ICSA E-Newsletter

Vol. 4, No. 2

June 2005

I Found Freedom

J. Huber

Abstract

The author describes his recruitment into a cult, the failed attempt to deprogram him, his gradual disillusionment with the cult, and the external assistance he relied upon to escape from it.  Next, the author portrays his participation in an exit-counseling intervention for another group member, the eventual upheaval in his cult, his victories as an anti-cult activist, his belief in the universal vulnerability of everyone to victimization, and, finally, his newfound freedom in life.

At the age of eighteen, I moved away from home to attend college and to savor my first taste of adult freedom.  But unbeknownst to me, within one month I would be progressively manipulated into a destructive religious cult, known as the International Churches of Christ, alternately called the Boston Movement.  It has received widespread media attention over the past twenty-five years since its inception, including features in Newsweek, Time, U. S. News and World Report, 20/20, Inside Edition, FoxFiles, and nearly one thousand other written publications, television programs, and radio shows.  The ICC commanded a spiritual army of over 100,000 soldiers organized into hundreds of churches spanning every country in the world, and, on October 17, 1998, I was baptized into its ranks.  Despite the straight A average I had consistently maintained my entire life that I derived much pride from, I suddenly found myself earning C’s and F’s, which demolished my freshman and sophomore academic records.  This was due to the stringent recruiting quotas we were all mandated to obey, which entailed approaching up to twenty-five strangers per day on street corners in an attempt to secretly bait them into our “One True Church.”  During the indoctrination process, I appeared to have lost my basic human freedom just when I had coincidentally acquired new adult freedom, and the raging current would soon submerge me further.

The flood first arrived in the form of eight carefully orchestrated Bible studies, each of which methodically induced a poisonous dependence on the church in such subtle increments that it evaded my conscious awareness.  This was achieved by winning my trust within the context of a seemingly harmless friendship.  After enjoying the company of some incognito cult recruiters on several occasions, my “new friends” invited me to attend a Bible study with them, to which I agreed.  While I had assumed the Bible studies would include multiple people all equally participating, it actually consisted of merely them with me as their target.  The initial studies labored to prove the infallibility and divine inspiration of the Bible, which happened to be beliefs I already subscribed to as a strict Southern Baptist.  A few Bible studies later, however, the comfortable atmosphere altered when my friends read a passage from James 5:16, “confess your sins to one another and pray for each other so that you may be healed.”  Before I even noticed that it was taken out of context and that the verse actually referred to physically ill people who had not been cured by other means, my friends began regurgitating to me their entire unabridged history of sins, right down to child rape and cat molestation, all of which had presumably been eradicated by membership in their church.  Then they inquired if I had any sins, which, unfortunately, I suddenly felt obligated to share since they had just seconds ago voluntarily revealed theirs, with unexpected candor I might add!  Upon their constant goading, I reluctantly proceeded to disrobe my soul with their sworn assurance of confidentiality.

The following Bible study, my friends depicted an inconceivably brutal account of Jesus’ crucifixion and began to yell at me that since Jesus died for my sins, then I was personally responsible for his death.  After hearing them flagrantly recite and deride one-by-one the specific sins I had entrusted with them the previous day, I indeed came to question whether or not I might be doomed to hell for the murder of Jesus in accordance with their claim.  As I became increasingly tormented by their rhythmic chant that I was the Jewish crowd who turned him over, I was Governor Pilate who passively permitted it, and I was the Roman guard who nailed him to the cross, all of which was punctuated with persuasive sound effects they generated of iron bolts being hammered through human skin, I eventually broke into tears, crying uncontrollably for one hour on the bathroom floor where I landed.  Thus, they emotionally blackmailed me by strategically extracting a record of actions I regretted and then exploiting it until I succumbed to their demand that I seek their pardon of my guilt.

In quite unambiguous terms, the remaining Bible studies informed me that my only glimmer of hope for salvation rested within the confines of their church.  Some quotes that became the cult’s most classic clichés were Hebrews 13:17, “Obey your leaders and submit to their authority,” as well as 1 Corinthians 1:10, “agree with one another so that there may be no divisions among you and that you may be perfectly united in mind and thought.”  These and other verses were used to defend their dogmatic position that it was literally sinful to be “independent” from the group in any facet of one’s life, including such matters of personal preference as whom to date, what to wear, where to live, when to sleep, and even how much to eat.  But my personal favorite was their opinion on the length of time to bathe, as I once was harshly rebuked by my leader for, in his words, indulging in a half-hour of “water debauchery”!  The leaders also subdued my individual will by forbidding me from entertaining any criticisms of them.  In fact, when I once disobeyed this prohibition and viewed some negative appraisals of the church by ex-members on the Internet, I was severely reprimanded for dabbling in “spiritual pornography,” as they branded this heinous crime.

