‘You’re sold a lie’: How do you spot a cult?
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For seven years of her twenties, Gillie Jenkinson was in a religious cult. She recalls being told what to eat, when to sleep and what clothes to wear.
“It was completely coercive, controlling,” she says, going on to add that the group operated from an “ordinary” looking terraced house.
She remembers giving all of her money to the group, believing it would go towards their mission of “saving the world”.
“None of that happened, we didn’t save anybody or do anything with it, but you’re sold a lie,” she explains.
After leaving the cult, she sought mental health support to help process her experiences but she was unable to find any trained therapist with experience in helping cult survivors.
In the end, she decided to train as a therapist herself and has now been practising for around 30 years, specialising in helping people who have left cults.
This led her to appear in the two-part BBC documentary Inside the Cult of the Jesus Army, which sees her work with people brought up in the now-defunct religious cult to recognise cult dynamics and identify the group’s impact on them.
The BBC revealed allegations of widespread child abuse in the group, which disbanded in 2019.
The Jesus Fellowship Community Trust, which has been winding up the group’s affairs, said it was sorry for “the severely detrimental impact” on people’s lives.
Speaking to the BBC, Jenkinson explains how to recognise a cult and why more support is needed for those who leave.
“It’s not always easy to identify a cult,” Jenkinson says, explaining that there isn’t one type of person that joins a cult, they don’t dress a certain way and they can operate from “ordinary” houses.
The Family Survival Trust (FST), a charity that offers support to those affected by cults, defines a cult as a system controlled by a charismatic and authoritarian leadership that is “rigidly bounded” and supported by a fixed set of beliefs. It involves brainwashing designed to isolate, control and exploit followers.
Cults do not have to be religious. Linguist Amanda Montell, author of Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism, explains people can “erect a cult around anything, as long as you can inject it with fear and an ‘us-versus-them’ mentality”.
Montell adds that these groups don’t even have to take place in person anymore and says they are becoming “easier” to find because of the internet, adding “so many cults do their recruiting online”.
Content retrieved from: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj4w95452eeo.
