[GUEST POST] Holy Shift: How I Left a Cult and Found Myself

A story from a reader about breaking free

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This courageous and insightful piece was written by a wonderful reader of mine, Pam. She’ll be in the comments if anyone would like to ask questions or engage with her.

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I want to start by reassuring you all that I am fine.

Really. I’m good. 

My stress is lower than it’s ever been. I’ve been happily married for 10 years to the best person on the planet. I laugh hard every day, I’m debt-free, and my parents are healthy.

Now that you know I’m okay, I feel like you’re ready to hear the next part:

I grew up in a cult.

When people hear the word “cult”, their minds usually jump to the grisly stories they’ve heard on true crime podcasts. They picture news footage of police standoffs and dead bodies. Jim Jones, along with murdering a bunch of people in South America, also raised the bar for cults, which makes it awfully hard to impress an audience.

So, let me get the big stuff out of the way.

This wasn’t a 6:00 news situation. I wasn’t kidnapped or handcuffed. There was no underground bunker, and we drank more Coke than Kool Aid. There was also no SWAT team busting through the doors to save me. Netflix isn’t clamoring for the story rights.

This is the story of a girl from a loving, middle-class family who played outside, devoured books, and taught her dog tricks. She had friends, did well in school, and knew, without a doubt, that an angry man in the sky called “God” was watching her every move.

From a distance, we may have seemed a little weird, but harmless. When someone asked me where I went to church (because in the rural South, it’s just assumed that you must go somewhere) I would tell them and they might ask, “Don’t y’all speak in tongues?” And I would say yes. And that was about it.

If they asked where I went to school, I would tell them the name of my tiny Christian school and they would say “Huh. Never heard of it.”

It was a subculture within a subculture within a subculture.

My kindergarten teacher taught us a song called Countdown. We would BEG to sing the countdown song because we got to count down from 10 to 1 and then jump as high as we could and yell “Blastoff!” Then we sang a song about how time is running out to accept Jesus as your Savior because he’ll be appearing in the sky any day now to suck us up like a vacuum cleaner. 

By third grade, we were required to memorize the names of all 66 books of the Bible in order. I can still rattle them off to this day. Along with our states and capitals, we also learned that God is watching us all the time, Hell is real, and that’s where we deserve to go because we were born bad.

I don’t remember how old we were when our teachers started showing us old Rapture movies from the 1970’s. They would gather us students in a dark room, wheel in a TV on a cart, and we would watch as Christians were beheaded at the guillotine because of their faith.

This, we were told, is what will happen in the future. Right here in America. If you don’t follow all the rules and believe hard enough, you won’t get sucked up by Jesus in the rapture. If you don’t get sucked up by Jesus in the rapture, then you’ll definitely die in an awful way.

Considering the stakes, these rules must be pretty important. So, what are they?

That’s a good question with a bad answer. Nobody can agree on what the rules are.

Some people say that believing in Jesus is enough. That’s the only rule.

Some people add church attendance, baptism, or speaking in tongues.

Some people say you can’t go to the movies or wear tank tops or say the word “Fuck”.

But what all these groups agree on is that if you don’t follow the rules, you will literally go to a flame-filled Hell where your skin will burn for all eternity. So, you know, no pressure.

When I was 8, I remember sitting in our weekly chapel at school while the preacher yelled at us about what it’s like to go to hell. I started crying and I couldn’t stop. My breathing got fast and my chest was heaving. My teacher actually pulled me aside because she was worried.

My friend has an 8 year old daughter who I adore. She likes reading and art and selling Girl Scout cookies. When I imagine her sitting in a pew sobbing, afraid she is going to go to Hell, I want to grab a hatchet and end the miserable life of any man who would dare scare her like that. Maybe I would even use a guillotine. Life imitates art. 

Anyway, the heaven and hell stuff was table stakes. It got more intense as we got older and had the opportunity to start making choices about our clothes, our friends and our music. There were, of course, rules about that. But the expectations also got way higher. 

