Category: unhealthy churches

Deprogramming: documentaries and movies about cults and fundamentalist Christian subculture

Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on April 16, 2015. 

Some people asked us what life was like after we left when I posted the UnBoxing Project series, how we handled leaving the sects of fundamentalist Christianity we were raised in.

My friends and I went through a period of deprogramming, which is still ongoing. We’d been told what to think our whole lives, what is good and what is evil, and then we found we’d been lied to.

Cults teach the people who want to leave the group that:

1) you’re the only one questioning

2) this is somehow your fault, because everyone else is compliant and does what they’re told.

This is how they maintain control, through isolation.

My best friend in college, Cynthia Barram, found some documentaries about cults and Christian fundamentalism that demonstrated nationwide trends and helped our little group of ex-fundamentalist homeschoolers realize that we weren’t alone in deconstructing from toxic religion.

Sons of Perdition (2010)

This documentary is about the teenage boys who get kicked out and the girls and women who leave Warren Jeff’s FLDS cult on the southern Utah / Arizona border.

Although our experiences in the Independent Fundamental Baptist or United Pentecostal Churches were different than the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints since our churches didn’t practice polygamy and didn’t have a prophet, we shared many similarities with their deconstruction process. Like the ex-FLDS young adults, we grieved the loss of family members who shunned us, struggled to find a sense of purpose when we no longer felt like we had been “chosen” to fulfill a divine mission like the cult taught us, and worked through unhealthy ways of coping with these losses and found a better way to live.

The “Sons of Perdition” struggled to support themselves and enroll in school. The daughters cut their hair for the first time and put on pants. We could identify with their stories because of our own experiences in fundamentalist cults.

Daddy, I Do (2010) and Cutting Edge: The Virgin Daughters (2008 TV Show)

These documentaries are about purity culture and the father-daughter virginity ball hosted at the Broadmoor in Colorado Springs every year.

Daddy, I Do features a variety of perspectives: fraternity boys, churchgoing parents raising kids, abstinence-only program leaders, and progressive Christians like blogger Matthew Paul Turner. It addresses the problematic nature of a daughter promising her virginity to her father until marriage.

The Virgin Daughters focuses specifically on Colorado Springs and the father-daughter ball, interviewing the various families who attend and showing the pledge the fathers sign to protect their daughters’ chastity.

Both of these documentaries feature fundamentalist Christian parents who admit they actually were not virgins at marriage, but they want their children to be.

Jesus Camp (2006)

This documentary is mostly about an evangelical Pentecostal-style church camp gone wrong.

The charismatic camp director says in the opening scenes that America’s only hope for spiritual revival is through the hearts of malleable children. So she and the other leaders proceed to brainwash them and manipulate their emotions, telling the children that they are engaged in warfare for the good of the nation.

The film also shows the group of campers visiting New Life Church in Colorado Springs and meeting the pastor at the time, Ted Haggard.

Ted Haggard, who founded New Life Church in the mid 80s, was known for “waging spiritual war” in Colorado Springs and encouraging his church members to “anoint” streets and intersections with cooking oil, according to a Harpers’ Magazine article called “Soldiers of Christ” by Jeff Sharlet published in May 2005.

The neighbor family who lived across the street from my parents in Colorado Springs had attended New Life Church for years when we moved there. The husband and wife both worked at Focus on the Family while we were neighbors, and the wife often took a spray bottle of cooking oil on her walks around the neighborhood that she would use to “anoint” neighbor’s driveways if she felt that she sensed a demonic presence, in accordance with Haggard’s teachings.

Haggard resigned as senior pastor of New Life Church in the fall of 2006 after allegations surfaced that he used methamphetamine and had sex with a male escort in Denver. He and his wife left the city for several years, but he moved back to start another church in Colorado Springs in 2010, where he has been accused again of illegal drug use and inappropriate behavior with young men, according to a July 2022 article by the Colorado Springs Gazette.

Jesus Camp was a harrowing portrayal of spiritual abuse, but I needed this film to process what happened to me and my high school youth group in one of my fundamentalist churches, to realize how we had been radicalized for the culture wars.

God Loves Uganda (2013) 

This documentary is about non-denominational evangelical churches like the International House of Prayer (IHOP) group (which has also been called a cult) that has emerged over the last 20 years increasing missionary efforts, reacting against established denominations leaning away from traditional theology and missions.

They look at what happens on the other side, at the financial impact of this church planting and aid on the countries receiving these missionaries.

