Once you understand the basic urges that motivate people, the ones that are the same worldwide regardless of racial group or culture, it doesn’t take much additional effort to understand and even appreciate the tenets of practically every religion. No matter how different a religion may be from what you believe, they’re all good at their core.

Unfortunately, the followers of a religion don’t always follow that religion’s tenets. That’s when groups, and churches, go bad.

One of our friends was raised in what I can only term a Christian cult. She got out, but her stories of them range from the weird to the appalling. They feel that they are “the Chosen Ones,” [1] the only recipients of God’s real truth, and that everyone else is going to Hell — including all “false Christians” (in other words, everyone but their little group). As far as I can tell, there is no particular scriptural basis for these claims, only their leader’s word that God has chosen him to lead this small, select group to salvation. [2] (What they need to be “saved” from, I don’t know, but that’s a story for another time.)

Unfortunately, they’re not alone. I’ve seen little groups like them throughout the US, to a greater or lesser degree. (I can’t speak for the rest of the world, but I suspect this is mostly a US phenomenon.) My family moved every couple years during my childhood, and as my parents thought that public schools were horrible (often with justification), I had the dubious honor of attending several religious schools instead, those being the only affordable alternatives. Some were good, but looking back on it, many of them were very obviously set up for indoctrination as much as education.

It’s easy to see the attraction for the leaders of these groups: ego gratification and social and political power. Particularly charismatic ones may even ride their power to a public office, giving them the ability to force their personal agendas on people they haven’t been able to sway by persuasion. But you have to look deeper to see what the followers get out of it.

When you look at a few such groups, it doesn’t take long to work out what they have in common. Every one of them is exclusive, both in their membership (almost always solely of the same racial group as their leader) and their outlook. Their view of the world is always much starker than reality: everything is either good or evil, there is no in-between and no room for compromise. Their people are the only ones who will go to paradise in the hereafter; everyone else is going to burn in Hell for eternity. Though it’s seldom baldly stated, the implication is that their leader has the only true hotline to God. Everyone not of their specific brand of faith is at best sadly misled, or at worst deliberately following Satan and actively trying to tempt the faithful to damnation.

There’s the attraction for the followers, then. Thinking this way gives them a sense of superiority and self-righteousness; it draws them together to fight a common (if unseen) enemy and gives them a sense of community and belonging. And so long as no one expresses doubts about what they’re being told, the group provides a kind of echo chamber, reinforcing their beliefs. After all, if everyone around you believes something, then that something must be right, yes?

In and of itself, there’s nothing to condemn here. If a group finds a way to make life a little easier for themselves by sharing an idea, more power to them. If that idea sounds a little odd to those outside the group, it’s usually a mild and harmless kind of odd that threatens no one. But it’s very easy for this mild and harmless oddity to turn ugly; the same things that attract people to a group can so easily be turned to controlling that group.

The signs of it are hard to see from outside the group, but are plainly obvious within it. You only have to see how they treat a member who expresses doubts or questions what they’ve been told, especially if that member is a child or is otherwise at the mercy of believers.

Good groups and churches won’t discourage people from doubting and questioning, because they have faith that their philosophies will hold up under scrutiny. They will probably offer to talk things over with the doubter, to help clear up confusion, but they won’t force themselves on the person. If the person chooses to leave, such groups let them go their own way.

Bad groups use any means at their disposal to keep members in line. If they can’t scare people into their way of thinking, [3] then mental and emotional torture are the most common tactics. Anyone who dares to show evidence that they don’t think like the group is made to feel the group’s displeasure. The support that such groups thrive on is withdrawn; the person is shunned or shamed. Friends who are members of the group avoid the person; most often the person doesn’t have many or any friends outside the group (because such people would lead them into temptation and evil, and are unworthy anyway because they aren’t members), so this is often devastatingly effective: the person scurries back into the right-thinking fold as quickly as possible, and does the utmost to prevent it from happening again by walling off the thoughts that led to it.

If the person in question is stubborn and doesn’t give in to any of that, there usually isn’t much such a group can do other than vilifying the person within the group to prevent others from following their example. But if the person is a child, and both parents are true believers… heaven help him.

These are the groups who try to ban and sometimes burn books — any books that contain ideas that might lead the faithful to question what they’re told. These are the groups who torture their children mentally or physically to force them to toe the church’s line, “for their own good.” These are the groups who try to ban the teaching of science in schools and replace it with pseudoscience that either supports their teachings outright or, more recently, simply tries to discredit the parts of science that disagree with them.

But there is hope on the horizon. Between the increasing public availability of education, books, and the Internet, it’s a lot harder to keep people ignorant now, so it’s a lot harder to keep them from questioning things that don’t make sense. People being what they are, I doubt we’ll ever see such cults vanish, but they should become ever-harder to maintain.

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Notes

[1] Our friend points out that they don’t call themselves “the Chosen Ones,” and wouldn’t openly agree if you put that name to them, but they certainly operate that way.

[2] Continuing from note 1, our friend also points out that this group will happily provide scriptural references supporting their beliefs, though “whether the arguments really hold water is another matter”.

[3] On reading the first draft of this entry, our friend added “I find the fear element is really played up in the cult I grew up in.” I didn’t think to mention that, and it’s important because it’s a sign of this kind of group that is easily visible even to outsiders: most of the pulpit time in such groups is devoted to the Old Testament “wrath of God” and “fear of God,” with only the occasional reference in passing to the love and forgiveness of God… usually when the leader is magnanimously accepting a former questioner back into the fold.