I Was Born and Raised in a Doomsday Cult

I was born and raised in a doomsday cult.

I was also born and raised in a working class neighborhood.  Went to public school.  Played kickball and baseball and jumped rope with neighbor kids. 

Our neighbors knew that we didn’t do birthday parties and Christmas.  They also knew that we didn’t play outside on Friday night and that we went to church on Saturday instead of Sunday. 

Our neighbors accepted us as just having “a different religion.”

“But they’re good people,” they were quick to say.  “You might disagree with their beliefs, but you can’t ever say they’re bad folks.”


All kinds of people join doomsday cults.  Good people who have the intention of making a difference in what can be a dark and dismal world.

These folks want the pain to end.  They want suffering to end.  And the only way it can possibly happen is for a supernatural power to set things right.

While they might refer to themselves as ‘God’s one and only true church,’ or the ‘only church with the true message about Jesus Christ,’ they never think of themselves as being in a doomsday cult.

We were no exception.

My parents married right out of high school in 1970, a time of political and social upheaval.  Given the era and their ages, I suspect that these young people were looking for a rock-solid absolute around which they could order their lives. 

Enter The Plain Truth Magazine. 

One day, my father stumbled upon Herbert Armstrong’s teachings through a news magazine that depicted modern life as death, despair, and destruction.  Fortunately, all of the horror depicted in the magazine was part of God’s plan for mankind.

Kinda like Time or Newsweek, but with a heavy emphasis on the Apocalypse.

The Plain Truth magazine was replete with photos of atomic bombs and nuclear tests, crying people, starving people, people hurting – and then God’s answer: a wonderful World Tomorrow where God would defeat Satan, and war would end forever.

Anyone would be hard pressed not to at least be a little sympathetic to that message in the middle of the Cold War.

With a little help from some ministerial visits and correspondence courses, my parents grew to believe that they were specially called by God to help usher in this World Tomorrow through allegiance to God’s one and only true church, the Worldwide Church of God.   They were baptized. 

They stopped eating pork.  They stopped ‘keeping Christmas’.  They started worshipping God from sundown on Friday night until sundown on Saturday night.  They started tithing, and in some years, that meant 30% of their pre-tax income.

They started spending the majority of their time with fellow church members.

Their relationships with their family members and neighbors didn’t end completely, but folks found their new practices peculiar.


But this would make sense, counseled the ministers.  After all, we are a strange and peculiar people.  They aren’t being called by God at this time.  You are.  Of course they don’t understand.

A few years later, I was born.

One of my earliest memories is sitting on a blanket in a room filled with folding chairs, looking up at panty-hosed legs, playing with Fisher Price Little People, and listening to Herbert Armstrong’s voice. 

“And this gospel of the Kingdom SHALL BE PREACHED,” he’d scream while pounding a desk “in ALL the world for a witness unto ALL nations and then shall the end come.”

Now Herbert Armstrong wasn’t in the room.  But his Voice was.  He was on a cassette tape playing at the front of the assembly.  But there was a microphone.  A man would get up and talk, and then he would sit down.  And then the Voice.

I wasn’t aware of the cassette tape.  I believed that God was standing in front of that microphone.  Everyone was taking notes and staring straight ahead.  It had to be the Voice of God.

Unbeknownst to me and my family in this pre-Internet age, Herbert Armstrong was in quite a bit of trouble at his headquarters in Pasadena, California.  The state had placed God’s true church into receivership, and Herbert had left the state, and later?  The country. 

It turns out when you get a quarter of a million people to give you nearly 30% of their pre-tax income, you do pretty well financially, but it might be difficult to call yourself a non-profit corporation.

A lot of people close to the Headquarters of the Worldwide Church of God saw the corruption and gave up.

But we didn’t. 

We were told that we were being persecuted, that the government was taking away the separation between church and state, and that the End Times were coming to pass the way Herbert Armstrong said they would.

And we became more committed, if such a thing is possible.

I never heard the word ‘cult’ until the mid-nineties.  I was in my late teens.  My grandfather was in the hospital, and in the waiting room, I picked up a New Yorker magazine, thumbed through it, and learned of a place called Jonestown.

I’d never heard of Jim Jones.  How in the world could something of this magnitude happen and it not be covered in the Plain Truth magazine?

At the time, the most compelling part of the story for me wasn’t the mass suicide or the dead bodies.  


It was that those people were in Guyana in the first place.

One of Herbert Armstrong’s favorite topics was the Great Tribulation.  “No flesh,” he would declare,” will be spared that great and terrible day of the Lord.”  And then the production team would cue the atomic bombs and the explosions, just in case we might wonder exactly what the great and terrible day of the Lord might be like.

Fortunately, we were the elect.  And as such, we were going to a Place of Safety to be shielded from such atrocities.  That is, if we were faithful to the end.

