It is one in the morning and you are taking a quiz on your phone.
You have found one of the checklists. Loaded language that only insiders use. Consequences for leaving. Absolute authority at the top. You are scoring your own childhood item by item, and some of them land hard, and some of them do not, and the total is not resolving into anything.
Was I raised in a cult, or was it just a strict church.
I am not going to answer that for you, and I would be careful with anyone who tried to from a blog post. What I want to do is take the question apart, because in my experience it is rarely the question the person actually needs answered.
Was I Raised in a Cult? The Word Has No Agreed Definition
Start with the practical problem. There is no settled line.
Scholars who study these groups tend to avoid the word entirely and reach for something duller, because the term carries more heat than precision. Courts avoid it for related reasons. Journalists use it constantly and mean about nine different things by it. In ordinary speech it usually means a religious group that the speaker is standing outside of.
So you are running your childhood against a category with fuzzy edges, at one in the morning, hoping it will come back with a number. It is not built to do that, and no amount of scoring is going to make it.
What the Question Is Actually Doing
What I notice when people bring me this one is fairly consistent.
Most people asking whether it was a cult are really asking whether they are allowed to be this upset about it. The answer to the second question is yes, and it does not depend on the first.
The label gets treated as a threshold. If the group clears it, then the reaction is justified and the memories count. If it falls short, then it was just a strict church, and the person is supposed to file the whole thing under an ordinary childhood and stop bringing it up. That threshold is invented. Nobody agreed to it. It is doing the same work the excuse did in last week’s post, which is to make you stop talking.
People almost always open with a disclaimer. It was not that bad. Then they talk for forty minutes.
What happened to you happened whether or not the group qualifies for a word. This is the same principle as last week from a different direction. Harm does not require a villain, and it does not require a cult.
Two Better Questions
If you want to understand what you were actually in, I would set the label down and ask these instead. Both are answerable from memory, and both work whether the group was mild or severe.
First. Could a person with power in that building be questioned out loud? Not privately, and not in a hallway. By name, in a room, with other people present, without it costing the questioner something. Think about what actually happened the last time somebody tried. In a lot of places nobody ever tried, and the fact that nobody tried is itself an answer.
Second. Was leaving allowed to be survivable? When people left, did they keep their friendships, their family relationships, their standing, sometimes their jobs. Or did leaving mean losing the whole architecture of a life at once, and did everyone still inside know that.
One thing needs saying plainly before either question gets used. If what happened to you, or to a child you know, involved abuse, then neither the checklist nor these two questions are the right instrument. That belongs with a professional, and depending on what happened and when, with the people whose job it is to receive a report. Nothing in this post is an argument for keeping that inside a family and working it out privately.
Those two do something the label cannot. They give you a description rather than a verdict, and a description is what you can actually work with. They also scale. A church can score badly on both and never appear on any list of dangerous groups, and what happened there still happened.
Now Ask Them About Wherever You Take Her Next
This is the part I would rather not write and the part that makes the rest of it honest.
Those two questions are not for diagnosing your past. They are the ones to carry into any community you are considering putting your child inside, including a good one, including a warm one, including this one.
Can the pastor here be questioned out loud, by name, in a room, without it costing the person who does it. If somebody stopped attending, would they keep the relationships they built here. Ask that of Windermere Union. Ask it of the church your friend keeps recommending. Ask it of a group with excellent politics and lovely people, because warmth is not the variable being measured. Week 50 takes up the larger decision about whether to take her anywhere at all.
A church that cannot survive those questions has told you something, and a church that can will not mind being asked.
What to Tell Your Kid About the Church You Left
She will ask eventually, especially if grandparents still go there.
Ages 3 to 6. She does not need the account. We used to go to a different church, and we do not go there now, is a complete and true answer at this age. If she asks why, something simple and honest. Some of the things they taught there were not right, and we decided not to go anymore.
Ages 7 to 12. This age can take more, and can take that you have feelings about it. Some of what they taught me scared me when I was your age, and I do not want that for you. Say it once, plainly, without a case attached. Then let her ask follow-ups over the next several years, because she will, in fragments, usually at inconvenient times.
Ages 13 and up. Give her the real account, including your anger, and then give her the harder half. She is allowed to reach a different conclusion than you did. She may visit that church with a friend and like it. She may end up thinking you overreacted. Handing her the freedom to disagree with your assessment is the whole thing, and it is considerably harder than handing her the assessment.
One line worth avoiding at every age. Do not tell her the people there were bad people. Some of them may have been. Most of them were somebody’s Miss Dorothy, and a child who is taught to sort adults into good and dangerous has been handed a worse tool than the one you are trying to take away.
You Do Not Need a Verdict
You can close the quiz.
Whatever that place was, you are not required to name it correctly before you are allowed to have a reaction to it, and you are not required to settle it before you can raise your child differently. The description is enough. What could be questioned, what leaving cost, what it did to you at nine.
Next week we go back to fourth grade, and to the modesty rules that showed up years before anybody said the word sex.
About Pastor Brad Jagger
Pastor Brad Jagger is Senior Pastor of Windermere Union Church (UCC) in Windermere, Florida, a community committed to Love Above All. He writes about faith, doubt, deconstruction, belonging, and raising children who never have to be afraid of God.
If you are raising kids after leaving the faith you grew up in, and you want a church where questions are welcome, people are affirmed, and nobody has to pretend to have it all figured out, learn more at windermereunion.org.
Pastor Brad Jagger | Windermere Union Church | Love Above All