Like a frog being boiled in water
People have asked me repeatedly how folks get recruited into coercive groups. As I am a multigenerational walkaway–that is, I was raised in a coercive group rather than joining one as a teen or adult–it’s hard for me to answer this personally; pretty much, most of my life “Jesus Camp life” was all I knew, and my experiences have been more of essentially resocialising myself (not unlike a kid who was raised by wolves and having to figure out human culture).
Johnathan W. Rice’s recent article in Salon Magazine,
Fear And Loathing In Jesusland, describes a story I’ve heard across ex-cult forums from recruitees who became walkaways–that you’re never given the “Full Monty” straightaway but are gradually inducted.
snip
Among other things, a big thing that the more coercive groups in the movement (including not just Campus Crusade and YWAM, but the infamous Maranatha) were involved in was “love-bombing”–smothering people with affection, making them feel wonderful and loved. The author himself experienced some of this, and also describes how after the “love-in” the indoctrination started to trickle in, eventually becoming a torrent:
snip
I myself would agree and disagree with his statement–what he may not have been aware of is that, particularly during the 80s and 90s, there was an organised campaign (beginning as early as the waning days of the Latter Rain movement in the 40s) to explicitly steeplejack the non-Christian-Nationalist segment of the evangelical movement. Legitimate “Charismatic” movements in Catholic and Protestant denominations were taken over from within by neopentecostal “cuckoo churches”.
In this case, the cult recruitment was less of individual people and more of a takeover-from-within and indoctrination of a very large chunk of the evangelical movement–one particularly mediated by New Apostolic Reformation groups as well as a group calling itself the Institute for Religion and Democracy that was closely connected to Christian Reconstructionists. (Probably the prototypical example, in fact, was the ultimately successful steeplejacking of the Southern Baptist Convention–formerly a conservative but relatively mainline denomination, it has gone hard-dominionist and is now quite possibly undergoing a second “consolidation” steeplejack by NAR-linked groups.)
The NAR takeovers and plans for steeplejacks–particularly of non-NAR-linked charismatic worship groups–is, to this day, woefully under-documented (about the only people who’ve written on this regularly are myself, Bruce Wilson, Rachel Tabachnik, and Katherine Yurica and to a lesser extent Sara Diamond), so that’s an understandable lapse–to someone who didn’t grow up in one of the major foci of the NAR movement (as I did), it would appear that the evangelical movement just “radicalised slowly”.
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