The documentary makers point out that people end up depending on the monetary support from the missionaries and churches in Western countries, and the evangelical churches sending missionaries use their influence to pass laws, like the one in Uganda that advocated the death penalty for LGBTQ people.

Basically, this film demonstrates missionary work gone bad.

Waiting for Armageddon (2009)

I’ve given up on rapture theology. The whole philosophy is based on a handful of verses and wasn’t widely accepted until television preachers in the 1960s started it during the Cold War era. If Jesus actually comes back like that, great, but if not, I’m okay with that, too.

In the film, a group of somewhat clueless Texans tromp around the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, and their pastor threatens to cause an international incident by yelling that this is where Jesus will come back until security asks them to stop, reminding them that at least three different religions consider the Temple Mount to be sacred and each religion believes very different things about it.

Then they play the Star Spangled Banner while riding in a boat over the Sea of Galilee. Gotta love that American Christian exceptionalism. Lovely.

Jewish leaders who better understand the intricacies of the religious history of the area are also interviewed in the film, and it also covers the annual Tribulation Conference in Dallas, Texas.

On the lighter side, we also watched comedy movies and TV shows critiquing how we grew up.

Saved! (2004)

In this movie, a high school girl decides to “save” her boyfriend from being gay by giving him her virginity. Then she gets pregnant.

And did I mention she’s in a Christian high school?

Cue goth punk chick and dude in a wheelchair (the other “outcasts”) coming to her rescue.

We laughed so much watching this film, because many of the ridiculous plot lines would actually happen in evangelical and fundamentalist subculture.

The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (2015)

In this Netflix-only series, Kimmy escapes an apocalyptic cult’s bunker after 15 years of captivity and reinvents herself and her identity in New York City.

The episode titles are hilarious from the obvious “Kimmy Goes Outside!” or “Kimmy Gets a Job!” and “Kimmy Goes on a Date!” to the more mundane, like “Kimmy Makes Waffles!”

The show received a positive review from an actual survivor of an apocalyptic cult.

I watched the first season during spring break of my last year of college and loved it, but I couldn’t watch too many episodes in one sitting because some of the comedy was too real.

When I first moved out, I was so very, very much like Kimmy, right down to her bottomless optimism. Laughing at her is like laughing at myself, which is both healing and painful.

Leaving is hard.

But for those of us who seek freedom, it’s worth it.

And we’re not alone, in this mess of deprogramming and making sense of what our lives were like and what our futures will be.

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Should I Stay or Should I Go?

Should I stay or should I go? When we debate leaving anything, we wrestle with this. Leaving means loss. So does staying. And there are likely a few things to gain either way as well, at least from the perspective we have at the time.

I have recently faced this question in another situation, and I was a bit surprised at the similarities there were to leaving the church I left 14 years ago. There are a few people who want me to stay. And I want to stay if only to please them, because I like them and I realize if I leave we’ll grow more distant probably. I’ve been encouraged to stay to help others who stay. A few seem to think I’m showing I wasn’t dedicated or committed if I leave. Just like in the unhealthy church, most will never notice that I’m gone, and just like in the unhealthy church, a few will likely even say “good riddance!”

And if I leave I’ll miss people. I’ll miss what the organization/group could have been, what it seemed to be. BUT.. I’m not happy. The few who want me to stay could leave and most did think about leaving at one time. Instead, they chose to stay. Their choice doesn’t have to be my own. Also, as I consider the situation fully, I realize we weren’t that close. A good friend would encourage me to do what is best for me, not attempt to persuade me to stay in a situation they, too, considered leaving.

Leaving doesn’t mean I’m not dedicated or committed. It may mean I’m wise, or it may mean I’m committed in a different way. It could even mean that I’m committed to myself – and there is NOTHING wrong with that. As for the rest… what others think is not my concern. They should do what’s best for them, but I must also do what is best for me and what I believe is right. Though I’m not sure what’s right, I know staying isn’t right for me.

The situation I’m in isn’t healthy for me. I’ve lost sleep. I’ve shed tears. And I’ve done what I can to repair the situation and bring care and community. Nothing has changed. Staying will do two things: it will continue to make me unhappy and stressed and it will potentially make others think they should stay or are alone in leaving, too. I’ve decided to make one final attempt and give myself two weeks to see the outcome of this attempt before making a decisive move to finalize my leave. In the meantime, I will act as though I’ve left already as much as possible.

This is an opportunity to adjust more than reconsider.

