Many years ago, just before the whole David Koresh cult exploded into news in April 1993, I almost joined a cult in Waco just down the road from those guys. That entire period of my life feels almost like a fever dream. I was operating along mental lines then that are now wholly unfamiliar to me. Thanks to some key mistakes I made, I was a prime target for cult recruiters. Today, let me tell you about the biggest mistakes I made.

(From introduction: Quote Investigator on writing in blood.)

(This post first went live on Patreon on 10/8/2024. Its audio ‘cast lives there too, and is available to all!)

The cloud had moved

One Thursday night, Ezekiel came to my first church to recruit for his cult. As per normal, I didn’t even notice him at first. Also as per normal, Biff had seen him immediately.

A few days later, we gathered in the parking lot to listen to Ezekiel’s stories of life at what he called “the Farm.” It was a large compound not far outside Waco. Ominously, the Farm was within rough eyeshot of David Koresh’s own cult compound, though obviously none of us knew who Koresh was or what he was about yet.

In describing the Farm, Ezekiel really impressed a lot of people. His promises sounded downright dazzling to my gaggle of friends, all of whom were fairly new converts to Pentecostalism. At the Farm, people lived like the very first Christians! Men ruled over women just like Jesus wanted! The group members farmed and wove their own fabric and sewed their own clothes and grew and killed their own food and shared every single thing they had with each other and and and and..!

Perhaps most potently of all, Ezekiel warned us that the cloud had moved. That meant that Yahweh’s favor no longer shone down on Pentecostals. Now our god’s favor hovered above this guy’s farm. If we wanted to live under the cloud of Yahweh’s favor, if we wanted to Jesus the most correct and perfect-est way, then we had to move there.

At the last moment, though, I got the heebie-jeebies from the cult’s leader.

I still don’t know exactly what made me suddenly distrust his glowing account of life on his farm in Waco. Maybe it was his sneering condescension toward anyone who changed their mind about going with him. Or maybe it was his open, unabashed misogyny expressed toward any of my friends’ girlfriends or wives who counseled them against going. I didn’t quite understand the nature of hidden anger problems, but I think I detected a big one in this recruiter.

That strange sense of foreboding served me well. When I refused to go, Biff realized he didn’t want to go without me, so he stayed too. In the end, everyone stayed home except for two particularly-fervent converts, Big David and Little David. They left with Ezekiel. Shortly after the Branch Davidian compound went up in flames, they escaped the cult. But they were never the same afterward.

In the aftermath and in the years to follow, I finally noticed some important things about both myself and my entire end of Christianity. I’d made a lot of key mistakes in my understanding of Christianity that had made me an ideal target for a succession of recruiters: evangelical (Southern Baptist Convention), fundamentalist (Pentecostal), and finally outright authoritarian cult (the Farm).

The ache for perfection and safety that made me a target

Of course, at the time I had no clue at all about any of the mistakes I was making.

All I knew was that I desperately wanted to find a group of Christians who lived and Jesused like the people who’d personally seen and known and followed Jesus. Like so many Christians today, particularly evangelicals, I thought that all of the problems I saw in my end of Christianity were due to watering down and corrupting Jesus’ instructions to his followers.

But I just knew that somewhere out there, there were Christians living in the full light of Jesus’ words.

And I ached to find them and join them. I knew they had to be out there somewhere. I just needed to find them. Once I found them, everything would be great. I’d be safe. My fears would evaporate, as would my anxieties about so many things. I’d finally get to lose myself in Jesusing every day, from dawn to dusk.

Until then, I felt unsafe and uncertain.

At the time, Pentecostals already thought that Catholicism had hopelessly corrupted Christianity for centuries. Its leaders had introduced saints to pray to and confessionals to keep track of followers. To soothe pagans’ hard feelings about forced conversion, my religious leaders taught, they created the Trinity, which Pentecostals reject completely in favor of Oneness theology. Even the Reformation had not put things to rights—after all, Protestants still almost all adhered to that demonic Trinitarianism.

But that wasn’t the worst problem with literalism. The sheer inevitability of abuse and overreach in literalism-following Christian groups was. Finding out how Big David and Little David had suffered at the Farm knocked me for a major loop. I had had a bad feeling about Ezekiel, but I’d never dreamed he’d almost kill my friends with beatings, sleep deprivation, constant struggle sessions, and starvation.

