It's In the Code Ep. 95: Fieldnotes for Surviving a Family Cult Part I
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In this episode, Dan interviews Michelle Down, author of Forager: Fieldnotes for Surviving a Family Cult, about her experiences and insights growing up in an extreme high-control religious community founded by her grandfather. Michelle helps us understand some of the dynamics of high-control religion, considers the role that coded language plays in such religion, and highlights the extreme focus on unity within such communities.
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Hello and welcome, as always, to It's in the Code, a series that's part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Dan Miller.
I'm professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
I am the host of this series.
Sorry, getting distracted by things popping up on my screen.
As always, I invite people to reach out.
This is a series that works because of the insights and thoughts and feedback that folks have to offer.
You can reach me various ways, but Daniel Miller Swag, DanielMillerSWAJ at Gmail.
Always welcome to discussion about topics, new ideas about topics.
Pleasant arguments, discussions people want to have about the topics with the proviso that I am always woefully behind in responding to emails, but I do eventually respond to them all.
And today is a break from what we normally do, something a little different that I like to do from time to time.
And it's my privilege to interview Michelle Dowd, who, among other things, is the author of a really interesting book.
I had the opportunity to read it and talk with her about it in a different context.
The book is called Forager.
Field notes for surviving a family cult, a memoir.
And so we're going to say more about that, Michelle, but if I could, I'll throw it over to you to just say a word and introduce yourself to our listeners.
Well, thanks for having me on, Dan.
It's really nice to talk to you again.
My name is Michelle Dowd, and as Dan said, I wrote a book about being in a family cult.
In my case, an actual, literal cult run by my family.
I am suspicious sometimes that many people come from families that are cultish, ish, or culty.
But in my particular case, my grandfather began a cult in 1931, and my mother was born into this cult, as was I and all my siblings.
And the experience I had at the cult was one in which I was prevented from having exposure to the outside world.
And it wasn't until I was a teenager that I began to seriously question that and find a way to get out.
Thank you.
Yeah.
And I really invite folks, again, it's Forge or Field Notes for Surviving a Family Cult.
Google it, go on Amazon, wherever it'll pop up.
And it's a really We could spend a lot of time talking about it, and it would be worth doing, but invite people to take a look at it.
People who listen to this series, people who listen to Straight White American Jesus know sometimes talk about the sort of nomenclature that's emerged recently of high-control religious contexts or high-control religions.
And certainly anything that we would conventionally define as a cult, and in your case, as you say, not sort of metaphorical or, you know, it's like a cult, I mean, sort of the literal definition of one would qualify as a high control religious environment.
But as we've talked about, and as I talk about oftentimes, high-control religion doesn't have to be a literal, we're on a mountain and we're not permitted to be with the outside world.
These elements of high-control religion are actually part of a lot of very mainstream religious expressions in America.
So I'm wondering, and I think this probably isn't hypothetical, I think this is a real question that you've had from folks.
It's a question that I get.
If somebody says, how do I spot a high-control religion?
What is that?
What does that look like?
Am I in one?
Is my family member or sibling or partner or son or daughter or whomever, right, is their religion a quote-unquote high-control religion?
What would you say?
How do we spot that?
What does that look like?
I think it's a wonderful question because it is not easy to spot whether you're on the inside or the outside.
And there's different methods through which you would spot, depending on if you're the inside or outside.
But if you are in something that you are suspicious, first of all, they will not call it a cold.
No one's going to answer that for you and say, Or they're not going to say it's a high control religion or that, you know, they are controlling you.
They will not tell you they're controlling you.
So you're not going to get a definitive answer, whether you're on the inside or the outside, in favor of it being a cult.
You will always be told it is not.
That being said, one of the key factors, I guess one of the key factors is, is questioning allowed?
Are you encouraged to have dialogue?
Because in most high control groups, those questions are really either forbidden or just deeply discouraged.
And are your questions answered?
And are you allowed to have a different opinion?
And if you do have a different opinion, will you be ostracized if you state it out loud?
And that's a pretty simple test.
Whether you go to the pastor, whether you go to, you know, whoever is in charge of your small group or whatever level, are you allowed to have open dialogue?
Are you allowed to keep a different opinion?
If you are not swayed, can you still be respected?
So I think in most high control groups, it's pretty obvious pretty quickly that that's not the kind of dialogue is now.
And it plays out in all different kinds of sort of social costs or social sanctions, right, ranging from sometimes formal ones to informal ones.
