I was a chess prodigy trapped in a religious cult. It left me with years of fear and self-loathing
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When I first discovered chess, after watching the movie Searching for Bobby Fischer on HBO, I was a nine-year-old kid living in a tiny village in the mountains of Arizona. Because of its title, many people think the film is about Bobby Fischer, the reclusive chess genius who bested the Soviet Union in 1972, defeating Boris Spassky to become the first US-born world chess champion in history. Really, it’s about how the American chess world was desperate to find the next Bobby Fischer after the first one disappeared. The story follows Josh Waitzkin, a kid from Greenwich Village in New York, who sits down at a chess board with a bunch of homeless dudes in the park one day and miraculously discovers that he’s a child prodigy – at least that is the Hollywood version of the story.
Searching for Bobby Fischer was to me what Star Wars was for kids a few years older. I didn’t simply love the movie. I was obsessed with it. Any kid who’s ever felt lost or misunderstood or stuck in the middle of nowhere has dreamed of picking up a lightsaber and discovering the Jedi master within. That was me in the summer of 1995, only with chess.
I was dirt poor. Tonto Village, where my sister, my brother and I lived, had nothing but dirt roads, and we’d run around barefoot most of the time. We’d disappear in the forest for hours, playing cops and robbers, building magnificent forts, making our own worlds. For most children, the challenge of living in such a small, remote place would be loneliness, only having a handful of others like yourself to play with.
But that was never the case in Tonto Village. On any given summer day, there were probably around 100 of us, all under the age of 12, running around shirtless and barefoot in the dusty streets and hills and streams and forests, because we were all being raised in the Church of Immortal Consciousness – a cult.
My mother was a lost soul, and it was because of her wayward spiritual wanderings that we ended up in the Church of Immortal Consciousness – which was known internally as the Collective, or the Family. It originated with the teachings of Dr Pahlvon Duran, who lived his last lifetime as an Englishman in the 15th century. But Duran’s teachings had not been passed down to us in stone tablets or through some ancient text. They were channelled through a trance medium named Trina Kamp who was first visited by the spirit of Duran when she was nine years old.
In the Church of Immortal Consciousness, run by Trina and her svengali husband/manager, Steven Kamp, we were taught that “there is no death and there are no dead”. Your soul inhabited a body so that it could learn lessons. You’ve had many lifetimes, and you may have many more lifetimes to come. Finding and fulfilling your “purpose” was of the greatest importance, and before you could achieve it you had to live a morally upright life. Integrity was the key concept. If you succeeded in keeping your word and being a good person, you were said to be “in integrity”. If you failed, you were said to be “out of integrity”, which was considered the gravest of sins in the Collective.
Finding your purpose was in part about what you were meant to achieve in life as an individual, but it was also about the life you would pursue together with a partner in raising a family. Finding the right partner meant finding your “like vibration”. A like vibration is an energy, an electric, pulsating vibration emanating from the centre of the universe and living inside us. Sharing a like vibration basically meant having a healthy marriage, and a common vision about how to raise children and handle money. If your marriage was struggling, often the validity of your like vibration was brought into question.
Steven and Trina’s followers were drawn to Duran because they were in need of real help. Many of them – alcoholics, drug addicts, abuse survivors – were running away from their families and from themselves. They had a hole in their lives that they needed to fill, and in order to fill it they gave themselves over to a thing that offered them answers. Which is how a tiny, remote village in the middle of a national forest became home to a bunch of damaged people, desperate for help.
And that’s where my mom, Deborah Lynn Sampson, and dad, Steve Rensch, entered the picture. From what I’ve been able to piece together, my parents’ marriage was still somewhat happy and mostly intact when they decided to join; at the first Collective Halloween party they attended, my mom went as Barbie and my dad as Ken, and I’m told they had a great time. But it wouldn’t take long for the cracks in their marriage to reveal themselves, becoming fissures and then canyons.
While it had originally been my mother’s idea to join the Collective, my father soon became the far more devoted adherent, throwing himself into the service of Duran and, by extension, Steven and Trina. My dad eventually became an ordained minister in the church, as well as Kamp’s chief lieutenant and right-hand man. As my father’s stature rose, their marriage fell apart. Less than six weeks after I was born, my 38-year-old father announced he was leaving my mother. Only he wasn’t leaving her to be with the other woman he had impregnated while married to my mom. Instead, he planned to marry Steven and Trina’s daughter Marlow, who was all of 19 years old.
Marrying the daughter of Steven and Trina Kamp, and becoming stepfather to her one-year-old son, my stepbrother Dallas, solidified my father’s position as a man of status and power. As his star rose, my mother’s plummeted. She was now the first wife, a scarlet woman, a person of no importance. For a time she was even “de-merged” from the Collective. They asked her to leave, which she did, when I was five. Our family, now with my younger brother Josh and mom’s new husband, Dennis, moved to Colorado. You might think this would have driven her to despise and reject the Collective for ever, but, in fact, in the long run it did the opposite. When Steven Kamp invited her back a year later, she returned and, after some initial reluctance, decided she was ready to work that much harder to prove her worth to this group in which her ex-husband now served as pastor.
When we moved back to the village, I was tarnished like my mom. I was the bastard child of Steve Rensch, the living evidence of his failure to have a like vibration marriage with my mother. I barely knew my father. I didn’t even know he was my father until I was seven years old, nearly two years after returning from Colorado. His paternity wasn’t acknowledged to me by anyone, including my mother – in spite of the fact that he lived right around the corner from me in a village of only a few hundred people, all of whom knew full well that I was his child.
I probably had a vague sense that Dennis Gordon, a mechanic, hadn’t always been my father, but as he’d been raising me since I was four years old I was too young to interrogate what those feelings were. I wasn’t Danny Rensch. I was Danny Gordon, and I didn’t question it. Then, one day, Steve and Marlow asked their daughter Bean if she had a crush on anybody. Bean said that she had a crush on me. That’s when they realised they had to tell everyone that Bean and I were actually half-sister and brother because her dad was my dad.
If it all sounds a bit incestuous, that’s because it was. Because any kind of collective ultimately is. Nobody owned or possessed anything . Adherence to Duran’s teachings was a greater priority than having material things – and the most important thing was finding your purpose.
In the village, nothing belonged to you. Everyone’s assets were “merged”, a term that was not chosen by accident. The whole idea was to let go of the material world and give yourself over to the spiritual journey of achieving your highest self. It was essentially communism. Glenn, who was basically my godmother, used to tell the story of the day she showed up with her husband, Jim. They pulled up in a U-Haul, parked, and the moment they opened up the back of the truck, people showed up and started taking things. The village was littered with bikes, because nobody actually owned them. If you needed to go to another kid’s house and you saw a bike, you took it. Then when you came back out to go home, the bike would often be gone because someone else had swiped it.
Content retrieved from: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2025/sep/07/chess-prodigy-trapped-religious-cult-danny-rensch.
