AN UNUSUAL SEMESTER: MY ROOMMATE AND THE CULT (UPDATED)

In November of my sophomore year of college, my roommate started attending church with a friend.   A couple weeks later, she told me that she had been baptized and that she was a born-again Christian.  She would no longer drink or smoke or be alone with a member of the opposite sex.  I was a bit startled at the suddenness of her decision, but that turned out not to be the half of it.

All of a sudden, my roommate had this instant gang of church friends, all students from the five colleges in the area.  Her church friends would call or drop by constantly.  They were always dragging her off to church activities.  There were services twice a week, discipling meetings with her spiritual mentor, outings to evangelize to people, and lots of very wholesome social events.  Every spare moment that she wasn’t in class, my roommate was engaged in some church related activity -- sometimes even early in the morning before class.

Eventually I went along with my friend to one church service.  It was held in a Quality Inn conference room, or maybe it was a Comfort Inn.  Scads of young people came up to me and gushed over me.  They were all remarkably good looking and clean cut.  I was told how much they had heard about me, how great my roommate was, and how  lucky I was to have found their church.  I had never been the object of so much relentlessly upbeat friendliness from a group of strangers before.  It  struck me as decidedly bizarre. The service itself involved a lot of cheering and clapping and singing and smiling, but the content of the sermon was that the members were letting Christ down by not doing more to convert people.  This church believed that anyone who didn’t belong to this particular church were not real Christians and were going to hell-- and the pastor berated the Congregation very harshly for not doing more.  "If you can hit the streets at eight a.m.  to talk to people, you can hit the streets at seven," he said.  "Or is that extra hour of sleep worth more to you than the agony Christ suffered on the cross?"

I also went to a party once at the home of one of my roommate’s church friends.  We played Pictionary and Charades.  Yet again, the atmosphere was manic --- constant laughing and smiling and high spirits -- and a lot of gushing over me.  All this energetic sweetness culminated in someone saying to me, “See, Happy, you don’t have to drink in order to have fun!”  I am not sure if my roommate had described me as some kind of lush or whether they just assumed that all non-born agains had to drink to have fun.  I recalled that my roommate had been the object of similarly intense friendliness before she was converted; it seemed to be the first step of the conversion process.

Of course, my roommate never had time to actually do any of her course work at the college.  She had an hour of Bible reading and reflection first thing in the morning, and non-stop church activities in the afternoons, evenings, and weekends.  This left no time to study, or write papers, except late into the night.  Her schedule was utterly grueling. Meanwhile, I noticed that there seemed to be a lot of drama in this church.  My roommate was assigned to be the mentor (or “discipler” I believe the term was) for the friend who had introduced her to the church-- which caused some problems because the friend was thereby categorized as a less mature Christian even though she had been a member of the church much longer.  The friend confessed her feelings of jealousy to my roommate, and my roommate spent a lot of time “rebuking” her for those feelings.    (One thing I learned from overhearing many of these “discipling” conversations is that confessions of sin would definitely be used against you in this church.)  I think a lot of my roommate’s supposed spiritual maturity was actually a function of the fact that she was exceptionally attractive (she had modelled professionally) and able to present herself in a very poised and upbeat way.  The church higher-ups had told her that she was “sharp” and the sort of person who could definitely attract a lot of new members to the church. It also became clear from what I could gather that people’s personal sins that they had discussed in their private discipling sessions were widely known and discussed within the congregation.

The other weird thing was that the church controlled all dating.  The young people (which was, as I said, pretty much the entire congregation) were encouraged to go out every Saturday night on group dates, but with the consent of the pastor they could double up on double dates.  And eventually, a couple could “go steady.”  This was always, however, only with the church’s permission.  Thus, you couldn’t go on a date with the same person every Saturday until you had permission to “go steady.”  The pastor would announce at the next church service all the couples who had started “going steady” the previous week.  Of course, any kind of physical contact between couples who were going steady was verboten and they couldn’t be alone together without a chaperone.  On one occasion, my roommate called up to the room to make sure I would be there because she wanted to bring her boyfriend up to show him her photo album.   I had to promise to stay in the room with them.

I focused that semester on my classes, and my school work, and my running, but it did seem that the rest of my life was dominated by people in my room having constant intense prayer sessions, Bible studies,  discussions of “rebuking” people, and dramatic conferences about church politics. 

One day, the teaching assistant in charge of the dorm summoned me out of the blue to a meeting of the dorm governing committee.   I was generally oblivious to the activities of this committee, so I couldn’t imagine what they wanted with me.  It turned out that they wanted to know more about my roommate’s religious affiliation.  Apparently, a freshman my roommate had been talking with had had a nervous breakdown because my roommate told her she was going to hell.  The teaching assistant felt that my roommate had joined a cult.

My impulse was to shield my roommate. I viewed my roommate as a grown woman who could make her own choices, as was the freshman involved.  I declined to share much information with the teaching assistant or the governing committee because I didn’t believe it was any of their business what religious group my roommate joined.  I portrayed my roommate as a responsible person who seemed to be getting a lot of pleasure and personal support from her church.

