Escaping Utopia

by Lalich, Janja; McLaren, Karla;

  A young man who grew up in a Turkish compound of The Family had a particularly difficult experience:

  My parents were based in the same country. They were in Istanbul, but they were based out of a different home. I’d see my dad once every two or three weeks, and my mom probably a little less frequently than that. I knew I was part of a larger unit, but not being with my parents was very difficult for me. And I developed … I was told anyway … that I developed serious spiritual issues, stemming from my dependency on my parents. I was about five or six then. The “cure” for that was corporal punishment: regular beatings, isolation, deprivation. Doing chores during regularly scheduled activities instead of joining with the rest of my group. Doing extra reading and memorization assignments. Those were the normal forms of punishment. Silence restriction occasionally. I would not ever speak out against my punishment or try to justify what I considered to be unfair treatment of myself. The people we lived with—the men and women of the organization whom I was instructed to call “uncle” and “auntie”— they all adopted Bible names. They were Uncle John, Uncle James, Auntie Rebecca, whatever. If you refused to include the “uncle” and “auntie”, you were punished. They rotated. We would have one for several months or a year, and then they would move on or go to a different home or a different group. Also they would change as we grew older. When I turned eight, I went into a different group and then had a new set of uncles and aunts taking care of us regularly for several months, and then they’d change and rotate.

  In the home I lived in for the majority of my years in Turkey, there were about sixty-five children living in there and about thirty-five adults. That would be the average home size; and those thirty-five adults were all uncles and aunts to me. I knew my parents were still in the country. I knew they were still in the city—because I would see them. We’d have what we called a “Family Day,” where we’d actually see our siblings and our parents and that happened about once a month; but in general I didn’t know how to get in touch with them or have an address or a telephone to reach them at.

  In some cases, this family separation had its advantages and was a sort of coping mechanism for the children. For instance, Iris and her friends in TM had freedom twice every day when all of the adults joined together for lengthy meditation sessions. But this freedom had drawbacks, as a young woman raised in the Hare Krishnas explained:

  First we moved to the Detroit temple. They had a small ashram that was, well, it was sort of a house that had the girls separated from the boys, and so I went and lived with a few other young girls and I didn’t even know where my mother lived. I don’t remember how long we were there, but I think I was maybe ten when we moved to New Vrindaban [a Hare Krishna compound in Marshall County, West Virginia]. I didn’t like it completely, but there were some fun parts about it because we got to live with our friends. It was kind of weird not being around our parents and not having the thought of them constantly looking after us and loving us and nurturing us. There was this freedom to it, that we weren’t looked after a lot, and we had a lot of free time to go and do things. As a kid, it seemed kind of fun. You’re like, “Oh, we’re on our own,” and you’re doing your own thing. But I think ultimately I really missed out on a lot of development and self-awareness and self-esteem and those sorts of things. But I didn’t realize it at the time.

  In most cults, family relationships are restricted or wiped away because they interfere with cult members’ time and energy—which is supposed to be focused solely on the cult’s beliefs, its purported goals, and the leader’s needs and whims. If cults do allow relatively normal family relationships within the cult, they almost always restrict or forbid relationships with family members who are not in the cult. These family-damaging systems of control ensure that cult members will not have full access to the love, support, and protection that a strong and healthy family can provide. These restrictive systems also reduce children’s opportunity to develop healthy social lives.

  3.

   Restrictions on Social Life

  Contact with the outside world and friends or family who weren’t in the cult was rare for our narrators, and these losses had lasting effects. In a healthy childhood, varied social relationships are positive and nurturing. Through their relationships, children learn how to communicate, love, develop empathy, negotiate, resolve disagreements, learn new things, and grow as individuals. Unfortunately, cultic restrictions on social life hinder individuation and intellectual growth, and interfere with healthy self-development. These restrictions also teach children how to keep secrets and hide their connection to the cult because, in most cases, outsiders are seen as untrustworthy or even evil. In some cults, this secrecy made the children feel too ashamed or confused to be able to explain their situation to any outsider who might have been able to help—including other children.

  Many of our narrators weren’t allowed to play with children who were not in their cult. All children in the Twelve Tribes were isolated from outsiders, and Matthew remembers being forbidden to play with outsider children, or to play at all:

  No. Not at all. No. Playing with other kids—even looking at them—was really strictly forbidden. We weren’t even allowed to go into retail stores except once when we were in Vermont, my mom did runs to this place that used to give us really cheap food or something in bulk. It was leftovers or something. So we used to get to go there, but if we went by a store that had anything that they would call “worldly,” like toys or anything like that, we would have to close our eyes. But once again, it depended on whose child you were. Because the elders’ kids, they got to go to Walmart or Kmart.

  Naturally, enforced isolation breeds loneliness and a sense of remoteness. For instance, Joseph’s social life outside the Exclusive Brethren was basically nonexistent:

  I grew up feeling different and alone all the time, and I still feel that way much of the time. I didn’t learn to bond with other children either in or out of the Brethren in the way that children normally learn to—for example, learning to compromise to find a way to continue a relationship when differences of opinion arise. Brethren children were strongly discouraged from making “special friendships” with one or more other persons. And my parents frequently forced me to abandon friends even within the group if they felt that I was developing too much of an attachment to one person. The Brethren also discouraged members from having any family loyalties, as these were considered “worldly.”

