Lived Through This

I Was in a Cult, and Maybe You Were Too

Memoirs of a former Southern Baptist

Photos courtesy of the author.

I was born on the shores of northeastern North Carolina to a schoolteacher and a commercial fisherman. We were the idyllic corn-fed, blue-collar, middle-class family. Religion was background noise in our home. Neither of my parents practiced much, but it didn’t prevent them from belonging to the small-town, pious lot. A trip to church was a rare occurrence, and when we did go we were usually late. We didn’t own frill-trimmed dresses or Sunday shoes, and if there was a Bible hidden in a dresser drawer somewhere around the house, I never found it.

Then something shifted. Fractured, really. My brother and sister were born in late summer, 1999. Twins. And, in tandem, my maternal grandmother began losing her battle with breast cancer. The stress of welcoming both new life and death put a strain on my mother so great that she started relying on religion. And by proxy, my siblings and I did, too.

By the time my grandmother passed away in 2001, on Veteran’s Day, we had been attending Sunday school, 11 a.m. services, and Wednesday-night Bible studies for a year with nearly perfect attendance. I’d started developing an anxiety disorder, nervous tics, and an obsession with the book of Revelation. Even at that age, I saw…