We would have sold everything and followed Herbert Armstrong to meet Jesus Christ in a cave dwelling in Petra, Jordan, which is where Herbert Armstrong believed this Place of Safety to be. 

We would have gone to Guyana. 

Although Herbert Armstrong died in 1986, we in the church continued to follow his teachings well into the 90’s.

Through a series of events that take a lot of energy to recount, I left God’s one and only true church with the emotional support of some dear friends.

As you might imagine, I floundered for a bit.

I moved to a new city to start over.  I was pretty happy, and I pushed everything about the Worldwide Church of God and Herbert Armstrong and Sabbath-keeping and Holy Days and all of it completely aside. 

Well, almost completely.  I started having anxiety attacks and incredibly scary dreams.

The answer had to be spiritual, of course.  It always had been before.

I started going to a completely different kind of church, and I liked it.  I liked the people there.  They were nice.  I said little to them about my experience.

One guy stood out in particular.  We started dating…and then exclusively…and then we got married.

And for a while, it was really great.

And then after a while, he started wondering if he had made a huge mistake.

I became convinced that to be a good wife, I needed to be everything that Herbert Armstrong had said good wives should be.  I started reading some of my old literature from Worldwide.  I considered going back to Sabbath-keeping and ditching my birthday and Christmas.

In the Worldwide Church of God, women were trained to be Stepford Wives.  


And I was no exception.

Slowly, the old programming took hold, and I became convinced that by leaving God’s one and only true church and marrying my husband?  I chose Satan.

If you ever meet my husband, I really doubt that the first thing that will come to mind is ‘Satan.’  Or ‘demon’ or ‘false prophet.’  (He did get a D+ in conduct in the fourth grade, but that’s not exactly Prince of Darkness material. )

It became harder and harder to keep our life together. 

One day, when I was looking for a Sabbath-keeping church in my area, I came across a website called The Painful Truth. 

Ex-Worldwide members had written their stories, and none of them were edited for content.

My husband came home from work to find me sobbing in a fetal position.

He read the site with me.  He was dumbfounded.  “I had no idea,” he kept saying over and over.  “I had no idea.”

For three days, I did nothing but read.  I didn’t eat.  I didn’t sleep.  I read.

And I cried.

This was April 1999.

My husband learned of a special retreat for people who had been through something called ‘spiritual abuse.’  It was called Wellspring Retreat and Resource Center, and it was in Albany, Ohio.  It was a place where I could get some perspective on what had happened to me.

I spoke with Dr. Paul Martin on the phone at length.  He assured me that they knew all about the Worldwide Church of God at Wellspring.  He told me that what I was experiencing was quite common.

Most importantly, he believed that he could help us.

Now in the Worldwide Church of God, psychologists and psychiatrists were always viewed as avenues for demons to enter into your mind.  So it might make sense that I was a little concerned about having my head filled with…well, demons.

“I’ll take you there,” said my husband.  “If you ever want to leave, you are free to go.”

The fact that I even went is a testament to how much I love and trust this man.

Ron Burks, my counselor, and I talked a lot about PTSD.  I learned that the condition was due to trauma, and that sustained trauma over many years can cause symptoms like anxiety attacks and nightmares.

I learned these things weren’t my fault.

After a week of treatment, my husband flew in for the weekend.   We left campus and went to Marietta, Ohio to celebrate his birthday.  When we got back to the Lodge, the staff had a cake for him and some flowers for me.

I was really touched.

One day, Ron and I had a session about the nature of narcissistic personality disorder that left me in shock.  Herbert Armstrong used people, and my family and I were some of those people. 

While that might have been self-evident to everyone around, it was news to me.

I was in shock.   God’s one and only true apostle was an absolute fraud.  He had kept our family from having relationships with each other and with their extended families and neighbors.  He had nearly destroyed my marriage.  

He had practically destroyed me. 

After this session, one of the Wellspring RAs, Jay, asked me if I would like some lunch.

“Sure,” I said absently, and I got up to make it myself.

“No, no,” he protested, “sit down.  Let me.  Would you like a ham and cheese sandwich?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Would you like it toasted?”

Asking me if I wanted my sandwich toasted may have seemed inconsequential, but it stood in stark contrast to how I had tamped down my wants in order to serve Herbert Armstrong’s wants. 

What I wanted was important.  What I want is important.  And it is good to want things.

I learned that my existence and worth as a human being was not predicated on following Herbert’s rules. 

And then there was the Bible.  I didn’t want to be afraid of that book any longer.

Bible study was never a part of Wellspring’s curriculum, but I deduced that Larry Pile, the main workshop leader, was a Christian.  One afternoon, I asked him if there was a book in the bible that dealt with spiritual abuse.

“There is!” he exclaimed.  “The entire letter to the Galatians is about false teaching.”