I will also say, if folks know that I also work as a practitioner with the Center for Trauma Resolution and Recovery, and if people study some of the work of Dr. Laura Anderson, who runs the center and writes about this, one of the points that she'll make, and I sort of make the point as well, but I want to throw a line out to her for people to check that out as well, is that it's also similar to a lot of high-control relationships.
Like, there are patterns of high-control relationships, whether we're talking about An organizational, institutional relationship, or we're talking about dating relationships.
And so one of the things I tell folks sometimes, I think we maybe are more familiar with that idea sometimes, right?
We know that it's concerning if somebody says their partner won't, I don't know, let them go out with their friends for drinks, or that they won't talk to them about the family finances, or whatever it is.
And you get those same parallels.
So thank you for that.
One of the features, maybe the feature of It's in the Code, is that we're often decoding religious language.
And the It's in the Code plays out a couple ways.
One are features that are in sort of the source code, as it were, that are just part of certain kinds of religious expressions.
Another one is the way that certain words or practices or phrases or what have you work as a kind of code, as a kind of shorthand for Various things, including social control and maintaining the behavior, the belief, what have you, of people who are part of those religious environments.
You highlight a lot of these in your book.
It's not necessarily articulated in exactly that way, but the idea is there.
And so I wondered if we could talk about some of these.
And one that I wanted to start with, it's about as mainstream in a lot of forms of American religion and sort of Christianity and quasi-Christian groups, anything else, is appeals to Scripture, the Bible, to being biblical, to quote-unquote the Word.
All of these are the kind of language that folks might be familiar with.
What are some of the ways in your experience within a high-control religious context that you were in that appeals to this sacred text?
It's so interesting that when we talk about the Word of God, you know, the Bible parent Word of God, Um, there's this idea that God is the one who wrote the Bible, that humans might have, you know, inscribed it, but that it was God's voice.
There is no historical reference point for that at all.
I mean, there's just no validity other than maybe even in the mythology of Moses maybe being handed, you know, the tablets.
I mean, they're always being spoken, but The rest of it is human interpretation and it's really interesting that we are told inside of high control groups that this is the Word of God and it's not to be questioned.
And yet, when you look at the words and you cross-reference them, you will see a lot of contradictions.
And if you were to say, ask about those contradictions, they would choose the ones that they are most familiar with or the ones that most serve their needs.
And then they will say, but this is what God says.
God says, and they will quote a verse, usually a very small portion of something.
And that will be the one that is held as law.
And they'll pretty much ignore the other passages that question that, even though they are also in this inerrant scripture that we are taught to see as the word of God.
So that is something that happened all the time in my group when I did read the Bible.
In my case, cover to cover, when I was eight years old, it is not the only time I read it, but that was the first time that I spent time really looking for the answers of The questions that I just, the inconsistencies that I perceived in the world around me.
And I think that many, many people raised as Christians, even in less controlling groups, have an experience like that where they read something that is not consistent with what they've been told and when they bring it up, someone in the group tells them that they are misinterpreting.
And so who gets to interpret this inerrant Word of God?
And in high control groups, there's either one person or there's a select few who get to determine what is and isn't truth with a capital T. Were you encouraged to read the Bible as well?
Was this something you were supposed to do?
Or was this, in your particular context, was it sort of a, I don't know, something you were doing on the down low and like not really telling people that you were doing that?
I was definitely doing it on the down low.
Okay.
We were not forbidden from reading the Bible.
We were supposed to read one verse a day, but they would give us the verse to read.
One verse, not like a chapter or verse.
And so I would question whether or not my own father, who is still alive and a member of this cult, whether he has ever read the Bible his whole entire life.
I would highly suspect he has not in any sort of... It's possible he's read most of the verses, but he's never read it in order or with the purpose of understanding it.
And I'll give an example, a real conversation I had with my father before Forager came out.
And I was concerned.
He had said to my sisters that he had heard that I had written a book.
I think he heard it from one of them.
I'm not sure.
But he was really, really upset that the word cult was in the title and he didn't want to ever speak to me about it.
And he wanted everyone in the family to agree to never speak of this.
He spoke to me once and said, I need you to make sure That this book does not come out.
You need to... I heard you wrote something, but it needs to not... You need to change your mind and pull it back.
And they said, well, dad, it's a little late for that.
I don't even really own the book.
And I don't think my dad really understands that.
But I did say, listen, if you want to talk to a little bit about it before it comes out, we can talk about the things that you might find difficult.
I understand you don't like that word.
And this happens to be true.
I didn't choose to put the word on the cover.
That was my publisher's choice.