After the church had exorcised to its satisfaction all iniquity from my life, I became its formal “disciple” through a baptism ceremony on October 17, 1998.  In addition to the fear implanted in me towards my sinful internal world, my leaders now inculcated a deep fear of the external world, claiming that we disciples would be persecuted by depraved people just as Jesus had two millennia ago.  Then one night, while my “brothers” and I were watching the Fox channel, a segment about ICC aired.  Their undercover news correspondent had infiltrated our church with a video camera concealed in her purse, in order to film our unscrupulous recruitment tactics, and a few of our friends were captured on her nationally televised footage!  Another time, our college ministry had formed an official school club, called Alpha Omega, but was subjected to disciplinary action and kicked off campus for the persistent harassment of students that we proselytized to.  Of course, our leaders interpreted such counter reactions to our radicalism as persecutory, and attributed them to Satan.  We church members were especially warned against Satan’s personal emissaries, called deprogrammers, who force disciples against their will to blaspheme God and His “Modern Day Movement.”  I came to encounter just such a demon:  a few months subsequent to my entrance into ICC, my distraught family invested in an expensive three-day deprogramming session with a renowned anti-cult advocate.  I was driven to an entirely different state, Alabama, under the pretense of a “spontaneous family vacation,” a pretense which when revealed was so offensive that it prevented my cultic mind frame from impartially weighing an accumulation of objective evidence presented against ICC  Hence, the deprogramming strategy failed, and my grief-stricken family barely survived the devastation.

I remained in the group for approximately one more year until I finally became disillusioned by the blatant hypocrisy of its leaders.  Since my blind faith in the leaders was unwavering, they alone could have unwittingly convinced me to abandon my steadfast trust in them, a feat even the deprogrammer had failed to accomplish.  I was specifically impelled to leave by the occurrence of two incidents.  First, our leaders always ordered us to sacrifice everything for the church.  So, when my family warned me they would withdraw my car, my dorm room, and my on-campus meal plan if I were baptized, a few days later my immersed body was raised from the water anew:  newly penniless.  Since my only duty at that juncture had been to study my textbooks and excel in my classes, I had neither a job nor a substantial bank account.  As I was now homeless, the church assigned me to the houses of various members.  It should be noted that from the moment this financial hardship struck, the church leaders insisted I still tithe to them money I did not possess.  Within the under one year and a half I was a member, the church relocated me four times.  One of those locations was a two-bedroom sardine can in which five brothers dwelt.  The church then decided to transfer me to the homes of affluent members instead.  For one semester I lived with the President and CEO of the former regional chain, Discount Auto Parts, now Advance Auto Parts.  It was rumored that he tithed about one thousand dollars per week to the church.  Given the immense sacrifices we all regularly made for the sake of the church, I grew intolerant of the lavish lifestyles of our leadership, such as five-star presidential hotel suites when on trips away from their glamorous half-million dollar residences.

The second catalyst of my disillusionment with the ICC leadership was a situation that concerned one of my close brothers.  He had begun to provide temporary shelter for a homeless girl until she could find a more permanent roof over her head.  Yet, our lead evangelist, the apex of our local church’s hierarchy, deemed this act repulsive because, in his opinion, a next-door neighbor might incorrectly suppose my brother to have a sexual relationship outside of marriage with her, which in turn could decrease his likelihood of joining ICC  Thankfully, my brother refused to kick her out based on a neighbor’s false assumption, which incited the evangelist to kick him out.  He was thus kicked out of heaven, which was synonymous with the church in our ideology, for not sentencing an impoverished girl to life on the streets.  Such hypocrisy on behalf of the church summarized to me for the very first time its core unwritten creed:  more highly value what others falsely assume to be wrong than what we ourselves positively know to be right, particularly when the discrepancy involves the leadership’s opinion versus one’s own deep conviction.  Utterly appalled, I decided I could no longer affiliate with a religious organization whose self-proclaimed heaven manifested far more symptoms of a self-imposed hell. With this adamant resolution in mind, I began my difficult spiritual exodus from the International Churches of Christ.

Ironically, my resolution to exit the cult may never have materialized were it not for a recruit whom I had urged to enter it.  For the previous six months, I had relentlessly pressured him to be baptized into our group, a notion he flatly repudiated on the basis that he was hydrophobic.  Not even my omniscient leaders were able to muster a quick response to that excuse!  Despite the fact that the only reason I had befriended him in the first place was to convince him to join ICC, little did I know that the only reason he had befriended me was to ensure my escape from it.  Himself a former victim of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, he had felt compassion for me when I approached him on the street corner one day to invite him to ICC, as he immediately detected I was in a cult.  Fortunately he turned out to be the better friend, and he greatly aided me in my slow venture away from it.  At that time, I not only lived with all ICC members, all my friends were members, too, and I had not spoken to my family in a year.  This recruit, who was the single non-member I knew, thus helped me hide my apostasy from everyone by accompanying me to church events while posing as a “future disciple,” which reflected favorably on me as a present disciple to the scrutinizing eyes of the leadership.  During this crucial window period, I was able to rekindle the estranged relationship with my family, and they welcomed me back into their life as well as home.