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Movie Review: Mars Hill Church’s ‘Good Friday’ film

Source: Mars Hill Church

Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on October 3, 2013.

Note: I wrote this post before The Seattle Times reported on Mars Hill Church’s senior pastor Mark Driscoll’s spiritual abuse in 2014, and long before the 2021 release of The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill podcast by Christianity Today. After I read the victim’s stories describing Driscoll’s demeaning statements about women, it’s not surprising that his version of Jesus is domineering, hypermasculine and heartless.

For centuries, churches have used various mediums in attempts to recreate Biblical stories, to make them come to life.

But the crucifixion is the story most frequently reenacted, usually with vivid, graphic detail.

From medieval Passion plays to modern productions like New Life Church’s The Thorn to Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, we in the audience revisit the torture of Jesus over and over.

I have seen many forms of the story — theater, film, and dramatized radio theater. Although the same story is retold each time, the techniques employed by the scriptwriters, actors, and directors can potentially lend a new perspective, but with so many adaptations, it’s hard to tell the story in a new way.

Mars Hill Church, a megachurch based out of Seattle, made their own “Good Friday” film in 2010, and released it online in spring 2011. Since I was curious to see what the filmmakers did with the story, I watched the 30 minute short film last week.

The opening scene is chilling. A small child swings in the dust on a rope, then pauses to look at three empty crosses, which seems to embody lost innocence.

Mars Hill Church’s senior pastor Mark Driscoll gives a solemn introduction. He encourages viewers to continue “somberly, as if you were watching a funeral.”

Mars Hill produced “Good Friday” through partnerships with Universal Studios and a makeup artist from The Passion and No Country for Old Men, which was evident in some of the film techniques, such as close ups of Christ’s hand gripping dirt in Gethsemane and then releasing it and flash forwards to the impending scourging.

The gory detail is unflinching, especially the scene in which Jesus’ bloodied body falls into the mud after the beatings.

Yet despite attempts to draw the audience in with these graphic depictions, the acting falls short, rendering most of the special effects meaningless, particularly with the casting of the main character.

The actor portraying Jesus fluctuates between stoicism and bitterness, which feels like he is lacking love. He foretells his death and betrayal at the Last Supper without almost any emotion. He seems angry and disappointed with Judas and Peter, defensive with the high priests Annas and Caiaphas, enduring the torment with strength, but without love, which is the essence of the real Jesus.

The gruesome beating in a torch-lit underground dungeon reminds the audience of a sinister horror film, in stark contrast to the scourging scene in The Passion where Jesus whispers to his Father that his “heart is ready” even as the torture begins.

Also, the actor playing Jesus looks like just any guy off the street randomly wearing a tunic. Even though I have my own conception of what Jesus looked like, I can accept an actor of any description playing Christ if he is rooted in the role. But this Jesus doesn’t have the passion to adopt the part.

Perhaps this lack of love is partly due to the focus of the film.

In both the film’s introduction and the church’s blog post about the film, Driscoll said he wants viewers to realize that “the cross is something done by us: we murdered God. Then on Easter Sunday, we remember that the cross is something done for us: God died in our place to forgive our sins.”

While that idea is a central part of penal substitutionary atonement, which is also the dominant theological view of salvation in American Christian evangelicalism, I think we need to not divide what we did to God and what God did for us into separate events—the two are concurrent and inseparable.

The Mars Hill film also attempts to distinguish itself from its predecessors by focusing more on theology than history.

“Whereas The Passion may have tried to tell the story with chronological and historical accuracy, we’re trying to make the theological weight of the event—the substitutionary death of the Son of God in our place for our sins—as vivid as possible,” Mars Hill Church media relations director Nick Borgardus said in an 2010 interview with the Christian Post.

But theology is not a cold, hard exercise. Theology may be based on logic and philosophy, but because of its focus on spirituality, it should also be inherently emotional.

When love is removed from sacrifice, the sacrifice becomes a nauseating, guilt-ridden experience. As the apostle Paul wrote, “Without love, I am nothing.”

When the central theme is removed from a central event of a religious worldview, only dead men’s bones are left.

The Biblical Jesus knew pain in its deepest forms, but he never lost love. The Mars Hill Church Jesus seems to have lost the meaning behind his sacrifice.

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The UnBoxing Project: Surviving and thriving on the outside

Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on April 7, 2015 as part of a series. 

Continued from How You Can Help (Eleanor’s thoughts)

Although I had very little when I was kicked out of the cult and moved out of my family’s house, I came from an upper middle class, well-educated family. I grew up privileged.