Now, in retrospect, I think it was a great choice and it helped me become more comfortable with the word, but I didn't tell that to my father.
My dad said, when I tried to talk to him about what it was like as a child, he said, I didn't even know you when you were a child, which is also true because we were raised collectively.
But then he said, I've never read that book.
He said, the pastor, he said his name, he said, he will read it and he'll tell me what to think.
And my dad said that with no irony at all.
And that this man, we like tell him when the woman who wrote the book is in right there, you know, he could ask me what the book is about, but he wasn't gonna, he didn't want me to talk about it.
He wanted to hear it through the lens that he respects.
And I think that's a beautiful example, not because I respect that about my father, but because it so clearly demonstrates the life that he has lived and how so many people operate in those systems.
And they really get a sense of Comfort.
And, you know, I mean, my, my father's very comforted by, by not having to do that thinking himself.
So when I, as you asked me, when I was reading, it was because I was, I was concerned that I was not understanding something because it just, I wasn't getting the comfort.
And so I sought to find the answers for myself, which is really not encouraged.
It is.
It's a really telling example and it's something that Brad Onishi and I talk about with folks a lot when people on the outside of all of these are like, you know, It feels so constraining.
It feels so disempowering.
And all of that can be true, but for many who are within those systems, it's hugely comforting.
This notion that not only is there a book that has all the answers, but I don't even have to find the answers in the book.
I can trust somebody else who does.
And a certain abdication, I guess, is aware of that responsibility to have to find one's own answers can be really, I think, very seductive and very sort of comforting.
The story you tell moves right into something I'd like to think about next for a minute, which is that high control religion is, at the base of it is, notions of authority and obedience and submission to authority, right?
And sometimes these are very clearly articulated, very explicit.
Oftentimes they're things you're sort of socialized into, much, much less explicit forms.
But can you say something about that, of the concept of authority or obedience We sing a hymn that I think many people sing called Trust and Obey.
And you know, trust and obey.
There's no other way to be happy in Jesus, but to trust and obey.
I could sing it, but I'll spare you that.
We did sing that all the time.
And we were taught to trust and obey literally the leader.
My grandfather was the leader of this church for over 50 years.
And it was not just a church.
It was an entire way of living it.
There's also the reality in our particular group, which readers can find if they read Forger, In our particular group, you had to be a child to join the cult.
There was no such thing as an adult member.
There were adult members, I should say.
There was no adult members who came as adults, and most people were there since they were five or six years old.
Seven was getting a little bit old, you know, to join this particular cult.
My husband, the man I married, he He joined at age seven, so he was not born there.
He's older than I am, so he knew me from the time I was born.
And he really felt, and I asked him many times, you know, once we were older, I said, what drew you to this?
I think it's relevant that his parents signed him up so that they were young parents and they wanted him to have, he was their only son and they wanted him to have real male role models and to be in a, they felt clean environment.
They weren't religious, but they wanted their son to have moral values and they conflated Christianity with morality because it was the 1960s and I think this was you know common and so he joined as a little boy and then he got indoctrinated and then he told his parents he wasn't leaving and at that point they had
Become accustomed to their son being coming, being very busy in this organization and going on long camping trips and long summer trips and like just being gone a lot.
And I think that they were relieved quite honestly, not because they didn't love him, but because they thought he was doing healthy things and he wasn't, quote, smoking or drinking or doing drugs and he didn't have a girlfriend.
And, you know, so he was in his well into his 20s.
By the time he looked at me and, you know, kind of from a distance, but said, wow, what is like, why is she Quote, going crazy.
Like, you know, what is happening?
And I was, you know, younger teenager.
And he started paying attention to that.
And it wasn't until I got kicked out that he asked himself where, like, where's this hypocrisy coming from?
So he felt very comforted by the fact that he was doing the right thing in life.
And that his parents struggled the way normal people struggle, and he didn't have to struggle because he was going to be given a wife someday.
He was told what his profession was.
He was told, you know, whose friends were.
And I'll add, because I think sometimes people don't necessarily recognize how comforting not only obedience can be, but how being around people who believe the exact same things you do, that there is not conflict.
Like the other word that they used a lot where we came from is the word unity.
We were very big in unity and they talked in unity in Christ, but it wasn't like unity in the world of Christ.
It was like this small group of Christ.
But that unity was really effective.
You could, I mean, we were really good at team sports because we could absolutely count on each other.
We understood the ways that we all thought.
We slept in tents together.
We were, you know, we were very, very close.
And when you are accustomed to that sort of community living, it's really difficult on the outside to, there's nothing, you can't replicate it.