Following my departure from ICC, I re-contacted my former deprogrammer to thank him for trying to penetrate my cultic mind state earlier.  Incredibly, he offered me the opportunity of a lifetime to fly to the exotic land of Australia, in an attempt to rescue from my same cult a young woman who had willfully agreed to participate in an exit-counseling intervention.  This young woman’s best friend in the group happened to be a close associate of the totalitarian founder and dictator of the whole ICC  Toward the end of our stay, she telephoned him when she realized we were not Americans who had traveled half the world to simply visit a good Aussie friend, but it was too late:  our client elected not to speak with the leader because she had decided to leave the cult!  The entire trip was one of the most beautiful and liberating experiences I will ever have.  Yet, complete recuperation from my cult involvement did not occur overnight.  Its pace was unusually hastened, however, by the later haphazard receipt of some news:  ICC partially collapsed.  I suddenly felt all better!  The tyrannical ruler of ICC, in the wake of a scandal that disgraced him involving the “spiritual death” of his recalcitrant daughter, was forced by his own disciples to resign and publicly apologize for all of his profound abuses.  I accepted his apology.

Having originated in Boston, Massachusetts, ICC received some publicity there when a staff writer for the Boston Globe wrote a prudent article about the sizeable decline of this spiritual empire due to the migration of many members.  I contacted her immediately after her story hit the presses, and she was most sympathetic to my personal ICC tribulation.  As this internal rebellion occurred within ICC, I became inspired to tackle head-on the larger issue of all destructive cults.  I began my prolific authorship of comprehensive essays about the psychological process of ideological indoctrination, aided by my over one hundred-book collection on cults.  I delivered an hour-long lecture to a college class about the dangers of cults.  I penned a lengthy article that was published in my college newspaper, cautioning my fellow student population about the omnipresent potential for cult deception.  In fact, I was even able to plead my case for the discontinuation of a class taught at my university, on the basis that one of the two required texts for the class was written by an obscure cult leader, and that two of the supplementary texts were by other more notorious figures, namely, Elizabeth Clare Prophet and Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh.  With the support of several empathic faculty members, the permanent cancellation of this class was issued, and it is no longer offered in the university’s course catalogue!

For one semester in ICC, amidst my four relocations total, I lived with a licensed psychologist trained in hypnosis.  Whenever I mention this particular roommate to people today, they usually joke that I must have been a sitting duck for cultic mind games.  However, I invert this presumption and admonish them that if a licensed psychologist and hypnotist can be mesmerized into a cult, then just about anybody can.  In fact, my church leaders always boasted of a true miracle:  the conversion of a professional cult deprogrammer.  This gentleman was evidently in the wrong profession!  My church leaders also loved to suck in prominent college students with public visibility, as they wielded greater clout and could more easily attract further recruits.  Although nearly everyone later renounced their faith, the Homecoming King, the captain of the soccer team, half of the football team, several volleyball players, as well as a few track and field members were all converted.

Clearly, everyone is susceptible to bamboozlement by a manipulative group, for which reason it is imperative that we strive to awaken the slumbering individual freedom of those current cult victims who, through their unaware agency, perpetuate the cycle of victimization to still others.  But I do not carelessly exculpate victims such as myself of all blame, for throughout a cult membership certainly some measure of freedom is retained, however diminished.  This latent spark of freedom need only be ignited, as occurred in my case.  After the re-discovery of my independence and the expulsion of ICC. from my life forever, I eventually graduated college with a Bachelors degree in psychology, a major I had promptly declared as I endeavored to demystify the enigma of my cult transformation.  I even earned straight A’s throughout my junior and senior years, which, after repeating some course work from my ICC. period, raised my cumulative grade point average to the honor of Magna Cum Laude at graduation!  Frankly, I believe that my first-hand experience in a cult, in conjunction with my natural passion for education, meaningfully complement one another to ensure my continued success in the prevention of, and aid in others’ recovery from, cultic abuse.  My dedication to the emancipation of all who are imprisoned is a product of the ineffable fulfillment that I now feel.  My personal odyssey into the ensnaring world of deceptive sects, thus, has not been one of freedom lost.  It has been one of freedom found.