I moved out as a college student with a couple of on-campus jobs after my parents emptied my savings account. Many of the people that we helped were in similar circumstances.

A week after I was kicked out, someone at the LGBT resource center at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, known as the MOSAIC office, told me about resources for people with low income. 

My upbringing in a fundamentalist Christian cult had taught me that accepting assistance from the government or non-profits like food pantries was morally wrong. If you didn’t earn your own food through your own hard work, you shouldn’t get to eat, they said. 

Slowly, I learned to accept help when it’s offered and allow the help to stabilize me. 

Resources like these helped me and my friends to stay independent from our parents and the cults we left while living on a tight budget.

  • Food pantries and food stamps
    When my paycheck barely covered rent and gas or three other girls were living out of our tiny apartment, we couldn’t afford food. Mercy’s Gate and other Care and Share pantries felt like small miracles. There’s even Colorado Pet Pantry for cats and dogs. And El Paso county provides SNAP benefits (food stamps).
  • Cellphone plans like Straight Talk, Wal-Mart Family Mobile, and Tracfone
    Our monthly bills were between $30-40, or we used pay-as-you-go plans, which helped us avoid higher costs from major cellphone network companies. 
  • Dollar stores
    During the first year after I left, my roommate’s boyfriend issued me a challenge: go to a dollar store and notice everything they sold. It was so helpful that now I take other ex-fundies to show them what  you can get with a few dollars in a pinch. Although some products are cheap or not good quality, it’s a good survival skill to see what supplies you can get at a discounted price. 
  • Thrift stores
    In Colorado Springs, we have the Arc and Goodwill, and local thrift stores whose profits benefit human trafficking survivors or disadvantaged teens that sometimes resell the leftovers from bigger thrift stores at even cheaper prices. 
  • Temporary agencies
    Our little band of cult survivors all needed jobs and often didn’t have much work experience to put on a job application. I didn’t know what temporary agencies did until one hard winter when I was down to only one of the three jobs I’d had the previous summer. Then I got a call from a temporary staffing agency that found my resume on Monster and wanted to hire me for a receptionist position at a pharmaceutical company, something related to my chemistry degree. They also gave me odd jobs like hotel housekeeping on the weekends for extra money. It wasn’t glamorous and sometimes the jobs I got were difficult, but it helped me survive short-term until I found something better.
  • Housing / utilities assistance
    Most cities have section 8 housing, although people often are on wait lists for several years and it’s difficult to qualify for. Colorado also has a Low-income Energy Assistance Program (LEAP), which provides heating assistance in the winter.
  • Internet
    Several major companies like Comcast and CenturyLink also offer low-income internet service. In Texas, Spectrum offers affordability connectivity programs. 
  • Mental health
    We wrestled with anxiety, self-harm, PTSD, and survivor’s guilt. But we found counselors both on campus at University of Colorado at Colorado Springs and within the Colorado Springs community who wanted to help us heal and worked on a sliding fee scale. 

We also found several non-profit and government organizations in Colorado Springs with resources for survivors.

On the outside, we formed our own little family, a chosen family rather than by blood.

Dale Fincher, who talks about recovery from spiritual abuse at Soulation, writes in The Exodus From Family:

“When our biological family puts a brake on friendship, we must look for friendship elsewhere. This year, I am no longer defaulting to blood and legal relatives as my ‘ohana.’ They will not lock me into a family orphanage until I conform to their demands. No. My family has become my Chosen Family, for we cannot live as orphans (John 14:18).”

A theme that resurfaces in the dialogue about spiritual abuse is that of Christian fundamentalism’s idolization of family values over the well-being of the individuals within the family. The family unit’s survival at all cost becomes idolized, enabling denial of abuse.

We learned we could all find freedom together.

No, we couldn’t save each other or support each other—we all had to ultimately find our own way because all of us are broken and hurting.

But we knew we weren’t alone.

Sometimes a hug, a shoulder to cry on, enabled us to just keep walking, to not give up.

Even if we were outcast, we believed our experiences were valid, we grasped for something better.

And we wanted to share this new life, this freedom with others.

R. L. Stollar, one of the founders of Homeschoolers Anonymous, wrote:

“I learned that Jesus of Nazareth was not content with 99 sheep when 99 sheep means that one gets left behind to suffer in silence and solitude. [….] But Jesus dealt with human beings, not statistics. Human beings are what I want to deal with, too. […] Us “bitter apostates” will be out in the wilderness, searching for the one you abandoned.”