There's just really, maybe military is close.
Something that's very life and death in that way, but you feel like the life that you're living is life and death and that these are your brothers and sisters.
Forever.
They're all eternity.
They will be with you.
I love that you brought up this notion of unity.
I wonder if we can sit with that for a minute because this is another one that I think people who listen know that I'm interested in religious discourse and so forth, and also in political discourse.
And we talk about nationalist movements and populist movements, this notion of unity looms large there as well.
But one of the things that I think is interesting, and if you could reflect on this for a minute, I'd really appreciate your insights, is that Unity in this kind of movie, you talk about people who are born into this or brought in at a very young age, they're socialized into it.
It very much is their social world.
It is their phenomenologists, as you throw out a word, would call this their life world, right?
It is the sort of the structure of their experience.
So there's a sense in which I think that appeals to unity become sort of both cause and effect.
The experience of unity, of being unified, creates what is a very real sense of community, of belonging, of like-mindedness and so forth.
And yet that effect can also become a mechanism for maintaining that control, because when somebody begins to stray outside of that, or when unity appears as an end goal in a certain way, that becomes an enormous lever to use on people to try to bring them back in line because you are threatening unity, you're threatening cohesion, you're threatening well-being.
And I would suggest that that's something we need in the world, in our lives.
We need to feel unified and belonging with somebody, with some group, family members, whatever, but also the mechanism.
But when you take it to a street like this, it is very alienating, quite honestly.
So it's comforting until it's not.
When you have something inside of you that you question and you want to stay and you want to be part of this community that you so deeply believe in, you repress it or suppress it, depending.
But you push it so far down that you are not in touch with yourself anymore and you learn to override your instincts.
And many people report, at least where I come from, having done very cruel, at least emotionally cruel things to other members in the name of unity.
And you will also, most people are at the risk of committing physical harm to people if they believe that it's going to protect the greater good.
And so.
The unity that is a lever, as you said, it makes you feel that if you are on the outside of that, you will be punished, you know, in eternity in hell, but you also, in the short run, will experience the anguish of either physical or emotional abuse from the very people.
It's like a Stockholm Syndrome thing.
You're like attached to the people that you know would hurt you if you stopped being attached then, so you just attach deeper.
Yeah.
And there's something really insidious about that.
So even though it's comforting, I think that we have to look at the cost of that comfort.
And my sister, for example, has stayed there her whole life and she's still there.
She hasn't really paid the cost Um, outwardly, it's hard to know really what's going on in her heart, but she has never had the experience of being excommunicated from this group because anytime she's gotten close to the line.
My grandfather used to tell a story about a man who wanted to hire a driver for his cart.
And he, um, would try out each of these drivers and see how well they could go around the turns.
And, and he would try one.
He like.
Would, you know, skim the curve like really tight and really fast to show that he had these remarkable driving skills and, you know, etc.
And then the man chooses the driver who is safe, who stays as close to the midline as possible or as far away from the clip as possible because that safety then makes that owner feel that this person's going to stay in line.
And I think that there's also the reality that people If that doesn't come natural to them, it is indoctrinated as, like, rigidly as possible.
But if they can't, you know, if they just can't buy into the no risk mentality, you know, like being safe, then they'll just be excommunicated.
And the people who stay will just, they'll be reinforced, again, this is what will happen to you if you don't play it safe and do what we ask you to do.
I know we need to wind down this episode.
I'll tell folks now Michelle's going to be back.
We're going to do another episode here.
But one of the things that when I work with clients, you know, coming out of high control religious environments, one of the things they all struggle with is exactly that notion that you're highlighting of being able to trust themselves.
They have been socialized and grown up in this context where you're supposed to doubt yourself, you're supposed to rely only on the judgment of others.
There are Bible verses as well, you know, and notions about being sinful and fallen and our heart leading us astray and the flesh and all this kind of stuff.
But what you're describing sounds to me very much like something I hear from folks all the time, where one of the things they really wrestle with is I was taught to distrust all of my instincts.
I was taught to distrust my intuitions about others or, you know, to come to my own conclusions.
And so I think it's great that you're sort of highlighting that factor.
And as you say, that it's comforting until it isn't, until it takes that turn.
Mind me when I come back and we'll talk about trust because I have wonderful thoughts on that subject.
So just remind me.
Okay, great.
And that's our teaser for next episode.
So again, my guest in this episode is Michelle Dowd, author of Forager Field Notes for Surviving a Family Cult.
We are going to come back in the next episode and we'll talk further.
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