If you were old enough to earn money, you were expected to give at least 10% to the church. More was better though. It was a 15-pieces-of-flair situation. Yes, the minimum is 10%, but don’t you want to show your commitment to God by giving more? 

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I gave thousands of dollars to the church that I earned from my 3 jobs. A lot of that went to pay off a church gymnasium we never needed in the first place and to buy new SUV’s for missionaries. I donated $1,300 to our pastor’s friend who said he needed money to build feeding stations for orphans in Central America. (I’m pretty sure “Orphans” is what he named his private jet. He’s since been caught twice committing financial crimes.) 

After Columbine happened, there was a renewed obsession with martyrdom. As a reminder, one of the shooting victims supposedly said she believed in God right before she got killed. So that was all anyone talked about for years afterward. At church camp, I sat in an auditorium full of middle school kids and the speaker said, “Stand up if you would take a bullet for Jesus!” 

By late high school, I was praying on my own for an hour a day, attending church at least 3x a week and going to various weeknight Bible studies.

I chose to go to a very conservative Bible College that had even more rules and higher expectations. All students were required to go to chapel every day, M-F, and also attend church on the weekends. No problem. I’d spent my whole life hustling for God’s approval, and I was ready to take it up a notch.

The student code of conduct required us to lead a very specific lifestyle. There were rules for every aspect of our lives, including no dancing below the waist, no getting caught in a bar, and no watching R-rated movies.

It may not have been a bunker, but they did lock the dormitory doors at curfew, and if you weren’t inside, it was going on your permanent record. 

I joined a street evangelism team, volunteered to teach the kids at church, picked up trash in poor neighborhoods, got excellent grades and woke up early to do 100 push ups and run a mile 3x a week. 

Besides running myself into the ground, my roommate and I were constantly at odds, which becomes a real problem when you’re not allowed to leave campus. (Students could only live off-campus if they were married or over the age of 27.) 

My family, even from a distance of 5 hours away, could tell I was not okay. They’re very religious people, but they could tell the university was poorly run and I wasn’t being treated well. 

When my parents tried to help, I got mad at them because I didn’t want to admit that I was not okay. At that age, I had no idea how to stand up for myself or handle conflict and it was a total mess. Mom and I stopped speaking to each other.

My body was trying to tell me something was wrong, but it can’t speak English, so it spoke dysfunction. I suddenly stopped doing 2 things: menstruating and shitting. My doctor asked me “Are you under any stress?” And I replied “No.” 

Why did I say that? Because by 18, I had lived my whole life in a state of anxiety. I thought that’s how everyone felt. I didn’t know it was called “stress”. I thought it was just Tuesday.

Two doctors couldn’t figure out why my body was rebelling, so they put me on a prescription that I continued for the next 7 years.

Medicine controlled my symptoms, but couldn’t fix my environment. What I needed was permission to drop my Evangelism Barbie persona and just be a person. It would have been great if anyone, ANYONE in my life had told me that my worth wasn’t based on my achievements. But everyone I knew was hustling, same as I was. They couldn’t give me something they didn’t have.

In the end, what broke my faith into a million little pieces was seeing the difference between what my church leaders said and what they actually did. I saw how the sausage was made and lost my appetite.

The best example I have is when a student blew the whistle on the University’s practice of slumlording. They were renting houses to poor people and not maintaining them and we all read about it in a university-wide email sent by the whistleblower. 

Instead of making repairs, they decided to give all the tenants 30 days to vacate and then they blamed the whistleblower, saying it was his fault these people didn’t have anywhere to live anymore. 

How’s that for loving your neighbor? 

In Fall 2005 I entered college planning to become a minister and by August 2006, I was done with all of it.

It was clear to me that all my church leaders cared about was image, power and money. How far back did the corruption go, I wondered. Was my whole life built on a lie?

For the first time in my life, I did not pray about what to do next. 

