Escaping Utopia

Growing Up in a Cult, Getting Out, and Starting Over

Janja Lalich, Karla McLaren

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781315295077
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

We think of cults as bizarre, inexplicable, or otherworldly places that only strange people inhabit, but cults and other abusive and high-demand groups (and relationships) are actually quite commonplace. In fact, the behaviors, social pressures, and authoritarian structures that create cults exist to a greater or lesser extent in every human relationship and every human group.

In the first in-depth research of its kind, the author interviewed sixty-five people who were born in or grew up in thirty-nine different cultic groups spanning more than a dozen countries. What's especially interesting about these individuals is that they each left the cult on their own, without outside help or internal support. In Escaping Utopia: Growing Up in a Cult, Getting Out, and Starting Over, the authors craft Lalich's original and groundbreaking research into an accessible and engaging book, the first of its kind focusing on this particular population.

1
WE WEREN’T THERE BY CHOICE

Meeting Our Narrators

Childhood is usually romanticized as a time of wonder, laughter, and magic—as a time when we’re surrounded by nurturing support that helps us form our identities, discover our unique skills, and grow up happily … if we’re lucky. Sadly, the individuals you’ll meet in this chapter weren’t lucky.

Instead, our six narrators were born into cults, or brought into cults in early childhood by their parents. When their parents (or their great-grandparents, in some cases) joined these groups, they did so because each group’s ideals and promises captivated them, made sense, or felt profoundly meaningful. But our narrators didn’t have any say in these decisions; they weren’t there by choice. Sadly, because they were children, they often experienced some of the harshest effects of the practices linked to their groups’ utopian ideals and world-changing beliefs.

In many cases, the cult survivors you’ll read about in this chapter didn’t grow up in their family unit and weren’t raised by their own parents. Many of the groups you’ll learn about placed children in collective homes so that their parents could work for the cult. The childcare duties often fell to people who didn’t have any training or the support they needed to nurture the children properly, because the business of these cults wasn’t about raising children. The business of these and most other cults is to grow, bring in money, and build their influence.

In some of these cults, children were far down on the list of importance, and many experienced neglect in the face of the cult’s main focus of gathering more followers, gathering money, and building power. Some of these groups developed specific rules that separated children from their parents so that bonding could not occur; instead, all members were expected to bond with the cult, its leader(s), or its ideology.

Other cults controlled women’s fertility and actively promoted pregnancy and childbearing to increase their numbers. The children born into these groups were often treated as blank slates who could be trained (usually communally) to be ideal and untarnished examples of the perfection of the cult’s beliefs. For many of these cult babies, early life was filled with discipline, hard work, endless indoctrination, and a constant demand for perfection. For many of the individuals you’ll meet in this book, childhood was not a time of wonder, laughter, or magic; it was more like doing time in a boot camp.

Janja interviewed sixty-five people who were raised in cults and escaped, in all cases on their own without any inside or outside help. In this chapter, you’ll meet six individuals, each of whose names have been changed to protect his or her privacy. We are, however, identifying their cults, all of which are still active as of 2017.

The many cults we studied seem very different on the outside. Some were strictly religious; others were focused on martial arts, while still others were focused on meditation or metaphysical philosophies. Nevertheless, the four dimensions of bounded choice that characterize all high-demand groups and relationships were and still are active in all of these groups. All of these groups rely on a transcendent belief system, charismatic authority, systems of control, and systems of influence to transmit their ideology, control their members, and put their worldview into practice—even though each group has its own unique organizational structure, philosophy, and utopian vision.

Some of these groups focus on religious ideals that reach back to the funda-mental early teachings of their respective religions; some focus on preparing their members for the end of the world or the end of human existence as we know it; some focus on metaphysical ideas about energy and health; and some focus on creating a more perfect world (or perfect health) through complete devotion to the group’s rules and dogma. But as you’ll see, no matter which ideals these groups promote, the most important ideals are related to transcendent beliefs, systems of control and influence, and the demand for unquestionable dedication to a charismatic and controlling authority figure.

We chose these six stories to help you enter the seemingly strange world of cults through the eyes of real people. As we continue onward into the book, we’ll bring in examples from the entire group of people Janja studied. For now, we will focus on the true-life stories of Samantha, Iris, Matthew, Jessica, Joseph, and Lily (all of these names are pseudonyms).

Samantha G.

The Sixth Child of a Tenth Wife in the Third Generation

My mother had six kids. My father tried to keep that as the average for each of his nineteen wives. He didn’t feel like they needed to have any more than six. Some of them had fewer and there were two or three that had a few more. Well, one had eleven kids, one had nine kids, but I think the average was six. He would decide for them: four for you; on to the next.