So I wondered:

Why was it that the further modern Christians plunged into Original First-Century Christianity, the worse the abuse seemed to get and the more hypocritical and abusive the leaders became? Why did I never hear about such groups operating with nothing but goodwill, harmony, cooperation, and love? Inevitably, they either always were or they became abusive. Why?

Most of all, what had almost led me to join one of these groups?

Today, I’ll explore that last question.

Mistakes in understanding the Bible’s accounting of events

As a fundamentalist, officially I believed that the Bible was the only real authority in Christianity. At the same time, I believed that it contained only true and inerrant information about both world history and my own religion’s history. And somehow in the middle, I managed to consider myself a Creationist and accept prevailing scientific opinion regarding how the universe and Earth came to be, how old each was, and how life had arisen here. Compartmentalization can be very stressful, and it’s how I got through most of my time in fundamentalism.

When I got into college, I was just so excited because finally, finally, I’d get to see corroborating contemporary evidence for Jesus and his miraculous life. My leaders had assured me of the existence of this evidence. I assumed they were correct. After all, the Bible has Jesus doing all kinds of stuff that would have gotten the attention of many literate people. One of them had to have written down an accounting of those events.

Very quickly, I learned that no such corroboration exists. Apologists learned to spin straw into fool’s gold by vastly extending just what they mean by “contemporary.” And they had to—because there literally is not a single sign between 0-35CE of anything the Gospels say happened. Most of its writers’ attempts to recount secular events from that time, like the Roman Census and the Roman “governor’s custom” of supposedly releasing whatever Jewish prisoner the Jews demanded on some particular feast day, either simply didn’t occur at all or were vastly different in reality.

And of the supposedly miraculous events around Jesus’ death (Matthew 27:45-56), like the Great Jewish Zombie Uprising, the darkening of the sun, and the tearing of the curtain in the Jewish temple, we hear not a single ancient word from the time. Out of a dozen or so literate people we know were floating around between Rome and Jerusalem around then, you’d think maybe one of them might have noticed all the zombies!

(See also: First-Century Fridays, where I tackle a different ancient author in search of actual contemporary evidence of Jesus and Christianity. Spoiler alert: There ain’t any.)

It would take me some years to learn that the Bible isn’t a historical document or a travel guide to the Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) world. Its writers clearly didn’t even intend it to be anything like that. Our modern notion of how history and historians work is just that: modern.

Trying to turn the Bible into a history book only cheapens it—and makes Christians look dishonest and gullible.

Mistakes in understanding my own religion’s early history

Like many evangelicals back then and today, I didn’t have an accurate understanding of Christianity’s earliest days. And like almost all Christians, I had this hazy notion of what I call “Original Christianity.”

In other words, I thought the very first Christians learned about their religion from the feet of Jesus himself. Thus, they had uniquely-accurate, uniquely-perfect beliefs and practices. In turn, the history of Christianity could be understood as a slow dilution and weakening of that perfection. In modern times, somehow the correct teachings survived, however. Jesus made sure of that. No matter what, one small group of Christians always kept the flame alive.

I could not possibly have been more wrong.

In actual truth, no Christians learned directly from Jesus. Just as no contemporary evidence supports the existence of the character of Jesus as he is portrayed in the Gospels, nobody has ever uncovered evidence to support the existence of a single one of Jesus’ Apostles and named close followers, nor even Paul.

After all, Paul was in the same cities as literate people like Philo of Alexandria and Pamphile of Epidaurus. Yet somehow, he never once interacted with any of them! Paul’s jaunt to Rome was especially problematic. Rome was chock-full of literate people. None noticed him—or early Christians—at all. The entire situation was so disturbing to contemplate that in the Dark Ages, a priest fabricated supposed letters between Paul and Seneca the Younger to fill in that gap!

Similarly, few to none of the earliest martyrs appear to have existed.

No, it looks a lot like Christianity began life around the same time as its earliest extant documents: Around the late 50s to early 60s.

Mistakes in understanding the supposed unity of early Christianity

And those first Christians were not unified. No, not in any way whatsoever. In fact, no two fragments of any particular New Testament verse fully agree with each other. As Bart Ehrman points out, many even disagree about major points.