And that is what we did, too.

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The UnBoxing Project: How you can help (Eleanor’s thoughts)

Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on April 5, 2015 as part of a series. 

Continued from How You Can Help (Cynthia’s Thoughts)

When we started helping people move out, we learned that getting out and finding freedom is messy, and everyone’s situation is different.

When someone contacted us for help, we said that they went “active.” It’s like being on call for an emergency move 24/7.

They’ll tell us the situation is deteriorating, but we don’t know it’s going to happen until they call us, because we leave the choice up to them.

In summer 2013, when Homeschoolers Anonymous posted Eve Ettinger’s Call For Help: A Quiverfull / Patriarchy Rescue, I wrote in an email to our network: “I think she is the first of many.”

The backlash is one of the most difficult things we all faced in leaving our cult-like churches and controlling families.

One morning in my apartment, right after Racquel and Ashley left their church, the First United Pentecostal Church of Colorado Springs, Racquel’s phone rang. She stepped into the next room for a private discussion.

She came back out looking troubled.

Ashley asked what was wrong, and Racquel said Sister H. from Louisiana just called.

Racquel started crying.

“Sister H. told me that the pastor may be wrong, our parents may be wrong, but not to give up on the Pentecostal church. But I just can’t do it. I can’t.”

“Did anything like this happen to you when you left, Eleanor?” she asked.

Yes. Yes, it did.

One of the pastors and his wife at our old church in the Dallas Metroplex, Rockwall Bible Church, called me and tried to convince me to attend Bob Jones University.

They agreed with my pastor at Grace Bible Church in Colorado Springs and they said the only way to honor my parents was to do this one thing, to obey them.

My friend Anna G. called me a few weeks after I moved out. She said she’d gone back to the church. The assistant pastor and his wife asked her to step into their office after an evening church service and asked her about two of my Facebook posts that she’d liked and commented on.

One of my Facebook posts that she had liked was lyrics from a song called “Keep Your Eyes Open” by the contemporary Christian band NeedtoBreathe (and the assistant pastor and his wife believed all syncopated music was of Satan).

The other Facebook post was a link to a Tumblr blog called Hey Christian Girl, a collection of memes with cheesy, silly pick-up lines with Biblical allusions. They said didn’t see the humor, and they thought it was sacrilegious.

Anna also said the pastor and his wife asked her if she agreed with me moving out, if she’d aided me in leaving the cult. They told her that they didn’t want her to influence their children to move out without their approval.

I caught my breath. I could see it now.

They can’t stand to lose one of their own, because that’s losing a soldier to the culture wars. You take one step back from fundamentalist Christianity and now you’re one of the outsiders, one of the “lost” that they evangelize. And they need your soul.

So when I hugged Racquel while she sobbed, I could say, “Yes, this happened to me, too.”

This is why leaving these churches and these homes is leaving a cult. And this is what it’s like to walk beside abuse survivors in seeking freedom.

I’ve waited through months of watching and making preparations before helping someone leave. I keep an emergency cellphone with an unlisted number in case a controlling parent blocks someone from calling my regular cellphone. I’ve carried pepper spray, a stun gun and a small knife, all legal to carry on my college campus, so I can protect myself and those who ask for our help if a situation turns confrontational and violent.

Our network of friends discusses alternate scenarios, backup plans with people who are wanting to leave. We plan for the worst while hoping that one day this won’t be necessary.

Here’s we learned about helping people move out:

Take the essentials, but stay safe.

TESSA, a non-profit in Colorado Springs that offers advice and support to spousal domestic abuse survivors, has a checklist of what to take with you when you leave that we found helpful.

  • Identifying documents
  • Clothes to last a week
  • Cash and bank information
  • Keys to car and work
  • Medications
  • Important paperwork and records
  • Personal items like photographs and jewelry

When Ashley moved out, five of us showed up because we knew her father was armed, he’d destroyed the inside of the car and the apartment, and we didn’t know when he’d return. 

Later, I learned anyone who feels threatened can request police protection while moving their possessions.

Sometimes we left something behind we valued.

I couldn’t take my heirloom violin from the 1890s or one of our family dogs I’d bonded with. Ashley left her dog Sasha and her bed because we couldn’t fit it in the van, and Racquel sold her horse when later she couldn’t pay board and her own living expenses.

We lost diaries, mementos, and valuables.

We decided our freedom was worth losing those things or that lifestyle.

We realized the important thing was keeping ourselves safe and learning how to heal.

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