Tales From The Cult – Page 2

I Don’t Drink, But I’m Trying to Start

I did a lot of solo travel in my twenties. Bored on the home turf, I networked with other Jehovah’s Witnesses to expand my social horizons. I want to check out Chicago, I’d say. Anyone have a cousin in San Francisco? Boston? I was beginning to close my eyes and fling darts at a map. At one point, I became obsessed with the Pacific Northwest. Dallas was a concrete jungle, hot and unrelenting, and Seattle was the home to Seasonal Affective Disorder. Sign my ass up.

The family I stayed with on that first trip was fun and generous. The wife was in real estate, and the husband was a photographer. As Witnesses go, they were very well off and had property on the Puget Sound. I had hoped to visit every summer as a respite from the Texas heat, so when they eventually asked me to housesit while they went to Central America, I hopped on a plane faster than you could fling a fish across Pike Place Market.

As planned, I looked for the local Witnesses. During the first week of what was supposed to be four, let’s just say, I would’ve received a warmer welcome sharing rusty needles near a dumpster fire under the I-5. I got stank-face immediately from married 19-year-olds; they were on their starter marriage, and feared I was moving in on their husbands whose facial hair was still coming in. Then, I met a modern-day Judas, a depressive frenemy who offered to show me Seattle landmarks only to talk trash behind my back to other girls in the congregation. One was especially sweet. “Why are you even here?”, she snipped. I dipped into my purse and offered her a Prozac, but the gesture was lost.

As my trip dragged on and the already frosty reception took a biting turn, I apologized to my lovely friends down in Costa Rica and booked the first flight out. The evening before I left, I stood on their front lawn to watch the sun set over the water. It was bittersweet, knowing I was leaving behind a beloved slice of the world just to get some relative peace back home. Suddenly, I heard a voice from across the street. “Hey there”, she called out, maneuvering the sprinkler in her yard from one side to the other. “Are you the house sitter?” I gave a polite nod to the friendly neighbor. “If you want to come over for a glass of wine, we’d love to have you.”

Like any cult, it’s us versus them. But, what happens when you realize your people are not your people? Is it important, or lazy, to create these moral shortcuts? Is it possible that you might need to reassess your relationships? Your religion, or politics? Your desperate need to be right? I felt disappointed and isolated by my religious community, but if anything was going to drive me to drink, it was a nice stranger confirming my suspicions. The nameless neighbor across the street showed me more kindness with her invitation, the only invitation to someone’s home in the two weeks I was alone—and she wasn’t one of “us”.

A source later told me that two people cried when they heard of my early departure. Of course, they weren’t crying for me. They cried because their life sucked, and they knew it was easier to shit on me than perform any self-reflection. Call it insecurity, or a genuine chemical imbalance from a lack of sunlight, I don’t know, or care. Wine Lady may not have had the answers to life’s greatest questions, and I didn’t need her to.

Kingdom Hoe: When Men Get Off in More Ways Than One

You’re sixteen. You had sex. Someone snitched.

Now, you’re sitting, nervous, at a conference table in the back room of a church. Three older men in suits are facing opposite you. One is the head honcho. Two are hunched over a yellow legal pad. None of them have been laid since the Dust Bowl. They proceed to ask graphic questions about your body and first sexual experience. You’re humiliated, and they don’t care. You’re denied the presence of a parent, or even another woman.

Jehovah’s Witnesses have their own judicial system run exclusively by male judges, and every trial ends the same way: you a hoe. If you’re a former Witness reading this, it’s no secret that women are disproportionately punished in comparison to the men who fuck them, then fuck them over. Whether he fessed up, moved on, or in the rare case, cares about her, seeing the guy publicly shamed and excommunicated for premarital sex is like a Bigfoot sighting—as elusive as the orgasm we know she didn’t have.

And, they don’t just target high schoolers. Girls who haven’t even begun to menstruate are told to cover their shoulders lest they lead grown men into temptation. Back in the seventies and eighties, married couples were chastised in front of the same tribunal of geriatrics for “unclean acts”, anything where he showed some love to the wrong hole. It’s a misogynistic tale as old as time, a system designed to control women and protect a line of perpetrators that start at the top.