That’s how Christianity was. Christians argued about literally every single doctrine under the sun, including a number that modern Christians almost all agree are indispensable to the religion—like exactly who and what Jesus was, what Heaven and Hell are like and how they operate and how to get to each, what Jesus’ death and resurrection mean, and more.

We only get a few bare hints in the New Testament of these epic battles:

A lot of early Christian fights clearly never made it into the canon of the new religion. For example, we don’t hear much about one of their leaders’ all-time dumbest hot takes: That martyred Christians went straight to Heaven instead of “sleeping” in the ground until Judgment Day. In a very real way, martyrs got the fast pass! As you might suspect, this doctrine didn’t last long. Eventually, Roman soldiers and officers got completely exasperated by all these Jews demanding martyrdom-by-cop.

The funny thing is that nowadays, I’m willing to bet that modern Christians believe universally that once someone dies, they immediately go to Heaven or Hell. Judgment Day only really applies to those still alive at the end of the world.

As one popular historian has noted, it’s more accurate to talk about early Christianities than about early Christianity. There were many, and it was just a series of good lucky breaks that one struggled to dominance and became the darling of the powers that were.

Until then, all these different groups fought like cats in a pillowcase to advance their take on Jesusing over the others. Once one faction won a fight, their leaders declared the competing takes to be heresy. Some heresies, like Arianism and Gnosticism, proved so powerful that they arose fairly early on and have never been fully stamped out—despite centuries of force and bloodshed from the ruling clique.

But because I fully believed that Original Christians had the most perfect beliefs out of all extant flavors of Christianity, I was easy prey for religious recruiters. All they had to do was present their group as living more like 1st-century Original Christians than whatever group I was with right then.

At the mere idea, I was enthralled.

Mistakes in attributing hypocrisy to a lack of correct Jesusing

One big reason why I wanted to find Original Christians was thinking that perfect beliefs and practices always resulted in extremely Jesusy behavior.

All too many Christians make this mistake today. When confronted with a hypocrite, they either try to No True Scotsman that person away from the label itself, or they claim that person has misunderstood some key doctrine which these judges, of course, handle correctly.

In the past, I’ve called this mistake “as the night the day.” The phrase comes from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, during Polonius’ instructions to his son Laertes:

This above all,—to thine own self be true;
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.

Here, it means that if Laertes practices true-to-self authenticity, he’ll prevent falseness in himself. Similarly, Christians who believe only the utmost in perfect doctrines and faithfully perform the utmost in perfect practices cannot possibly be hypocrites. Jesus blesses those Christians and their groups, too, so these groups always thrive and multiply! In fact, a church that isn’t growing isn’t Jesusing correctly at all.

It took time and a lot of drama for me to disconnect correct beliefs and practices from traits like trustworthy and kind.

In searching for Original Christians, I completely expected their lives to be ruled by Jesusy traits. I’d already figured out how unfair and control-hungry Pentecostals could be, how racist and sexist, how disturbingly dishonest and flaky. But so far, they were the most Jesusy Christians I’d found.

By about 1992, I was a sitting duck for a cult recruiter.

Mistakes in taking my faith way too seriously

If I could summarize anything about my faith in Christianity, it’d be all in. Once I became aware of the doctrines and claims, I threw myself into it.

It’s always funny to see evangelical leaders today slamming ex-Christians. One common accusation of theirs is that ex-Christians deconvert because we were lukewarm. In Christianese, that term means lackadaisical. Cold would be not Christian at all. Hot is the ideal temperature. Though they vastly prefer hot, Christian recruiters think they can at least work with cold.

For years, this accusation has been a favorite of evangelical leaders.

But I was absolutely hot. On fire. Completely consumed. Sold out. Radical, if only in the 80s/90s sense of the term. Hey, that’s just how everyone talked back then.

After years of being raised a fervent little Catholic, I was captured the night I heard a Southern Baptist talk about the Endtimes. But soon enough, I grew disillusioned with the hypocrisy and money-grubbing I saw going on there. Southern Baptists didn’t take their faith seriously enough.

As a result, nobody could talk any sense into me. Everyone I knew as a kid and teenager was Christian. All I was doing was taking my beliefs to their logical conclusions. Technically, they should have been right beside me in that endeavor.