  Iris had a few friends outside of the TM compound, but when Janja asked if those friends knew that she and her parents were in TM, she replied, “No, no, no, no. We kept it all secret.” And one young woman who grew up in The Family replied:

  You’re talking socially, then, I guess. Because we would go out and we would interact with the world in the sense of witnessing to them. And passing out literature. But as far as having peers outside in the world? No. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. No. Any sort of friends that I ever made, um, were all for the purposes of witnessing to them.

  A young woman who spent ten years of her childhood in the Jehovah’s Witnesses recalled her complete lack of social time with children her age:

  I was monopolized by the church as a child. I really did not have any choices. My choices were taken away from me, almost immediately. My mother sat me down when I was about six weeks into studying with them [the JWs] and told me I could never associate with our relatives again. Not even my own grandma—because Satan might be using them to keep us from learning the Truth. That was how she explained it to me. And so, the family reunions we had every year, those were completely tossed out the window. We never went to another family reunion. Also, my social life was obliterated. I was forbidden to associate with anybody who was not a Jehovah’s Witness in good standing with the organization. And in the small, rural town where I grew up, there were no children who were Jehovah’s Witnesses close to my age. The closest person in my congregation, she was nineteen when I was ten. And so I had nobody to hang out with or sociali
ze with for the next nine years.

  Cultic restrictions against any kind of social life outside the group are often enforced through surveillance and disciplinary actions. A young woman raised in The Living Word church recalled the intense scrutiny that she and her fellow Living Word teens endured when they attended a public high school:

  We were definitely pretty ostracized as a group, but not very tightknit. We were all zombies. Just kind of zombies. We weren’t allowed to do any kind of extracurricular activities, and everybody treated us really strangely. There was definitely a big sports element … anytime you’re in a Midwest high school scene, that’s the only exciting thing. It seems to be all that anyone’s ever stoked about. So the whole school is all super into sports, and we’re not interested at all or allowed to participate. So that was really strange. We were also definitely not allowed to date. I was allowed to talk with others riding on the bus, but I knew they were watching pretty closely, especially any time they ever decided that there was any inappropriate type of situation going on. We were completely separated and really browbeaten for even being friendly to each other. All living in a state of fear. You don’t know what is going to be crossing the line. And at any time you can be pulled into the dreaded conference room to have someone talk to you and kind of tear you apart. For something you don’t even understand. I remember there was a boy who had asked me to go to prom with him, and I was told that he was a disgusting Mormon. So I was just having all these horrible teenage, regular things happening, but then you add being totally confused and separated, torn away from my family—and you’ve got a pretty shattered, helpless, depressed girl. No, there was no joy.

  These everyday restrictions on social life created an enclosed and entrapping world—and also kept the children away from any outside person who might have helped them. Inside the cult, the restrictions were not any less severe, since the daily rules and regulations were reinforced through shaming, punishments, isolation, and even banishment from the group.

  4.

   Daily Rules, Discipline, and Punishments

  Daily rules and regulations, along with disciplinary measures, are critical aspects of cultic systems of control. This discipline is used to ensure that the indoctrination takes hold and that members become and remain entirely loyal and obedient. Both adults and children alike are expected to conform. Lily remembers that the consequences of rule breaking were severe and relentless:

  Grandmaster Kim humiliated all of us. No one in the College of Learning was excluded. Kids included. We were all humiliated. And if she couldn’t find something on you, she made something up. Yes, there were physical punishments, but she never physically punished me; she had other people do that. She was a little bit smart, so she had other people handle that. So if it came back to her, she would be like, “I never did that and I never wanted that. That was them; but look, they’re gone.” We would get disciplined physically to wear us down and also sometimes she would slap people, pull their hair, throw things around the kitchen, beat them with a stick. She’s a crazy bitch.

  Discipline within cults is often harsh and abusive. Matthew shared details about the types of physical discipline that children in the Twelve Tribes endured:

  The most minimal discipline you could get was that they would use oil dabbles, like rods. And it depended on whom you got, because some of them would oil them really good so they would hurt really bad, while some people would feel bad so they wouldn’t oil them as much (laughs). Then you would hold out your hands and they would hit your hands however long they wanted and then it went up from there. They had a bunch of utensils. Bamboo hurt the worst probably and there were wooden paddles and then whatever they had laying around the house if that stuff wasn’t available. And they would use that on the bottom, and some people would go all the way up the back and down the legs. It all just depended on whom you got. Then sometimes they did it naked or sometimes just with your underwear. At one point, there was a raid on the community; after that, they said not to do it naked because they didn’t want to leave really bad marks that wouldn’t heal in a day or two. But a lot of the old timers still really liked to do it naked and some of the men seemed to get some enjoyment out of spanking the girls naked.