Towards the end of the year, my roommate revealed that the church leadership wanted her to transfer to a different college in a different part of the country, an area where they wanted to start a new church and win new converts.  To my amazement, she was able to get a spot at this new college at the last minute despite the fact that her grades had plummeted the previous year due to all the church activities.  She and I kept in touch after her transfer, and the following year, the church made her transfer yet again to yet another college in another area.  The church discouraged its members from having a lot of contact with non-church family and friends, except for potential converts.  I believe I was her only non-church friend left, and unfortunately, they had her moving around so much, that I eventually lost touch with her and have never been able to track her down again.

In retrospect, I realize that my roommate’s church was not a genuine Christian church but rather a damaging cult that had gained complete control over her by keeping her constantly occupied, isolating her from those outside the church, and guilting her into doing what they wanted by throwing her private confessions back in her face and invoking the agonies of Jesus on the cross .  There is even a website with testimonials from scores of former members. I am not sure what the teaching assistant and dorm governing committee would have done to help my roommate, but I wish I had been more forthcoming with them about some of the negative practices I had observed within this church.  More profoundly, though, I regret somehow losing touch with my friend.  I can’t remember how it happened or whose fault it was -- those years in our early twenties were awfully busy.  But I have always imagined my roommate desperately needing a non-judgmental friend outside the church and possibly not having one.

UPDATE:  Richard raises the valid issue of how one distinguishes between a "cult" and a valid religion.  This was my exact concern when I declined to assist my dorm administrators when they wanted to intervene in my roommate's association with this church.  This definition from www.reveal.org, that website for former members of my roommate's church, has captured the meaning of the distinction quite well:

Cult: A group or movement exhibiting great or excessive devotion or dedication to some person, idea, or thing, and employing unethical manipulative or coercive techniques of persuasion and control (e.g., isolation from former friends and family, debilitation, use of special methods to heighten suggestibility or subservience, powerful group pressures, information management, suspension of individuality or critical judgment, promotion of total dependency upon the group and fear of leaving it), designed to advance the group's leaders, to the actual or possible detriment of members, their families, or the community.

This particular group encouraged my roommate to cut ties with her non-church friends and family and to live according to a schedule of "mandatory" church events that necessarily deprived her of sleep.  Her isolation and mental vulnerability from lack of sleep made it easier for the church higher-ups to impose their will on her.  One thing that I forgot to mention is that my roommate's discipler often made her life decisions for her -- not only whom she would date but decisions like what classes to take, or whether to come to my house for winter break. It is worth noting that my roommate did not WANT to transfer to another college, but felt she had to because the church wanted it.  I suspect also that my roommate was giving far more money to this group than she could afford.  The pressure to conform and the much-discussed fear of "falling away" from this particular group and thus going to hell was far more intense than any regular church-- and unlike regular Christianity, one was doomed to hell for leaving the church even for another Christian church.  While I suppose there is nothing illegal about any of this, I think it was quite fair to label this group a "cult" and to try to persuade people not to join it.   This link makes a far more detailed argument as to what made my roommate's group a cult.

Comments

[will]

What an interesting story!

Now I want to know what happened to her.

[The Happy Feminist]

Trust me -- so do I!

[Allison]

Wow. I kept very busy with church-related activities through high school, but nothing compared to what your roomie did. Even so, I still to this day resent much of it -- I was socially just...off...for a long time. God, it's nice to be (mostly) normal now.

I hope that someday you track your former roommate down, and I hope you learn that she's escaped.

[The Happy Feminist]

I think she probably has. This church seems to have a lousy retention rate, and in the last couple of years, a lot of people have become disillusioned due to major internal changes and tensions in the church -- much prompted by the defection of the founder's own daughter, described in the press as an "independent-minded" Harvard senior.

[j0lt]

Just curious - do you know if the church ever let her stay at one college long enough to graduate?? How did her parents/family react to her conversion - and its effects on her grades? Or did they become involved with it too?

Interesting story - have you tried googling her yet?

[The Happy Feminist]

I google her like crazy every few months but she has a very common name, and she very likely changed her name if she got married.

I don't know if she ever graduated.

She had no family except for her mother, who was an immigrant from a foreign country.

[The Happy Feminist]

Not that being an immigrant necessarily meant the mother couldn't handle the situation, but I think the mother's poor language skills may have made it harder.

[TangoMan]

Why not contact the alumni office of all the schools that you know she attended for those offices can be like bloodhounds when they want to hit up the alumni for donations.

[The Happy Feminist]

hmmm . . . I have contacted my alma mater, which didn't have any info., but I assumed the other schools wouldn't share contact info. with some random person off the street claiming to be a friend.

[TangoMan]

but I assumed the other schools wouldn't share contact info. with some random person off the street claiming to be a friend.

I'm sure that they would be able to take your information and forward it to your friend without divulging any personal information.