As P.J. O’Rourke has observed, there’s just something in the human psyche that isn’t satisfied with the remains of an Archduke at Sarajevo. It simply must have a World War I. Once I got started, I had to chase my dragon all the way to its end.

So once I found Pentecostalism, that was my answer. Its adherents took their faith way, way more seriously! And with all their rules, they seemed to be following Jesus’ orders more closely than the Southern Baptists ever had.

But all of my on-fire hotness made me a perfect target for the Farm’s recruiter.

Mistakes in taking myself and my spiritual walk too seriously

Have you ever run into someone who has an absolutely bizarrely inflated view of themselves and their requirements? Like they can only sleep on 2400 thread count sheets or eat organic artisan almonds that were hand-activated by young Belgian nuns during Easter week?

I was like that with religion. Only the best for me!

When it came to religion, I was quite elitist. I judged every religion by my own beliefs and practices. Thus, it was impossible for me to think Catholics were Jesusing at all correctly, or Mormons, or even mainline Christians who only really thought about their faith on Sundays. I was right. They were wrong. Period.

And because of that, they all needed to join me in my search for perfect Christianity. I was jolly well not going to be joining them and further weakening my beliefs!

More than that, though, I thought that nobody in Christianity would dare take undue advantage of someone who only wanted to Jesus the Jesus-Jesus harder than everyone else. I wish I’d known earlier that the truth runs exactly the opposite: The more focused a Christian is on Jesusing, the less they pay critical attention to their leaders, and the less critical thinking they do of their leaders’ demands!

In any religion, in any group like a religion, there exist others who will take advantage of a true believer’s trust. The only people you can really trust are Mac users. (/s)

Entering the Total Perception Vortex

Eventually, I got walloped upside the head by reality. Bit by bit, my belief in Christianity—my Faith Pool—emptied as one by one of my illusions shattered and mistakes resolved.

Once that process got underway, I finally learned to view myself as a part of humanity. Instead of seeing myself as some wise, enlightened creature who’d figured out the secret to avoiding Hell, a scurrying mystery-religion rat out for #1, I was finally part of a glorious all. Joining humanity wasn’t a loss but the best gain I could ever have hoped to make.

More than that, I began to see every person as doing the best they can with what they know. No gods are telling any one of us something the rest of us could never figure out. Nor is any one religion better or worse than another, or closer to any gods, or even closer to perfection. Even the filth- and death-obsessed Aghoris are just doing their best with what they know.

That understanding allowed me to step back and view religion as a social force that humans have been inventing and reinventing for ages—likely since Homo sapiens sapiens first evolved. Through engaging with community-affecting stuff like religion, be it as a celebrant or a critic or a bystander, we fit ourselves into a vast tapestry that flows through millennia.

That’s a big part of why I refuse to use any religious labels for myself anymore. I got into a lot of trouble and alienated a lot of good people with the tribalism that flowed from wearing those labels. Though I don’t think I’d make those mistakes now, I’ll happily stay right here—at least for now—at “None.”

Life is a process of growing past our mistakes

Nobody is ever a finished product. At no point can someone look upon their life and their current self and think “Ah, but yes, this is it, this is finished.” Like the universe itself, we are always in flux. Always changing. We can try to keep ourselves from change, though in the doing we will only cause ourselves more suffering.

Perhaps that’s why religious extremists hate change like they do. Change introduces variables into the mix that often can’t be controlled or predicted. A god, a religion that never changes, ever, except when it absolutely does: That’s right up their alley. It’s imperfection labeled wrongly, but it’s the only game in town even making that promise. Nothing else does, and nothing else would.

With change comes the chance of making mistakes. We can live amid mistakes for a long time, perhaps even for a lifetime. But I’d rather not. I’d rather know I was wrong and fix that error than stay wrong forever.

I can’t say that I’m totally thrilled that I’ve made so many mistakes. But I can look kindly upon them. I figured my shit out, got my head out of my ass, and learned better. Out of everything, I figure that’s about all anyone can reasonably ask.

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You may forget but
let me tell you
this: someone in
some future time
will think of us

Sappho


Captain Cassidy

Captain Cassidy is a Gen-X ex-Christian and writer. She writes about how people engage with science, religion, art, and each other. She lives in Idaho with her husband, Mr. Captain, and their squawky orange tabby cat, Princess Bother Pretty Toes. And at any given time, she is running out of bookcase space.

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