I called my parents at 7:30 am crying and told them I was ready to leave. I apologized for wasting their money at that expensive clown school and for turning on them when they were just trying to help me to see the truth. They were more than happy to get me out of there.

I transferred to a state school close to home. Somewhere with lots of cows and trees and absolutely no pressure to prove anything.

At new student orientation I raised my hand and asked if I would need to sign out to leave for the weekend. My RA raised her eyebrows and said “No. you’re adults. You come and go whenever you want.”

I had choices for the first time in my life, which was both liberating and terrifying. I had always been such a decisive person and suddenly I couldn’t make decisions about basic things like ordering from a restaurant menu. Later on, I learned (possibly from one of my 14 therapists?) that it’s normal to have trouble making decisions after surviving trauma. 

You might be wondering if I went totally nuts with my newfound freedom. But the state school I went to wasn’t exactly a party school and I wasn’t exactly a party girl. I never cared anything about drinking. I just wanted the truth. 

The college had a big library and I took full advantage of it. I would check out stacks of books and devour them. Biblical criticism, Bertrand Russell, Thomas Paine, Joseph Campbell, Sam Harris. If it had ever been forbidden, I wanted to read it. 

I had to special order The God Delusion from a local bookstore and when I took it home, I removed the shiny cover so my grandmother wouldn’t know what it was. 

I was so hungry for the stories I had been missing out on, and books gave me that.

Of course, I also wanted to live my own stories. I made new friends and we cheered each other on while we laughed and struggled, fell in love with all the wrong people, and wrote bad poetry. 

They knew I felt like a misfit and they never made fun of me for not understanding pop culture or sex positions or whatever else we were discussing over breakfast. They loved me through that rough first year and every year after that.

From the time I transferred, it took one year for my faith to completely dissolve. I never wanted to be an atheist but in the end, it was a mercy killing. I needed to figure out who I was without a higher power vetoing all my options. I needed to break the rules and see that the world wouldn’t end.

I lost my church community and felt a separation between me and my family, who are all practicing Christians. My Mom was (and still is) absolutely devastated and believes I am going to hell.

And yet, I found a way to finally feel okay.

The church told me my whole life that if I turned my back on God, life would be empty and miserable. They told me I was nothing and no one without God. At first, I wondered if they were right. It was sad to leave everything I knew behind. I hated feeling lost and directionless in this new choose-you-own-adventure world. 

Then one night, two months after transferring, I felt the first glimmer of hope. There was a Halloween event on campus. Students got up on stage to read poetry or sing for the crowd. After it was over, the organizers begged us to take the carved pumpkin centerpieces with us to make clean-up easier.

I was sitting at a table with another student whose name I’ve forgotten. He was like me: young and socially awkward. He looked at me and grinned, “You want to take them outside and smash them?” Yes, that was exactly what I wanted.

We carried our gourds out to the parking lot and I laughed as we threw them to the pavement, watching them split into pieces of a disassembled orange puzzle.

For the first time since I left Bible college, I felt joy. Looking up past the streetlights into the night sky, I thought “Maybe I’m going to be okay.” 

Every day I woke up and continued to rebuild myself from scratch. 

One afternoon, I was driving alone and I started thinking about all the times in church when visiting preachers would come up to me and tell me they KNEW I would be serving God in the future. The church calls it “prophesying” and we took those predictions very seriously. 

It dawned on me that no one could tell me who I was anymore. I heard myself scream “Screw the prophecies! Screw the prophecies!” (Isn’t that cute? I was still learning how to curse.) A weight lifted off my chest and I laughed from the lightness and joy that flooded my body.

I was going to be okay.

After reading my story, I hope you don’t see me as a victim. I prefer the term “resilient as fuck”. Because humans can always find a way. Our ancestors survived the Ice Age, a global flood, and dinosaurs. (Or maybe not those last two. I’m not sure. I have some gaps in my science education.) 

We can even watch our gods die right before our eyes and keep going. That’s pretty fucking resilient.