Jehovah’s Witnesses have a chronic, systemic child sexual abuse problem. Eleven men, known as the Governing Body, or ruling board of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, are complicit in the obstruction of justice. They are: Stephen Lett, Gerrit Lösch, Geoffrey Jackson, Samuel Herd, David Splane, Kenneth Cook, Jr., Gage Fleegle, Jody Jedele, Jacob Rumph, Mark Sanderson, and Jeffrey Winder. I imagine Jeffrey Epstein would’ve been a welcome addition. Like Epstein, I’m guessing more than one of these names are on the list of sex offenders that have yet to see the light of day, a database that has been amassed for decades.

In 2024, Taylor Swift wrote a song about another loser she dated, this time, a loser in “a Jehovah’s Witness suit.” I couldn’t care less who the guy is. I have zero interest in decoding the subject of her cryptic jabs. My only hope is the whispery hit ballad doesn’t encourage clueless, pubescent Swifties—in some counterintuitive twist— to crush on their own loser Jehovah’s Witness boy. It would have been nice to see the indisputable Queen of Pop use her influence to address a few of the scarier things about the Witnesses if she was already going out of her way to burn them. Maybe she could sing about the countless Jehovah’s Witness women who have been raped, then excommunicated for reporting it to law enforcement. Or, she could collaborate with Serena Williams—celebrity Jehovah’s Witness and ambassador for the Allstate Foundation’s domestic violence program, Purple Purse—to allocate funds to Jehovah’s Witness women who are being beaten, then coerced into staying with their abusers. Maybe on the next album.

Of course, there are men who are not immune to the trigger-happy whims of authority. One guy in my congregation—we’ll call him Scott—became a widower at thirty-five. After the death of his wife left him a single father with five boys to raise, Scott developed a heroin addiction. Instead of extending compassion and facilitate his rehabilitation, the elders disfellowshipped him. Young boys have been preyed upon and abused in the Jehovah’s Witnesses. And, sometimes, women who are unhinged or calculated manage to get away with bad behavior; the congregation politics were such that the stars aligned in her favor, and when this sort of thing happens, you can bank on it that it’s a case of the elder having reason to protect his ass, not hers.

Young women around the globe continue to be subjected to purity culture and double standards. They were born into a world of criminals, men who have made it their goal to keep her sexually repressed and silent. To the young woman in that back room who had to sit there and eat it, you’re not alone. As more Kingdom hoes unite and courts lose patience, the only thing he’ll be eating is subpoena.

Happy “Beth” Day: Eating Birthday Cake with a Clean Conscience

Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t celebrate birthdays because a long, long time ago, a drunk, horny King Herod dumped his wife, shacked up with his sister-in-law, requested his stepdaughter Salome do a creepy little shimmy for his birthday, then told her she could have anything she wanted. Apparently, the sadistic little shit and her mother ordered John the Baptist’s head on a party tray. So, considering the astronomical rate of beheadings that occur at birthday parties nowadays, Jehovah’s Witnesses naturally want to distance themselves from such revelry.

My parents secretly celebrated my birthday for years. On the morning of September twenty-first, my bedroom door would crack open, my mother’s grin peeking through the doorframe like Jack Nicholson’s stunt double: “Guess who’s one year older today?” For the record, I appreciate the effort. I knew birthdays were against the rules, and they were trying to find a way to celebrate their daughter in a way that still let them sleep at night. They came up with a clever solution: on my seventeenth birthday, my mother pulled an ice cream cake out of the freezer with the following words swirled across the top in cursive frosting: Happy Beth Day!

Yes, we acknowledged the absurdity of pretending we weren’t being rebellious—or, maybe we weren’t? It didn’t say “Happy Birthday” we reasoned, blue frosting smeared on our red hands. I find this even more humorous since my birthday fell on a Sunday that year; we had just returned from the meeting, Jehovah’s Witnesses’ version of church services. We spent two hours denouncing anything associated with mainstream society, then we went home and stuffed our faces with Baskin Robbins.

Coincidentally, my twenty-fourth birthday also fell on a meeting night. Afterwards, I made the mistake of mentioning it was my birthday to my brother’s then-girlfriend who was not a Jehovah’s Witness and was dumbfounded that I wasn’t out getting wasted. She promptly whisked me away to a dive bar where I was given a birthday girl shout-out and handed a flight of Buttery Nipples. It was awkward—but so is convincing yourself (and trying to convince others) that you’re not in a cult. If I was going to hang out with the heathens and consume three to six ounces of a smutty beverage, why bother with the whole religious act? Why walk the line? And why did my parents, two grown people, need to commit culinary subterfuge to celebrate the birth of their own child?