I asked if we could read together, and he agreed to explain his thinking on the matter.  He also reminded me that these were his thoughts, and that I was free to look at the material  anyway I wanted.  We read two chapters together before I had to stop.  I was just weary.

I came home from Wellspring and slept for almost a week.

I kept reading the Bible, but with different eyes and with a different voice in my head. 

I started really liking the stories that Jesus told.  We didn’t spend so much time on these in the Worldwide Church of God.  When I read them, Jesus emerged for me as a character with a quick wit, who was cunning but not deceitful, and who was overwhelmingly compassionate.

In short, I found him miles more compelling that Herbert Armstrong.

A few years later, when our children were small, I went back to Wellspring for a week.  For a refresher course.  Just to remind myself to relax and enjoy the little things in life.  

But on this visit to Wellspring, it became overwhelmingly apparent to me that there were thousands of groups of varying sizes just like the Worldwide Church of God all over this country.

My counselor, Donna, and I talked more about what I wanted.

“I think I want to write,” I said.

“So write,” she said.

I told her about some story ideas I had. 

“I don’t think people really understand spiritual abuse,” I said to her.

“I don’t think they do either,” she said.

“There needs to be a story…or a movie…”

She smiled.  “It would have to be made by someone who thinks outside the box.”

“What’s a box?”

That summer, I started writing my novel, and I reassembled some of those dear friends who provided emotional support for me when I was leaving the Worldwide Church of God.  We went camping together like we had many years prior. 

One of my friends was now a filmmaker in Los Angeles.  “What are you working on?  You’re always working on something?” he asked me.

“A novel,” I said.

“Pitch it to me.”

So I did.

“That isn’t a novel,” he said, “that’s a movie.”

I told him that I didn’t know how to write a screenplay.

“Well, I do,” he said.

I crammed my novel  into a screenplay.  The first draft was 189 pages.  I was thrilled to be done, and presented it to my filmmaker friend.

“Oh, you’re not done,” he said.  “You don’t know this yet, but a page equals a minute of film, give or take.  We’ve got to cut some stuff out of there.  This isn’t The Godfather.”

And he gave me notes on the script.  I revised.  And he gave me more notes.  And I made more revisions.

Twenty-two revisions later, I reconnected with an old friend, Storme Wood, who had been doing film and video production for a number of years and was itching to direct his first narrative feature.  We met for breakfast, which turned into lunch.

“I didn’t know you wrote screenplays,” he said, cautiously, when I told him of Paradise Recovered.

“Well, I do now,” I said, and I handed him the script.

After reading it, Storme came to visit, and I took him to meet with friends of mine, also spiritual abuse survivors.

As an aside, spiritual abuse survivors are everywhere.  If we assume that the 3,000 distinctive cult groups in America have an average of 200 members, and if each of those members has twenty people in their immediate circle who has been hurt and abused, we’re talking about twelve million people who have been hurt by spiritually abusive leaders either directly or indirectly. 

And those estimates are incredibly conservative.

I had become acquainted with a group who called themselves Apostolics Anonymous.  They met together on Wednesday nights in a local tavern.  Despite the fact that I was never in the United Pentecostal Church, I found that we had a great deal in common.

To his credit, Storme spent a great deal of time gently listening to their stories.

When we got in the car to leave, he had tears in his eyes.

“I don’t care if I sit in the back of this production and pay bills and crunch numbers,” he said “we have to make this movie.  For them.  For all of them.  For you.”

My husband and I scraped up a little over $100,000.  With that tiny bit of money by Hollywood studio standards, plus a lot of sweat and sacrifice, Storme and I made that movie together with a team of people who also sacrificed to tell this story.  Many of them were survivors or friends of survivors themselves.

Paradise Recovered isn’t my story, but it is about me.  But it isn’t just about me.  In our test audiences, we heard women and men wonder aloud if we had been documenting their lives with a camera when they were growing up.

After experiencing our fictitious aberrant group,’ Prophetic Watchman Ministries, International,’ spiritual abuse survivors (regardless of affiliation) told us that we ‘got it right.’

When we were handed the Grand Jury Prize for Narrative Feature at Oklahoma City’s deadCENTER Film Festival, the festival director hugged me and said, “Thank you for sharing this film with us.  It was time somebody said it.”

We had the pleasure of being  part of seventeen film festivals around the country.  We won a number of awards.  Many film festival directors called us and told us how much our film meant to them personally.

And when we watched the film with a handful of cult survivors in my living room, their tears of joy and promises to pray for us meant more than any accolade or award.

Wellspring gave me my life back and gave me the courage to be who I want to be.  It was there that I learned that I have a great deal to give the world.  I still falter.  I still have an anxiety attack from time to time.  I am still experimenting with faith.  But I have a voice.  And I use my words.

And I write every day.

