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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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Alecia Pennington, you are not alone

Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on February 15, 2015.

Homeschool alumni Alecia Faith Pennington’s Help Me Prove It campaign went viral on social media this last week.

She explained that she can’t vote, can’t get a job and can’t get a driver’s license, all because she can’t prove that she was born in the United States.

Because she was born at home and her parents allegedly never filed for a birth certificate, she said she cannot prove her US citizenship. Her parents also never filed for a Social Security number and never took her to a hospital, and she has no school records because she was homeschooled, according to her now-viral YouTube video.

“This leaves me with nothing to prove my identity or citizenship,” Alecia said in the video. “I am now 19 years old and I’m unable to get a driver’s license, get a job, go to college, get on a plane, get a bank account, or vote.”

Her YouTube video was viewed over 500,000 times and reached Reddit’s front page within a week, according to Homeschoolers Anonymous.

But as the survey conducted by Homeschool Alumni Reaching Out (HARO) a few days ago demonstrates, she is not alone.

And the majority of survey respondents whose parents denied them their identifying documentation were also members of the Homeschool Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), which is an interesting correlation.

My parents were members of HSLDA.

They kept a card with HSLDA’s hotline number taped beside our front door when we first started homeschooling in the early 90s. (I’m the oldest child in my family.)

My parents told me if anyone from Child Protective Services showed up at the door, we needed to call that number right away and not answer any questions until we talked to their legal representatives. They taught me that our ungodly government was looking for reasons to persecute good Christian families who just wanted to raise their children according to Biblical teachings.

They said spanking wasn’t abuse, even if it left marks, because it was all part of the plan to raise children to fear God and obey authority. If anyone asked if my parents spanked, we were to lie and say they didn’t.

When my parents gave me an ultimatum between moving out and transferring colleges to Bob Jones University summer 2012, I left with only my driver’s license.

Earlier that year, my mom gave me a folder marked “Eleanor.” She kept one for me and each of my siblings that she planned to give to us when we turned 18.

This folder had everything from baby footprints and my birth certificate to my social security card and passport to x-rays and health records for my growth hormone treatment as a teenager.

But the one of the most destructive wildfires in Colorado’s history, the Waldo Canyon Fire, started one sleepy Saturday in June 2012. By the next Tuesday, the winds rolled it down the mountain into the city, destroying around 300 homes, and my family and neighbors were planning to evacuate.

My dad took the folder with all my identifying documents for safekeeping in a safe deposit box. I reminded him I would need it later.

I moved out on August 1, 2012. Before and after moving out, I asked for that folder and my documentation over and over.

I applied for jobs off-campus for additional income, but could only provide my drivers’ license for the I-9 documentation for employment to prove my US citizenship and ability to work legally, which wasn’t enough since the document requires two forms of identification.

My mom finally gave me a few copies of my social security card and passport. But not before I’d already been denied one tutoring job after an interview because I couldn’t produce proper identification.

They kept telling me they were holding my documentation in safekeeping for when I changed my mind and decided to go to Bob Jones University instead of “rebelling” and moving out on my own,

About six months after I left home, they finally gave me my social security card.

I continued asking them for my passport.

Text messages from 11/17/2013:
Me: May I please pretty please have my passport?
Mom: Passport applications are available at the post office. […] I will continue to pray for you. Goodbye.

Later, my dad said I had to repay large amounts of money that he claimed I owed him before he would give me my passport. As a college student with part-time employment, I didn’t have extra money to replace my passport or my other identifying documents.

I didn’t get my passport back until October 2014.

So this week, the Help Me Prove It campaign reminded me that I still don’t have my birth certificate or health records.

I emailed my parents again two days ago.

My dad replied the same day:

Have not seen your BC (birth certificate) for quite some time. Your best bet there is to contact Jefferson County in Texas. They can likely give you a copy. Very busy these days. Best regards, TS

Mom answered the next day:

Dad and I had to request birth certificates when we first applied for passports. It was not something that [your grandparents] had. We wrote Harris County and Duchess County for our birth certificates. You won’t need one to renew your driver’s license. Just proof of address and take the eye test. Mom.

No answer about my health records.

At least I’m registered in the county system, so I can get another birth certificate if I need to get a driver’s license in another state, and I can request copies of my health records from my doctors.

Alecia Pennington can’t.

So yes, some of us (story 1) (story 2) who moved out years ago are still fighting to get our documentation.

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

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

Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on March 16, 2015 as part of a series.

Continued from Self-care during activism

Here are Cynthia’s concluding thoughts.

Rescuing people from cults is not an item to check off of a to-do list. It’s a process.

While we worked together on the UnBoxing Project, we learned this through our own exhausted time and money.

We didn’t just need to free people from church attendance and their abusive, controlling homes. In little funny moments and frustrating conflicts, we watched them free their own minds and personalities.

Moments like when Racquel wore jeans for the first time. We’d told her that she had a lovely figure that didn’t need to be concealed under long, wide skirts, and she didn’t believe us until then.

Moments like when Eleanor first moved out, I recommended dry beans for cost-effective meals, and she didn’t know how to cook them.

Moments like the Socratic dialogue with Ash in a reclusive university meeting room, establishing that safety was possible.

After my friends and I got out, we struggled with various levels of c-PTSD, depression, and anxiety from the emotional, physical, and spiritual abuse we’d endured. It would be difficult enough to hold a job while dealing with shock and recovery, but many of the people we helped didn’t have any experience in the workforce.

I believed in self-sacrifice, and I didn’t care if I wasn’t well enough to help other people. Nobody else was going to do it if we didn’t. I told Cynthia Barram this, and she gave me a graphic image: She said to picture a woman in a place where food was scarce. The baby still sucked at his mother’s breast, but she had no nutrition left to give. At this point, the child was just eating blood.

We needed stability and resources ourselves, but with our parents gone, we only had each other. Like the undernourished mother nursing, we gave more than we had to give.

Many of us had to drop classes because taking care of extra people was so stressful. Eleanor ended up paying more than her portion of rent for the house she got with some of the people we’d rescued.

We realized that we weren’t heroes, and we didn’t have the strength to be heroes.

The question was, at what point do you let people learn for themselves?

Our own limitations answered for us: we didn’t have the means to support other adults who had so little experience with the outside world.

We all decided that if we needed to rescue people, we wouldn’t be able to share finances with them, like co-signing on a lease. Getting out of a cult left these adults without survival skills, and we were young and broke, too. For the first year after my parents kicked us out, my sister and I rented from a family whose children were grown.

If only we knew some people who were older than us, who had the financial stability to own a house and rent out a room. If only we knew people who could teach a young adult, between the ages of 18 and 25 or so, how to keep a job and pay the rent.

Unfortunately, most of the people in the networks we had were similar to our own parents. That’s what isolation does — it limits the people you know.

We’re still looking for people who can serve as safe houses in our UnBoxing Project, perhaps who have more stable living conditions than those of us who needed to escape, too.

We need them. People who are willing to take a young adult into a guest bedroom, and help them prepare for life outside. Help them find and keep a job.

Those of us who were abused aren’t very demanding. We generally don’t take up much space, and we shrink at the thought of imposing on anyone. Just let us know we’re welcome, and let us know that it’s okay to talk about what’s going on. We need therapy to deal with what we’ve lived through.

Can we ask you to do that? Because we can’t do it ourselves.

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