Black Christian Mind

The Cult You Don’t Know You Are In
by Sabrina Dawkins

Cults can’t announce themselves as such because the title will scare away potential followers. You were running out of money. You hated your job. Your parents didn’t understand your problems adjusting to this diabolical world run by Satan and his angels, so you left. But you didn’t just leave, you ran to something. You ran into the open arms of a cult. They made it so convenient: a place to stay, food to eat, and a loving new family. You wouldn’t have to worry about your problems anymore because your new family would protect you from the harsh world. And even if they fell short of that by no fault of their own, at least you all would be together to comfort each other in your suffering; and therefore, you would never again have to suffer alone.

The cult hid its true title in order to lure you in. It knew your weaknesses, your desperation. It knew you had no options left. It knew that you would bet everything on a dream, a hope for a better tomorrow. It knew that all it took was a few smiling faces, sweet-sounding words, and the promise of a lifetime of security in its arms and under its care.

You jumped in with both feet. It was the only choice you thought you had. You didn’t know you were entering a cult. You still don’t know you’re in a cult. A cult could be a church, a YouTube channel, a movement, a book, a philosophy, anything that people believe in that is not true and draws them into the fantasy world created by another.

When people think of cult leaders, they often think of the obvious ones: Jim Jones, David Koresh, Marshall Applewhite, and Charles Manson. These males obviously created false realities to captivate the minds of their followers and gain control over them. But rarely do people think of the shiny new book sitting on the Barnes & Noble shelf as being a call for cult membership. Rarely do people think of certain majors in college as introductions to cult philosophies.

For instance, in high school I was required to read atheist Richard Wright’s Black Boy; he became my favorite author for a while. I studied books written by atheists in my undergraduate school library. I read godless philosophy books and New Age demon-channeled books in my spare time, looking for truths. Of course I didn’t know they were harmful and false at the time. But I ended up living with atheists I didn’t know in what I thought would be a sharing, communist-like environment for over a month because I believed in something that wasn’t true. I got a job while there and helped out financially with what little I had, but I left broke. The truth was that I was demon possessed, and they were demon possessed, and there was no way we were going to live together in peace and harmony.

I had a mental breakdown, though I didn’t know it at the time, and left grad school because I was overloaded with a lot of false information that I could no longer handle. I was miserable at school and didn’t know where to turn. Luckily I had been very active online and had met an atheist who ran his own website. He was charming and I was naïve and demon possessed. I couldn’t go back to living with my parents because that would be a failure, so I went to live with him and his family. Running his website was his full-time job, and he had a lot of visitors, which meant that whatever he was teaching was convincing and entertaining. He would do live interviews, and he had an active forum. I even did some advertising work for him by promoting him on forums before I made the move. One of the first things he did when I moved in was have a yard sale, including his things and mine.

My introduction to this small atheist cult was in the books I read starting in high school which made atheism seem like a normal way of living. No hint of evil or demon possession was attached to the word. And the New Age books told me that I was in control of my life and my decisions and that I could make any decision I wanted and not have to worry about a permanent consequence: All is love and light. We are all connected. There’s no such thing as death. Life is a dream. There are no permanent consequences. We are all family. We are all evolving. Everyone is good. I was technically an agnostic unknowingly influence by demons, but I got into his atheist cult and really wanted to be accepted, but I didn’t belong.

Even now it’s hard for me to believe that I was actually in a cult. I’ve watched some Jim Jones documentaries, Marshall Applewhite and Charles Manson speeches in the past and with my nose slightly stuck in the air wondered how the followers could’ve believed such nonsense. But I, too, believed nonsense. Why? Because all my life I had learned lies, from as long as I could remember. How could I tell the difference between the truth and a lie? We didn’t learn the Bible in the public school system, we learned evolution and read godless and sexually immoral books such as Brave New World and The Color Purple. The curriculum back then, to me, was objective. Never did I think in my grade school years that the curriculum was sinister and meant for evil, that it was mentally easing me into the lowest rank of a godless cult in order to make me into someone else’s slave.

Many people don’t do something as drastic as go live with their cult. Many just hold in their minds false teachings, a false philosophy. Many go to false churches every Sunday, where they give a portion of their earnings, volunteer, and go to church events and trips during the week while learning a false version of the Bible. The more subtle and widespread the cult, the more successful it can be because it’s harder to detect. If it’s not a group of people living in a large house together, if the members aren’t overly vocal, then it’s harder to pin down.

For many years, I just saw my experience as a terrible time in my life of desperation and bad decisions. It’s much more embarrassing to admit that I was taken in by a cult, but I was. Yes, the older you get, the more independent, the less likely you might be to fall for an obvious cult’s teachings. But what if many of the things you believe now are false? What if the assigned readings were false? What if the education your teachers received was also false? It’s hard to accept that when I was a vulnerable child, I was fed false information, but I have come to realize that I was. And when a person is operating based on false information, the person can only go from one false belief system to another, one cult to another. I went from atheism to communicating with mostly demons in dreams disguised as godless people whom I admired at the time.

Truth is the only real escape from the obvious as well as the subtle cults, from the cults in big houses, to the cults inside of paperback books; from the cults in far-off secluded lands, to the cult in a neighbor’s house who hosts a book club once a week; from the cult being hazed on a college campus, to the cult with headphones on listening to their favorite YouTuber’s latest video; from the cult in the church building with the charismatic preacher, to the cult in the Intro to Philosophy class; from the cult that cries when their favorite sports team loses, to the cult that watches all the installments of their favorite blockbuster movie.

The more members a cult has, the more they’re able to mold the world into the artificial fantasy world of their cult, making them less detectable because they have made their cult principles normal and widespread, which is why popular opinion cannot be trusted. Only the truth is impervious to influences from the clever cults, the cults that flatter, and woo, and captivate and never tell you that they’ve gotten you. Revelation 12:9 doesn’t say that Satan fooled just a few people.