Growing Up in a Cult

Cult: a relatively small and controlling group of people having beliefs or practices that are seen by others as strange or sinister.

I have often written about growing up in Mississippi in the fundamentalist Church of Christ and of having my first serious doubts about God’s goodness at age eleven and about his existence three years later. I want to approach the subject from a different angle, but I will first need to lay some groundwork.

I found it exceedingly hard to escape the Church of Christ, not just because it had been my primary social and religious outlet my entire life, but also because I had been told that no people are more miserable than those whom seek to avoid God’s purpose for humanity, which is to belong to the Church of Christ. 

During the seven years that transpired between my first doubt and the day, at age 18, when I abandoned the Church of Christ for the Episcopal Church, I did everything in my power to regain my faith. I sang, preached, and served saltines and grape juice to neighborhood kids from behind a packing box pulpit decorated with wisteria. When I outgrew that, I started preaching for real at age fifteen. I also led singing; presided over the communion table; and attended one Church of Christ service or Bible study or another up to nine times a week. I was enormously honored when different ministers invited me to accompany them to revivals they were preaching in Kentucky and Indiana. Yet, within my heart, my dedication to the church continued to drop ever lower, and I was too ashamed to tell anyone. To make matters infinitely worse, I came to believe that, because I had cursed God in a fit of rage for denying me the “gift of faith” at age twelve, I had committed the vaguely defined unpardonable sin. It’s a wonder that I maintained my sanity, torn as I was between no longer believing in God, yet knowing that he would torture me day and night for all eternity if I were wrong.

By age 17, I concluded that my problems with the Church of Christ were its fault, not mine, so I sought to liberalize the church by writing articles for the church newsletter, none of which were published or discussed. At age 18, I began a multi-year period of serious church-shopping during which I visited over 50-denominations (plus several non-Christian groups), but my heart was with the Episcopal Church from the day I first walked into one. After I switched, Church of Christ people I had known and loved my entire life shunned me. Surprisingly, not a single person bothered to ask why I had left. I interpreted the implication that my immortal soul wasn’t worth an hour of anyone’s time as a profound rejection.

I want to spend the remainder of this post doing something I have never done, which is to describe the beliefs and practices of the fundamentalist Churches of Christ, which is the group's formal name. This will be challenging because of the church’s numerous divisions. For example, some congregations use multi-tiered trays to serve communion wine (or grape juice) while others use a single glass. Other rifts have occurred over instrumental music, the permissibility of women Sunday school teachers, support for foreign missionaries, and the use of church buildings for non-religious activities. There being no minor differences within the Church of Christ, the more conservative of these groups accuse the more liberal ones of “willful disobedience to God” and assures them that they will spend eternity screaming in well-deserved agony. The Church of Christ as I knew it...

...considers itself God’s one true, eternal, and unchangeable church; 


...considers itself “the only path whereby man might be saved”;

...believes that God will guide all sincere seekers to the Church of Christ regardless of when and where they live, and that all who are not guided to the Church of Christ will suffer eternal torment in hell;  

...denies the possibility of honest mistakes in religious belief and practice;  

...relies solely on the Bible for doctrine and practice;

...insists that persecution had driven it underground for the 1900 years prior to its modern appearance in 1906;
 

...holds that churches that go by any name but the Church of Christ are in rebellion against God; 

...considers the Bible an error free guide to science, history, and the will of God; 

...holds that salvation comes through faith and works;

...meets in buildings that are plain inside-and-out with the possible exception of a cross on the steeple and atop the communion tray;

...the Sunday morning service consists of extemporaneous prayers, hymns from the turn of the 20th century, and the Lord’s Supper, which is seen as a memorial to Christ (as opposed to consubstantiation and transubstantiation, which are the view of the Episcopal Church and the Catholic Church, respectively). 

...expresses a special hatred for: liberals; for “Godless college professors who rob Christian boys and girls of their souls;” for the Catholic Church (“the whore of Babylon”); and for any church resembling the Catholic Church (particularly the Episcopal church);

...is mostly Trinitarian but doesn’t use the word Trinity because it isn’t found in the Bible;

...holds that sermons about love are optional but that weekly sermons about hell—followed by one or more altar calls—are obligatory (these sermons so terrified me as a child that I would hide under the bed when I got home); 


...is anti-science, anti-intellectual, and suspicious of higher education except at Church of Christ Bible colleges;


...practices immersion-only baptism starting at age 12;


...holds weekly communion (Mogen David Wine and Matzo crackers) for baptized members;


...practices congregational rule without denominational oversight;


...denies being a denomination;

...denies women the right to preach, teach Sunday school, make announcements, openly ask questions, or serve as elders;

...believes that instrumental music in church is anathema to God;


...has no licensed ministry;


...members call one another Brother ____ and Sister ____;

...has no special titles for ministers but commonly refers to them as Preacher ____;


...believes that churches that call themselves the Church of Christ, but don’t believe or practice like one’s own Church of Christ are in willful rebellion against God;

Lively Debates

I spent enough time with ministers that I was privy to many of their informal religious debates, which I will offer as further illustrations of the church’s mindset. In one debate, opinions varied regarding the fate of a theoretical person who “accepted Christ into his heart, but died in a car wreck on his way to be baptized.” (This question came up during a revival that was being held at a country church that had no baptistry, making it necessary for the candidates to be taken to a town church that did.) Another debate concerned the minimum age at which God will cast a non-Church of Christ child into hell. There were also debates over the fate of a Christian (i.e., a member of the Church of Christ) who died without having begged God’s forgiveness for his or her latest sin. 

Yet another debate occurred between two Church of Christ preachers and a 13-year-old Methodist girl (this was possible because she had attended a Church of Christ skating party with a friend). She knew her Bible well, and this enabled her to swap verses in a debate over whether salvation comes by faith alone or by a combination of faith and works. The preachers’ admiration for her knowledge (if not her courage) was evident, and no one could have seriously argued that she was in willful disobedience to God, yet according to Church of Christ doctrine, she was nonetheless destined for hell. 

Then there was a long ago night in Georgia when my elderly relative named Carrie told Peggy that she and her entire Southern Baptist family were going to hell if they didn’t join the Church of Christ. I had warned Peggy that such a view is consistent with Church of Christ doctrine, yet Carrie’s words left Peggy in tears as surely as a slap in the face would have done because no one had ever said such a thing to her, and because she was hearing it from someone whom appeared to like her and had treated her kindly.

Not everyone who leaves the Church of Christ as I did carries lifelong scars. My two sisters left without regret, and my brother [who lives near you in Sour Lake, Texas] wasn’t even perturbed when the Church of Christ disfellowshipped him for performing music in nightclubs. My siblings were able to escape unscathed because they had managed to keep the Church of Christ at the periphery of their lives (Peggy did this with the Baptist Church) whereas the Church of Christ became my life during early childhood when I accepted its claim that I would be forevermore miserable if I left it, and that I would incur hellfire twice over if I were to later join another church. In the eyes of the Church of Christ, I could have hardly done worse than to join a church that owes its existence to a wife-beheading 16th century British king. 

Thanks to the Church of Christ, I spent much of my childhood in terror, and when adults do that kind of thing to children, they should suffer for it. I tell myself this, but because my father’s father and his father were Church of Christ preachers, I don’t know if I believe myself. I try to find peace with my anger by telling myself that they (along with my parents, friends, and preachers), meant well, but that seems too low a bar when it comes to intentionally terrifying children, not just once or twice, but multiple times a week from birth until adulthood. 

I will devote my next post to the Episcopal Church.