So, to that end, I set out to create a sort of piecemeal American cult, using aspects from several different sources. I created a cult leader named Robert Morris. He shares some attributes in common with Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism. He’s a conman, he has a predilection for sleeping with women that aren’t his wife, and he is killed before he can really go nuts to the tune of Jim Jones. This halts the religion that he founded at a certain stage and ensures its ability to endure. Most cults eventually burn out when their leaders go off the deep end, but if a cult leader gets martyred, it improves their chances for eventually morphing into a normal religion.
Of course, Robert Morris is living way too late to be Joseph Smith. He lives in the 1960s and 1970s and is involved in the Jesus Movement. I modeled this on David Berg, founder of the Children of God or the Family International. Berg even left California specifically because he thought California was going to fall off into the ocean. I thought that was too good not to use. Unfortunately, David Berg was not martyred, which meant that he got to introduce the doctrine of Flirty Fishing (prostitutes who witness about Jesus and also make cash!) and then eventually went completely crazy by institutionalizing sexual abuse towards children. It’s really too bad no one killed that guy before he got going.
A few other things came from other sources. I made the Life vegan because I wanted to be all-access here. It’s not just religious people who become fanatical. There’s definitely the same dangers with any kind of radical belief, and I’ve known some really out-there vegans. (Full disclosure: I’m a vegan.) I cut the Life off from electricity to make them more like the Amish and also appropriated the Amish community in Sarasota for my purposes.
Also, I think the story of the FLDS is intriguing because it was caused by two different cult leaders. One being Joseph Smith, but the other is, of course, Warren Jeffs. Gideon Walker is my Warren Jeffs. A lot of the things that Gideon does are taken directly from things that Jeffs did. Jeffs is the one who really started going crazy with the child bride thing, and he purportedly would ask creepily detailed questions of anyone who had been caught in some kind of sexual misconduct.
The final pieces of the Life’s beliefs, however, come from my own personal experiences. Robert Morris grew up in a religious environment much like mine, and he incorporated his past into the beliefs of the cult he was creating. Calling services “meeting,” calling the building a “meeting hall,” having the congregation “break bread” instead of have communion— all of those things come from the sect that I was raised in until I was about thirteen.
I grew up in a branch of the Plymouth Brethren. (If you’re interested in this kind of thing, the Exclusive Brethren of the UK and Australia are another branch.) Wikipedia calls us the “Open Brethren,” but admits that they created the appellation. We never called ourselves anything but Christians, and we worshiped in a Gospel Hall.
Though there was nothing polygamous about the Gospel Hall, I always felt a strange sort of kinship when I would see pictures of those women on polygamous compounds in their prairie dresses with their hair up on top of their heads because…
We looked just like them.
Women in the Gospel Hall were not permitted to wear pants, and we weren’t allowed to cut our hair. When we went to meeting, we were required to cover our heads. So I remember being part of a sea of women with hats and long, long skirts. I remember my mother, my aunts, and my grandmother all wearing their hair piled up in buns and my older cousins with their hair in beautifully sleek French braids which they somehow did themselves (something I still can’t do).
Every time I would look at the polygamous women, it would remind me of my childhood.
I suppose that’s why I began devouring the memoirs written by women who had escaped the FLDS. There was much that they endured that I never had to worry about. There was no physical abuse in the Gospel Hall, no forced marriages, no child brides, and no plural marriage. But there were still things that I deeply identified with. Every time the woman in the memoir would go out and put on regular, secular clothes for the first time or cut her hair, I would cry, because I remembered the first time I cut my hair. Every time she would realize that all the people in the outside world were not all inherently evil, I would cry, because I remembered when I believed that the only good people on earth were inside the Gospel Hall.
I can’t fully understand the horrors that real people escaping from abusive cults must deal with. Luckily, I’ve never been raped or hit or hurt. But these abuses come from deep within the psychology of any set of fanatical beliefs, and I understand that psychology. There are two pieces of it. One—boundless entitlement. Two—abject insecurity.
You’re taught that you are better than everyone else in the world, and, for some people, this is an excuse to commit horrible acts and to justify them.
But you’re also taught that you’re only better than everyone else if you follow a set of stringent and strange practices. Trying to live up to this kind of perfection is impossible. So that means life within a fanatical system is wrought with constant failure. You berate yourself. Others berate you. You try and try and try, and you are never good enough.
Anyway, this book is for anyone out there who has ever managed to get away from any kind of fanatical belief system. There is some part of us deep down, always an high alert, trying to push us to be perfect, even if we know that the beliefs that warped us were all lies.
Out of Heaven's Grasp Page 29