  One young woman from the Word of Life Fellowship described the “Deliverance Ministry,” which was used to keep church members in line:

  If you rebelled, they would say you had an unclean spirit or a rebellious spirit and you needed to get a demon cast out. So you would have to go to the Deliverance Ministers and go through this whole, like, exorcism. And there was a lot of shame attached to that because, you know, clearly you hadn’t spiritually taken care of yourself or you wouldn’t be in that position to begin with. I had grown up hearing my father giving these Deliverance Ministries in the other room, and so much screaming would go on. And writhing. You would see it sometimes in church services: the writhing and the screaming and weird voices. Total exorcist sort of stuff, which was really, really frightening.

  I had a period of rebellion, and that needed to be taken care of. I had wanted to leave the church since I was eighteen, and now I was in my early twenties. Two Deliverance Ministers were brought in. They prayed with me first and they laid me out on the floor so I’m on my back. They draped me in a cloth and then these two ministers were praying and praying. They got more fervent, more frantic, and they pushed on my stomach. And they got me all worked up emotionally so I’m crying all over the place.

  I was just crying and crying and crying. And they pushed on my stomach, and pushed and casted, yelling in my ears to cast out the foul demon. Or my unclean spirit, whatever it was. It’s just—it was so freaky. This went on for hours. Especially when they saw that there were multiple demons that they had to cast out. Some people would throw up, because it’s a lot of stress to put your body under. Plus the emotional stress, and then the whole pushing on your stomach and the yelling in your ears. That’s what the Deliverance Ministry was. And then you come out of there. You’re emotionally drained. Totally exhausted. You feel like, yeah, I guess something happened because, uh, I don’t know how to explain it, except there’s this kind of relief. And you feel like oh, yeah, okay, they did cast out the demon because I feel a little bit lighter.

  Jessica recalled the punishments in The Family, where the cult’s Law of Love was used to excuse nearly any form of child abuse:

  The Law of Love doesn’t only cover the sex stuff. It covers, for example, discipline. Any form of discipline is fine as long as it was done “in love.” That really included some very over-the-top things. Kids were getting beaten black and blue, public spankings, nude public spankings. Putting kids in tiny little closet rooms, and fasting them for like a month. There were the child discipline rules, and those were very, very harsh. But just add it to the fact that little kids were working ten- to thirteen-hour days, schlepping on the streets, selling tracts, in freezing cold weather! And we were like five years old, or if you were lucky, you got to go singing, which was street busking basically, which was fun. We did that so-o-o-o-o much. I mean every one of us when we were really little kids.

  I was on silence restriction for a total of two years of my life. I was on silence. I added it up. One time I was on silence for nine months! I could not say a word! And some of the other kids were really little, too. One of my friends who was younger than I, a boy of seven or eight, was put on a year of silence restriction. How the hell can a little boy possibly not talk? How do they expect you to? He did it. He got in trouble a lot, which is normal. But if you think about these little kids on silence restriction—I’m amazed! We were really, really little kids. They were really, really harsh on a lot of the boys who rebelled. They got a lot of the public humiliation and the public beatings.

  The daily rules in cults nearly always involve work requirements and, in many groups, strict gender separations. Joseph witnessed both in the Exclusive Brethren:

  Married women were forbidden to have careers. They were expected to
produce children, care for them (and/or any elderly persons who were members), and run the home. Brethren were expected to give hospitality to large numbers of people almost every Sunday (usually at least ten to twenty people to a sit-down meal of two courses). The burden of the catering and the cleaning was managed by the women. As I grew older, my mother expected me to help with the daily household chores, and also with preparations for catering on Sundays. I disliked this intensely, and did everything I could to get out of it. Men were required to work to support their families, and the salaries paid by Brethren firms to the men reflected the fact that they were expected to support a large family, as birth control was not practiced.

  Children in most cults are required to study, attend lengthy indoctrination sessions or church services, and work. For instance, the many businesses of the Twelve Tribes involved extensive child labor. Matthew described his early childhood, in which he and the other Tribes children worked up to fifteen hours each day:

  The group had a cafe and we did a lot of work in the cafe. My sister was working in the bakery, usually during the day, making the desserts, and I worked doing salad dressings or doing prep work in the mornings. But we all worked in the back because the authorities would come around to see if we were there because of child labor laws. So we would have to stay in the back so they couldn’t see us. Or the leaders would have us come in late to do clean-up work: closing up, cleaning, stuff like that. Our day was just work, work, work. That was their whole thing.

  Besides work, the Twelve Tribes devised many other ways to keep children controlled. Matthew shared his experiences:

  We weren’t allowed to have things like favorites in the community. No favorite colors, no favorite people, no favorite foods, you know, which to kids in the world is like a staple, right? They had too many rules for kids. There was no peer involvement allowed at all. No peer involvement allowed with your same-aged kids. You weren’t allowed to play sports. The kids weren’t allowed to be independent, you know, to do what they wanted. They forced the kids to all work all the time and do service for the commune. We had to clean the house. We had chores we had to do. We had to get up at four or five o’clock in the morning, and you had to be involved with the commune. Things needed to be done to help the parents, the other adults, and you were required to do everything with the adults, who would supervise the kids.