Samantha

Samantha G. is the sixth child of the tenth wife of a Fundamentalist Mormon man who had nineteen wives and seventy-four children. Samantha was born in the 1970s, and is a third-generation Fundamentalist Mormon (also known as Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, or FLDS¹). She grew up in a large polygamist community in Arizona, surrounded by hundreds of polygamist families who believe in the religious doctrine of plural marriage for Mormon men (but not for women, who are allowed only one husband at a time).

In the mainstream Mormon faith, plural marriage was abandoned in the late nineteenth century as a response to pressure from the U.S. government. However, many Mormons at that time denounced the change as both politically spineless and spiritually endangering—they were certain that the loss of plural marriage threatened devout Mormons’ chances of ascending to the most exalted of the three heavens prophesied by Mormon founder Joseph Smith. Smith believed that the third and highest heaven, the Celestial Kingdom, was where only the most faithful Mormons would be nearest to God. In his original prophesies, Joseph Smith proclaimed that entry into this most exalted kingdom could be attained only by men who had undertaken Celestial Marriage (plural marriage).

The Mormon Church splintered over the issue of Celestial Marriage in the 1880s, and many polygamist Mormons left the new state of Utah (where plural marriage was outlawed) for Mexico,² Canada, and then-unincorporated areas of Colorado and Arizona. Samantha’s large family consists of direct descendants of the Arizona faction of this rupture, and in her community, it is understood that a man with fewer than three wives has very little chance of ascending to the Celestial Kingdom. Accordingly, most men accumulate numerous wives. Samantha’s father had nineteen wives, but some men in the community have more than fifty. The legal and financial situation for these wives and their children, however, is very precarious. Because plural marriage is illegal in all parts of the United States, these plural marriages are not recognized—and typically, many plural wives raise their many children on public assistance and food stamps as if they are single mothers.³

Growing up, Samantha lived in a large home with eleven of her nineteen mothers and thirty of her seventy-four brothers and sisters. She was raised primarily among half-siblings who were near her own age, and she didn’t really get to know her own full siblings (who were segregated by age into other homes) until she was an adult. Samantha’s mother was expected to stay at home and care for all thirty of the children while some of the other mothers worked, but she found the work overwhelming and often retreated into her bedroom or into nervous breakdowns. Though Samantha was the youngest of her mother’s six children, she became a caretaker and medications manager for her mother at home and during her many hospitalizations.

Samantha and her many siblings went to a public school funded by the state of Arizona, though the curriculum was controlled and directed by the church. Many of the teachers were plural wives from the community, so there were not a lot of outsiders who could provide support to the children. Consequently, Samantha’s (and her siblings’ and friends’) many complaints about the systematic sexual abuse they endured were not reported to any authorities.

Samantha was raised in a very tightly controlled community where rules of dress, behavior, and worship were strict—but also where, unfortunately, sexual abuse by brothers, uncles, and cousins was not controlled at all; instead, it was commonplace. In fact, Samantha’s own father molested her repeatedly, though he was never able to remember her name (or which of his nineteen wives was her mother). As Samantha reached puberty, she avoided making direct eye contact with adult males at parties or gatherings because she was afraid that she would be forced to marry one of them. In Samantha’s community, marriages are arranged by male church elders; young girls have little to no choice in the matter, and many girls are married before their sixteenth birthdays.

One consequence of the large number of early enforced marriages in FLDS communities is a high infant and child mortality rate, along with a high number of miscarriages and stillbirths. The youth of the mothers is a factor, as is the sheer number of pregnancies some women experience. It isn’t uncommon for FLDS women to become pregnant every year or two from their early teens into their late thirties. Another factor is that inbreeding among members of the same family (such as first cousins, uncles and nieces, and other close relations) isn’t monitored; therefore, genetic birth defects are prevalent.⁴ Samantha once counted the graves in the baby cemetery in her small community and found over 150 hand-dug graves, including seventy graves for stillborns and babies under one week of age.

Samantha’s mother went in and out of mental hospitals throughout Samantha’s childhood and adolescence, so no one was available to protect Samantha from incessant sexual and physical abuse. Things changed when her father died suddenly. Samantha was fourteen then, and before an already-arranged marriage could be forced upon her, she escaped from the cult and lived with a non-fundamentalist Mormon family nearby. Samantha struggled for many years to rebuild her life, and is now an advocate with the HOPE Organization, which offers support and a kind of underground railroad to freedom for survivors of abuse in polygamous relationships.

Fundamentalist Mormon groups are still active in Arizona, Colorado, Utah, Mexico, and Canada, with more splinter groups and family compounds forming every year. For instance, Elizabeth Smart wrote the 2013 bestseller, My Story, about being kidnapped from her own bedroom when she was fourteen and being held captive for nine months. She was abducted by a fundamentalist Mormon couple who wanted to start their own polygamist cult—with the teenaged Elizabeth as their first, unwilling plural wife.

Iris D.

