- Joined
- Jul 12, 2015
Yes. Everyone has been brainwashed at some point in their lives. You’ve been conditioned to wear clothes, wait at stop signs, not shit on the street, etc. Human civilization is effectively a big cult. But thats not the point, at all.
Most people who join cults are not uneducated morons; even extremely wealthy and educated people can fall into a cult. The danger of a cult is in how it offers a sense of belonging, of moral rightness, of a better way, all for simple things in exchange. Most cults don’t last beyond a generation or two because they are hollow levers of control for the leader to use to exploit whoever joins and as soon as the big magnetic force of a charismatic leader is gone, people leave. But fundie cults are a bit different in that while they often rely on charisma to get started, they specifically target already religious people who want to distinguish themselves from the mainstream branch as more faithful and more into god, and are less likely to ask questions. Protestants don’t have the structured outlet valve Catholics and the Orthodox developed for the extremely faithful who want to have a deeper connection with the divine - the priesthood, the covenant and the monastic orders. Those organizations also attract abusers, but the very strict and structured lives appeals to plenty. This isn’t to say that these institutions aren’t also cult like, the major difference is in how in the modern era they’ve tried to pull back from temporal influence and crack down on bad behavior. Joining is also always a conscious choice now. For fundie cults this isn’t always the case.
Fundamentalist cults like the Quiverfull movement see their job as nothing short of changing all of society to be what they think of as righteous. Since not many people look at a fundie religious cult nowadays and think “I gotta join that”, their primary source of new members has to come from somewhere else - inside the cult. This is where the extreme focus on the authority of the man and the submission of the wife is coming from. Their only goal as women in the cult is to have more members for the cult. That’s it, the entire cult is focused around that and to do it in a way that justifies itself internally to the members and minimizes the chance that a member will run screaming to the authorities about abuse. Remember, these sorts of cults want to gain temporal authority and use it to spread their spiritual authority, to force society to become what they want it to be. Scandals make people wary, but since the structure of the cult isn’t a top down organized thing, this means that there isn’t any outlet valves or one hand watching another, it’s circles of fucked up people fucking up their kids and also fucking their kids.
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