In addition to sharing profits with all of the filmmakers who helped in this effort, my new production company, By The Glass Productions, has designated at least 10% of the producer’s profits to Wellspring Retreat and Resource Center for a Victim Assistance Fund. 

Healing is possible.  As Greg Sammons, the current director at Wellspring, told me recently, we are always in recovery.  But it gets easier.  It gets better. 

And life is very rich and very, very good.


Paradise Recovered is distributed by Monarch Home Entertainment and will release on April 24, 2012.    You can pre-order Paradise Recovered on Amazon.com or put it in your Netflix DVD queue.

Your support of this film will help survivors like me find the healing they richly deserve.  Thank you.

What I Am Is What I Am

I wrote and co-produced this film called Paradise Recovered.  And I've been really busy at it, building an audience, networking with independent film people and spiritual abuse survivors and advocates alike.  It's been the most rewarding and brutal work I've ever done, and it has rocked me to my very core.


Fortunately, I've had some strong champions shoring me up throughout the whole process.  They keep me sane, and they keep me calm.

Some people wonder what my motives were/are in creating this film.  Some answers:


I am not anti-Jesus, nor am I anti-church. I belong to a church. I enjoy the people there, and I feel very free. Sure, there are things I'd change. There are things I'd change about my marriage and my family as well. There are things I need to work on.  We're all works in progress.   


What I am against is a church controlling people, demanding allegiance to something that is more akin to a human resources model than a *biblical* one, and denying people their human rights as free thinkers.


But that's not all. 


I grew up in a very controlling, legalistic church.  I never met the men to whom my family gave 30% of their pre-tax income.  My only experiences were with the middle management, so to speak, and the lay members.  On the whole, these people were some of the finest people I have ever known.

These well-intentioned, salt of the earth people, systematically recruited by this abusive cult, were taught that they and they alone were specially and uniquely called to be a part of God's End Time Work.  That a doomsday was coming, and we were going to be whisked away to a place of safety if we were faithful to our leader and his edicts.


They believed that our leader was an apostle and a prophet and that he alone had the key to understanding the bible.

If we did what the leader said, we were rewarded.  If we did not, we were cast out.  


In other words, if we questioned authority, God had no use for us at all.

So, additionally, I am against spiritual leaders who claim omniscience and make fallible people feel like dirt for making the mistake of thinking freely, all while claiming that their way is the only way.  


Their claim to speak for God is also a bit of a problem.


I can tell you about friends that I saw one week at a worship service, and then never saw again.  Why?  Because they had dared to question.  And it was like they never existed.  We never spoke of them again.

I never forgot those people.  Never.


It's amazing to a lot of people that after such an experience, I remain a Christian.  But my faith and practice looks quite a bit different than it did growing up.  Growing up, we rarely talked about Jesus, for example.  Learning about the person of Jesus and how he loved broken, forgotten people informs my faith.  


As a result, I err on the side of grace.  Always.

For me, Jesus is the model for dealing with spiritual abuse. He called the Pharisees on the carpet. He took a bullwhip to some moneychangers who were telling people that their sacrifices were substandard. He fought for children and prostitutes and people who couldn't walk and Gentiles. And he championed them, calling them 'faithful,' even when the religious authorities called them 'sinners.' 


He asked a ton of questions.

He told stories about running fathers and parties where everyone was invited and derelict Samaritans who were more faithful than preachers.

And the Pharisees plotted to kill him. Why? Because he questioned their power and authority.  Because he made them look bad.  Because they lost money.


And so they did kill him.  They hatched a plot and killed him.  To shut him up permanently.  Or so they thought.

I believe in the power of the resurrection. Because you can't kill truth. It might be buried for a short time...all hope may indeed seem lost...but then the stone gets rolled away.

In creating Paradise Recovered, I talked to over 100 survivors from 18 different abusive churches.  Since that time, I've had the opportunity to talk with a great many more.  And while the doctrines and practices of their congregations and groups differ, the elements of narcissism and control are nearly identical.

The fact that people have trusted me with their stories of pain at the hands of pastors...the fact that former pastors have shared with me their stories of pain at what they did to serve an abusive system...the fact that pastors have shared with me how they've been hurt by congregations...the fact that I have been loved by people who didn't understand my pain but who sought to love me in spite of me...all of this is truly humbling.

And these stories are terribly real.

No amount of marketing or slickness can make them less real.

The abuse needs to stop. Doctrine and dogma should never trump a person. A pastor might inspire you, but s/he has no greater standing than you do when it comes to understanding spiritual matters.

And if you need help, or if you have a friend that needs help, I'm here.  Along with the rest of my team at Paradise Recovered.  And we believe you. 


We believe every word.


E-mail me if you want at producer@paradiserecovered.com.  All of your e-mails will be kept in the strictest confidence.


Thank you for reading.