Bait and switch — How a South Korean cult mimics sound doctrine to recruit believers
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Chris Smith logged in to the first session of an online Bible study on the parables, filled with excitement. He was hungry for more in-depth exploration of the Scriptures than his church offered, and his girlfriend said she’d heard good things about the study.
The first few months went great. The group met over Zoom a few times a week. Despite the virtual setting, enthusiasm permeated their discussions. The group leaders emphasized the importance of prophecy and fulfillment. “How did the Jewish people miss Jesus’ first coming?” they asked. “How can we be sure not to miss the second?”
That first class ended in October 2018, but the leaders invited everyone to join a follow-up in-person class meeting in Seattle, near Smith’s home. He was thrilled—until he and his girlfriend pulled up to the meeting site, an unmarked building he thought seemed kind of … sketchy. He asked her if she was sure about going in.
“And she said, ‘Oh, I don’t know. You know what? Let’s just give it a chance,’” Smith remembers. He thought it over then said, “OK, sure. What’s the worst that can happen?”
Six years later, he calls those his “famous last words.”
He isn’t alone. Shincheonji, the shadowy South Korean cult that lured Smith, boasts that it graduates 100,000 new adherents from its seminary every year. Now, as the cult loses followers in its home country, it’s setting its sights on Christians.
LEE MAN-HEE, a charismatic Korean farmer involved in several different religious sects as a young man, founded Shincheonji in 1984. The group goes by several other names, including Shincheonji Church of Jesus Temple of the Tabernacle of the Testimony and New Heaven & New Earth Church. It is widely recognized as a cult by South Korean Christians, but relatively unknown elsewhere.
Shincheonji became especially unpopular in South Korea in 2020 after authorities deemed it responsible for thousands of COVID cases and charged Lee with breaking virus control laws.
In the last several years, the group has focused on growth outside Korea, recruiting Christians to attend sham “Bible studies” through churches, personal connections, social media, and even—as Smith would discover—dating apps.
Shincheonji is small, but it’s growing. It operates, typically under other names, in over 29 countries around the world. The Church of England; the Manipur Baptist Convention in India; churches in Auckland and Wellington, New Zealand; and the Singaporean government have all raised the alarm in recent years, calling the group a dangerous and deceptive cult that consumes people’s lives.
People like Chris Smith. About six months into the in-person study, he and his girlfriend broke up, although they both stayed part of the group. Six months after that, in October 2019, the group leaders finally revealed their affiliation with Shincheonji—and that half the study members, including Smith’s former girlfriend, already secretly belonged to the group.
It turned out she’d targeted him through a dating app and connected him to that first online study for more than personal reasons: He was part of her recruiting commitment. But by then, Chris thought he understood why she’d lied to him: She just wanted to save him. He officially signed up as a member of Shincheonji.
Content retrieved from: https://wng.org/articles/bait-and-switch-1725590378.
