My Three Years in a Christian Cult
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There is a nondescript house on Brookfield Drive in East Lansing, Michigan, whose address I forget though I remember everything else about it. It’s where I lived for almost three years in the 1970s as part of a religious group called Shiloh Fellowship. When I’m in town, I sometimes drive slowly past it, letting my thoughts disappear into the past. I haven’t reached the point of ringing the doorbell to ask whoever lives there now if I can look at the rooms I once shared with the brethren.
The house, when I lived there, was part of the Kingdom of God. To the eye of faith, so was everything else. I was saved when I was in high school, and to the extent something like that can be explained it was for a common reason: I wanted everything to be saturated with meaning. This is a cruel demand to make of the world, but as a sixteen-year-old I felt comfortable making it.
The “hour I first believed,” as the hymn “Amazing Grace” calls it, belonged to the early seventies, when the countercultural idea of becoming a different person overnight was still strong. My younger brother Paul was saved when some college students held a youth rally at our church, after which he began leaving lurid Gospel tracts around the house. I resisted until one of them got to me and I recited the “Sinner’s Prayer” on its last page, writing down, as it instructed, the date and time of my conversion: January 6, 1973, 8:12 p.m. I became part of the subculture known as the Charismatic movement, which was then at its height. This mostly middle-class movement, which started around 1960 among Episcopalians in California, borrowed many features—especially an emphasis on the supernatural—from traditional Pentecostal churches such as the Assemblies of God. My first Charismatic meeting was in the cavernous basement of a Catholic church. Two hundred people, mostly young, occupied metal folding chairs arranged in a circle around a few men with guitars. Guitars and metal folding chairs were in many ways the symbols of this movement. A few minutes into the meeting the room filled with the sound of glossolalia, or speaking in tongues. I spoke in tongues a few days later and found it pleasant rather than ecstatic, which was disappointing.
The emphasis on direct, unmediated contact with the supernatural was, in some ways, the Charismatic movement’s undoing. It had a warm, thoughtless glow but no real structure, which opened it up to predatory messiahs such as Moses David. In 1968, David founded the organization Teens for Christ, which later became Children of God, a cult that prostituted its female members. Shiloh Fellowship, the group I joined shortly after my conversion, belonged to the Shepherding Movement, which was a reaction against Charismatic vagueness. We were accused of being a cult by Pat Robertson, himself a Charismatic, who refused to allow our leaders on his TV show The 700 Club and said the only difference between our teachings and Jonestown was “Kool-Aid.”
I was raised in the Episcopal Church but knew basically nothing about Christianity. I had never read the Bible, whose pages were less than clear about what to do now that I was a child of God. There was friendliness and warmth at the guitar-saturated prayer meetings but little in the way of doctrine, ritual, or even Bible reading. The only point seemed to be having as many ecstatic encounters with God as possible. It was a drug culture without drugs.
The Charismatic movement started before the counterculture, then partly merged with it. Though too young for drugs and sex, as a middle-schooler I had fallen in love with the rhetoric of late-sixties radicals such as Angela Davis, Huey P. Newton, Mark Rudd, and Abbie Hoffman. I followed their arrests, bombings, and FBI posters the way some of my peers collected baseball cards. I carried this somewhat absurd romance to the point of publishing an underground newspaper, spelling America with k rather than c, and eventually getting sent to a Quaker school for troubled boys in Canada.
Much of this was standard adolescent posturing, but it had a grain of real fanaticism that had nothing to do with revolutionary politics. Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman both had what I lacked—namely, a sense of humor. Unlike them, I had no practical agenda, only frustration with the visible world, which seemed to obstruct my view of reality. I didn’t really want to burn everything down, though I did want to make the visible world transparent enough to let me see what was behind it.
My relationship to this shadowy reality felt restored for a short time after getting saved. Everything became less opaque, and I saw God’s world, the world of reality, through trees, buildings, roads, and shopping malls, making seventies suburbia continuous with the biblical world of kings, lepers, and miracles. This period didn’t last, however. About three months after gaining access to it through the Sinner’s Prayer, what I thought was a firm hold on invisible things started wavering, and I reacted by going into religious overdrive. I prayed incessantly, read the Bible, preached the Gospel, and upped my attendance at prayer meetings. On a ski vacation I waited until I was high over the slopes in a chairlift before asking the stranger next to me if they knew of Christ’s salvation. None of this frantic activity seemed to help.
Shiloh Fellowship had just started meeting in the rented basement of a Lutheran church not far from where I lived. It had the familiar trappings of guitars, glossolalia, and metal folding chairs, but something was different. At the first meeting I attended, everyone had a Bible, which made it seem doctrinal, not just emotional. The founder, Erik, was preaching from a King James Version that lay open in one hand while his other swooped, gesticulated, and singled out verses for witty, incisive, and even sardonic commentary. He attacked Christians who wandered aimlessly from meeting to meeting, calling them “spiritual lone rangers” who were afraid of commitment. I found the remark about lone rangers striking, unaware that it came from a book by Don Basham, one of the founders of the Shepherding Movement and a member of the Ft. Lauderdale Five, the group that formed its nucleus. The book, Deliver Us From Evil, was about exorcism. Basham was a professional exorcist, as was Derek Prince, another member of the Five. The three others were Bob Mumford, Charles Simpson, and Ern Baxter. Their names are not forgotten by Christians of a certain age, and the ashes of the rigid hierarchy they attempted to carve from the Charismatic movement still smolder in discussion online as well as in books such as Damaged Disciples: Casualties of Authoritarian Churches and the Shepherding Movement by Ron and Vicki Burks.
All I knew then was that I suddenly felt at home. I wanted something larger than myself, and this was it. It spelled the end of guesswork about “reality.” Erik, the founder, was charismatic in the usual sense and looked like a rock star. His message, however, went in the opposite direction, which made me trust him. He was from upstate New York and had a distinctly non-Midwestern accent that also grabbed me. The message, which came straight from Christian Growth Ministries in Ft. Lauderdale, was this: the “Jesus movement” most of us belonged to was a good thing that had run its course. It was now time to start building the Kingdom of God. The Body of Christ, meaning the church, was more important than the individual Christian. Baudelaire said that on encountering the works of Edgar Allan Poe, he felt he was reading an exact transcript of his own thoughts. I felt that way listening to Erik preach. He seemed to be reading not from the Bible but from the page of Reality.
In 1975, the New York Times published an article entitled “Growing Charismatic Movement is Facing Internal Discord Over a Teaching Known as ‘Discipling.’” That was us, and I had by that year moved into the house on Brookfield Drive with three other “brothers.” Discipling and shepherding were the same thing. According to this teaching, the true church was not the usual setup of pastor and congregation but rather a vast network of relationships between sheep, who could be men, women, or children, and shepherds, who could only be men. You weren’t a real Christian unless you were personally “accountable” or “submitted” to a local shepherd who watched over all parts of your life. You also paid tithes directly to this person, who in turn tithed to the shepherd above him in a pyramid whose summit was in—you guessed it—Ft. Lauderdale.
Content retrieved from: https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/my-three-years-christian-cult.