The Enlightened Child Freed from Karma

My parents felt an obligation for us to be given the key to enlightenment and the universe so that we would never have to reincarnate again. And so, my brother and I were brought to the home of some TM leaders to go through this initiation process. We did not know what it was going to be other than we were very excited and very hyped up about how mystical and important this was. We had our special little holy flowers and handkerchiefs and we went with a group of other children—my brother and me. He was five and I was eight. A young woman performed a ceremony with some incense and candles and she started chanting. And then she kneeled down and bowed down to a picture of somebody. I didn’t know who it was. She motioned for me to bow down as well. And I didn’t. I didn’t know what it was about. And then we sat down and she gave me my special mantra and told me how to use it. And it was supposed to be a huge turning point for our spiritual state in the universe. We were now better than everybody else who had not yet been initiated, and so we were kind of the spiritual elite.

Iris

Iris D.⁵ was born into the Transcendental Meditation (TM) community in California in the late 1960s. Her parents met at a TM teacher training and dedicated their lives and their home to the growing movement. Iris and her brother grew up meditating and following TM’s spiritual teachings, and their home was a training center for adults and teens who were interested in TM. As some of the first children born into the movement, Iris and her brother were considered especially spiritual and enlightened.

TM was founded by an East Indian man called Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. He was born in 1921 (as Mahesh Prasad Varma) and began teaching meditation in India in the late 1950s. Mahesh traveled and lectured throughout the world, and rose to international fame and power after the Beatles (and other celebrities) briefly joined his ashram in Rishikesh, India, in the late 1960s. Though the Beatles stayed for only a few weeks, their presence and apparent devotion⁶ made meditation seem exciting and fashionable. Mahesh became the international face of the meditation movement and TM soon became the most famous form.

TM uses deep breathing and silent repetitions of a special mantra (usually a single, meaningless syllable) to supposedly help people transcend their bodies, their emotions, and their thoughts in favor of a depersonalized form of consciousness.

TM is generally suggested as twice-daily twenty-minute practice, but devotees in TM’s inner circle meditate in two-hour sessions (or more) every morning and evening. TM devotees claim that their form of meditation brings relaxation, stress relief, lowered blood pressure, creativity, inner peace, protection from disease, and spiritual enlightenment. However, many studies⁷ suggest that lengthy meditation may also exacerbate underlying mental illnesses and/or induce anxiety, depression, dissociation, paranoia, grandiosity, and even hallucinations in vulnerable people. Iris remembers many psychotic episodes occurring in TM community members; however, those events were explained in spiritual terms, as awakenings. There were also several suicide clusters among young TM devotees that were also explained in spiritual terms: the victims were portrayed as fully awakened beings who no longer needed to cycle through birth, death, and reincarnation.

Iris’s parents were deeply devoted to teaching TM and building the presence of TM in the United States and throughout the world. They often left Iris in the care of other members during their four-hour daily meditation sessions, and during their recruiting trips in the United States and abroad. When Iris was three years old, her family moved to Fairfield, Iowa, where the TM community had developed a large compound with a grammar school, and soon, a university.⁸ Iris’s mother gave birth to Iris’s little brother there, and in the first few months of his life, she left him and Iris in Fairfield so that she could take a six-month training directly from the Maharishi in his compound in Holland (children weren’t allowed at Mahesh’s compounds). As an adult, Iris asked people in the TM community about her mother’s travels, and while there was some concern about her mother leaving a breastfeeding child, Iris also heard praise about the depth of her mother’s devotion to TM.

Children in the Fairfield compound knew and lived with their parents, and while being left for months at a time was difficult, it was a normal and expected part of community life. The children also had relative freedom because the adults were so focused on recruitment, teaching, and building TM. This freedom was especially enjoyable during the adults’ lengthy daily meditation periods, when the children were free to run around and play (or get into trouble as they got older).

Life in the TM compound in Iowa was fairly pleasant. Everyone believed the same things, ate the same vegetarian diet, and shared the higher purpose of creating world peace through TM. This sameness, however, meant that stepping out of line was very socially dangerous; without any use of overt force, the community was able to keep people in line with threats of expulsions.

Iris and her friends went to the private TM grammar school in Fairfield—the Maharishi School of the Age of Enlightenment. The school taught all subjects through the lens of Mahesh’s beliefs; and though it was intended primarily for TM children, the tuition was very expensive. Iris reme...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. We Weren’t There by Choice
• 2. The Transcendent Belief System: Purity, Perfection, and the Eradication of Individuality
• 3. Charismatic Authority: Exhilarating Vision, Electrifying Charisma, and Total Domination
• 4. Systems of Control: Official Rules, Formal Structures,
• 5. Systems of Influence: Social Pressures, Rigid Expectations, and Constant Manipulation
• 6. Landing on Mars: Finding Their Way in an Alien World
• 7. Surviving and Thriving: Trauma, Resilience, and Integration
• Appendices
• References
• Index