A lot of my Jehovah’s Witness peers never had the chance to celebrate their birthday growing up. Their parents gave them chili-bowl haircuts and beat the shit out of them. You had it good, they say. Your parents were awesome. Whether it was sneaking me a cake, a trip to the movies, or a wink-wink on my special day, my parents were awesome for pushing back—so far as I was willing to not turn them in.

It’s Beautiful, Dammit: Why Blue Skies and Sunshine Made Me Want to Die

I’m driving home from the coffee shop when I look out the window. The neighborhood is bathed in a soft, early morning glow. Everyone is still asleep. Bursting cherry blossoms bristle in the crisp spring wind, the sidewalks peppered with the pop of purple coneflower. Suddenly, the sky yawns, big and blue and beautiful. As I soak in the view, I feel slightly unsettled. Fingers coiled around the steering wheel, I examine each passing house: the one with a brick porch that’s a different color from the other bricks. The one where the shutters have a half-moon carved above the slats. Espresso wafts through my Volkswagen as I coast down the lazy, bohemian boulevard. I notice if the front door has a screen, a brass knocker pinned at the top, or is propped open and ready to greet whomever may come moseying along. It’s going to be a perfect day for preaching, only I escaped the cult seven years ago, and I don’t have to knock on another fucking door for the rest of my life.

Every Saturday, I’d wake up at 7:30 am, begrudgingly, throw on a skirt, take a nervous shit, gather my Bible and a stack of dog-eared magazines, and haul ass to the Kingdom Hall. Granola bar hanging out of my mouth, I would relish the last bite of breakfast and moment of silence before heading in. Next, I would say hello (begrudgingly), sit through an obligatory pep talk about saving humanity, then brace for the heat or blistering cold, depending on what we were subjected to that month. On the way to the “territory”, I would jerk my car into a Quik Stop, take another nervous shit and dry heave. Twenty minutes later, I parked my broke (but enlightened!) ass on WASP country, with irritated stares already peering through their fancy blinds. Jehovah’s Witnesses infamous door-to-door ministry is a nuisance at best, certainly for the disoriented homeowner jostled awake by a religious zealot, but also for the one doing the knocking. I used to pray, not for salvation or world peace, but for rain. Please rain, I thought, and spare us all.

I grew up in Dallas, Texas, where most of the year is oppressively hot. Like a vampire, I recoiled at the sun, pining instead for cool, overcast skies. I rejoiced in a thunderstorm. I had been known to frolic in a puddle, or two. But most notably, rain meant those crazy people wouldn’t be out proselytizing. Rain was the sole qualifier, the one get-out-of-jail-free card we had where Jehovah’s Witnesses in suburban America wouldn’t be pressured to preach to strangers that day—at least not on foot. We also did ‘phone witnessing’, the Jehovah’s Witness equivalent of telemarketing. Hello, you live in a gated community, which is why I’m giving you my unsolicited religious advice through this method instead. And, we did ‘letter writing’: hand-scribbled junk mail punctuated with scriptures and stickers, letting grown women with a Lisa Frank obsession express their creativity in ways they wouldn’t otherwise be allowed to. I, however, risked the guilt trip that came with opting out of these alternatives, and went back to bed. Preacher on the streets, sinner in the sheets, indeed.

But, if it was beautiful outside, say, 65 degrees and not a cloud in the sky, you were screwed, destined to spend a rare, sparkling two hours now tarnished by the drudgery. No one wanted to talk to us, and if we were honest with each other, none of us wanted to be there, either. We descended on neighborhoods, uninvited, to arrogantly shove our brand of religion down someone’s throat on their own doorstep. At least a fraction of us knew this was wrong, but we were following orders; the door-to-door ministry was mandatory, and anyone who didn’t report for duty would answer for it later. People cursed, slammed doors, or would simply notice us from a distance and quietly head inside. I hated blue skies and sunshine because it meant I would be seen in the daylight doing something that, in fact, put me in a dark place. My religious life isolated me from the rest of the world, and preaching on a stunning, panoramic morning only served as a reminder of how lonely I really was.

Occasionally, I’ll get a faint hit of PTSD on a bright day, though it quickly subsides, replaced by a rush of relief—I’m free. Spring and summer are very different now. Lounging in my plastic Adirondack chair in a tattered bikini, I welcome the warmth on my cheeks. (My face, pervert.) I’m enjoying my little patch of land uninterrupted, happy to let my neighbor do the same. No more doors to knock down, souls to save, and if I take a shit, it’s for the pure joy of it.