As many longtime readers of Daily Kos know, when I talk about the religious right, I’m not just speaking from the abstract. I know what the mentality that drives the religious right smells like from the inside.
In my freshman year at the University of North Carolina, I was tricked into joining a hypercharismatic campus ministry known as Waymaker Christian Fellowship, an outreach of King’s Park International Church in Durham. They hid a lot about who they were in a deliberate attempt to pull in people who would otherwise never set foot in an outfit like this one.
I felt something was off about them from the start, but only realized it when they tried to turn me into a Christian Coalition Republican. Despite this, the mind games they used were strong enough that it took me until early in my second semester to get out.
Early in my sophomore year, I discovered that KPIC had once been the Carolina chapter of one of the more notorious campus cults of the 1980s, Maranatha Campus Ministries. When I tried to warn my former “brothers” and “sisters” about it, the response was basically, “So what?” It still angers me to this day—I hadn’t just told them, “I think there’s something wrong here,” but “There is something wrong here—and here’s the evidence.”
Ultimately, to get hard evidence of their deceit, I pretended to have seen the light and burrowed back into Waymaker for a brief time in the winter of 1997-98. What I discovered gave me enough to file a formal complaint against them with the student judicial system—but due to a loophole that forbade deceiving school officials, but not students, nothing could be done at the time. I continued speaking out against them without relent—and some of them got the bright idea to frame me for supposedly harassing them early in my junior year. However, that went nowhere.
Since graduating, I have since learned more about KPIC’s Maranatha ties. For instance, it still operates under the same bylaws it adopted during the Maranatha era—meaning that legally, it’s the same church, despite their attempts to distance themselves. KPIC is one of the most important churches in Every Nation, a network of charismatic churches built around most of Maranatha’s remains and led by former Maranatha ministers Rice Broocks and Steve Murrell. It is part and parcel of the New Apostolic Reformation, the overtly fascist offshoot of the religious right that wants to bring about the Second Coming by taking over the world. Waymaker has since changed its name to Every Nation Campus Ministries-UNC.
Last month, I started a blogging project to outline more about what I saw in Waymaker/ENCM, as well as the evidence of their Maranatha ties. I call it “Child of the Truth.” Why? All too often, fundies claim that those calling out their abuses are “children of the lie”—when we are actually speaking truth.
More and more, I believe a lot of the same mentality that made Donald Trump possible had its genesis in the mentality that drove groups like Waymaker. Just like the religious right tolerated Trump’s outrages because he made the right clucking noises on social issues, Waymaker and KPIC tolerated outrageous behavior just in the name of getting people saved. So over the next few months, I plan to give a first-hand account of how that mentality unfolded in a charismatic Christian cult.
Want to see more? Check it out on the Web, on Facebook and on Twitter.