John (using the ICC's materials) explaining 'the truth' to me and heavily implying that any disagreement we might have about the interpretation of specific passages or theology were the result of some significant moral failing on my part. As much as I tried to convey that actually I did have quite a bit of experience with the bible and my theological positions were things I'd thought through quite carefully, John repeatedly condescended to me with statements like "it seems like you've opened your bible before but haven't really gotten into it" and (when we disagreed) "you're confused now, but don't worry, we'll help you to understand". This part of the study, too, seemed designed to manipulate the visitor into questioning whether they "really" understand the bible or if they're "really" a Christian, so that the ICC can fill that gap with their own traditions.
Also rather strange --- we read Matthew 15, which cautions against replacing the Word of God with human traditions, and I was asked if I knew any human traditions that went against the bible. I gave a few thoughts, and was essentially told that I was wrong, and that this passage was "really" about infant baptism, which is sinful because it teaches people that they'll go to heaven if they're baptized as an infant, when really to go to heaven you need to make the choice to be baptized. (You'll notice here two significant theological errors: the idea that baptizing an infant would make them go to heaven is clearly absurd, and no church that baptizes infants actually teaches this, and also the idea that baptism is necessary for salvation is somewhat less absurd but also blatantly not true (see e.g. the thief on the cross with Jesus.)) More importantly --- if this really was an "introduction to Christianity" class, spending a significant part of the second meeting insisting that otherwise orthodox churches who disagree on a minor theological point were all going to hell is a very, very odd pedagogical choice.
(Speaking of denominations! The ICC, despite being a "Christian" denomination with hundreds of thousands of members, insists on calling itself "non-denominational". Why, you may ask? Because "denomination" refers to human traditions splitting away from Jesus' true calling, while the ICC is the only church to really follow Christ's teachings, which apparently did not exist until 1980 or so.)
One of the other men around called John out for saying the the earth was millions of years old instead of 5,000 (which seems too young even from a creationist viewpoint??) and they got into an argument where they kept trying to "rebuke" each other. I decided not to share my thoughts.
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Things started (?) to get weird in Session Three, "discipleship". The International Church of Christ apparently considers the word Christian a pejorative based on a strange reading of Acts 11:26, and therefore prefers the word "disciple". (Keep in mind: I didn't know much about the ICC yet, so I still thought this was a normal Christian church with some oversimplified doctrine and poor use of scripture, so I was still coming back with the goal of meeting new Christians in the area and broadening my social circles.)
The ICC's definition of discipleship is superficially similar to the Christian understanding, but is twisted in hurtful and legitimately dangerous ways. We jumped around the bible again, this time finding verses about how following Jesus will require sacrifice, and how evangelism is an important part of discipleship, studiously ignoring any verses about Jesus bringing peace or joy or happiness. And so "sometimes doing the right thing is very painful" gets twisted into "the most painful thing is always the right thing." (At some point Steve told me "you know it's true if it hurts", which when taken with my mental illness would lead to some pretty interesting conclusions!)
But more importantly, discipleship in Christianity is a question of following God. Yes, it can be helpful and deeply important to seek help from more experienced Christians, and we regularly refer to such relationships as "discipling". But this isn't the essential point of the word, and more importantly these relationships aren't absolute: if I'm being counselled by an older Christian and they tell me to do something sinful, or insist on a claim that isn't biblical, I will push back. Maybe I'll convince them. Maybe we'll agree to disagree. Maybe they'll convince me. But this is like any friendship: I can and do seek advice, but I'm not "reporting" to anyone.
ICC "discipleship" seems to be different. You're given a single person who is discipling you, and it seems like they exert a significant amount of control over you. It's not super clearly spelled out in any of their literature, but I got the impression from John and Steve that you might go to your discipler and say something like "I'm considering moving", and they might say "no" and you're supposed to just listen to them and not move. I found at least one example of a woman who was told by her disciplers she had to marry a specific man she'd never met, and so she did. (She later left the cult.)
But because of the "equation" (which John kept insisting must appeal to my math background) "CHRISTIAN = DISCIPLE = SAVED", the ICC is able to claim that anybody not in this specific kind of discipling situation is not a real Christian and therefore is going to hell. This is the culmination of the manipulation tactics from the previous two sessions: now that you've been primed to question your faith, this flurry of bible verses thrown at you and constant repetition that "this is just what the word of God says" is meant to convince you that since you aren't in this kind of discipling situation (because you're not in a cult), you're not a real Christian and you need to join the ICC if you want to go to heaven.
This led to the concept of baptism. Steve asked if I had been baptized: I was baptized at the age of six, but I misremembered and said I was baptized at 12. He then asked if I was discipling anyone at the time, which of course I was not because I was 12 (actually 6). Due to an unimaginably blatant (but very confident) misreading of Matthew 28:19, Steve insisted that since I wasn't discipling anyone when I was baptized, I wasn't a true disciple, and therefore not a true Christian, and therefore my baptism was not valid.
(To be clear: Christians fight over when things like Communion are valid. Nobody questions each other's baptisms. Even when the Catholic church was burning Protestants at the stake, they found Protestant baptisms valid. This is like, really really blatantly out there theology.)
I'd put up with a lot of bad theology, but this one kind of annoyed me, so I pushed back and started going off on the various ways they had misinterpreted pretty much every passage we'd talked about. Steve insisted that I was wrong because I was still living in sin and hadn't accepted Christ (I had) and that he "just didn't want to see me like this", and we got in an argument and ended up going about an hour over time. I left without scheduling another meeting, but leaving open the possibility. At this point I found the whole thing kind of funny, and thought this was a very strange church, but whatever, you know?
That night at dinner, I was relating this experience as a funny story, and a friend asked if I was talking about the International Church of Christ. I was, and she told me she'd had a similar experience, down to being invited from the street and ending up in arguments about baptism. She said I should google them, which I hadn't done yet, so I did when I got home and THEY ARE A STRAIGHT-UP CULT.
The "sessions" I was going to are a series of modules intended to essentially brainwash Christians into believing the ICC is the "one true church" and into turning over a significant amount of control of your life to them. A later module, called "Light and Darkness", asks you to list your darkest sins and give them to these people who, recall, are more-or-less strangers, and the internet has no shortage of examples of "disciplers" using these sin lists to emotionally blackmail their disciples.
Because of my strong Christian upbringing (thanks mom and dad!) and general bible nerd status, it was pretty easy for me to see that they sucked at reading the bible and to not put too much value on what they said. But what really concerns me is how confident they are about it. They flip through the bible with such an air of authority, and start at orthodox Christianity and only slowly indoctrinate you into the weird world of ICC bs, and I'm worried that if you were legitimately starting out in faith or seeking to learn about the bible, it would be really easy to fall into this trap. And I don't really know what to do about this - we can have plenty of "good" and helpful bible studies where people are sincerely trying to learn and grow together, but how do we make sure people end up there and not in predatory cults? How do we help people who are already sucked in --- I feel like most of the ICC people I met were sincere and kind, just misled into joining this dangerous system of spiritual malpractice. Do I try to talk them out of it? Do I pray for them and hope for the best? I don't really know.