As many longtime Kossacks know, I have a first-hand experience with the mentality that makes the religious right tick. During my freshman year at Carolina, I was suckered into joining a hypercharismatic campus ministry with very close ties to the New Apostolic Reformation, the overtly fascist offshoot of the religious right that believes it can take over the world and bring about the Second Coming. I now realize that more than 20 years before Trump even thought about running for president, I had a front-row seat for the mentality that led much of the religious right to bow down to him.
By way of review—early in my freshman year in Chapel Hill, I was tricked into joining Waymaker Christian Fellowship, an outreach of King’s Park International Church in Durham. Something was off about them from the start, but I couldn’t put my finger on it until they tried to turn me into a Christian Coalition Republican. Even then, the mind games they played with me were enough that it took me until January 1997 to finally get out of there. I’ve been speaking out ever since, but recently started writing extensively about that ordeal at a new blog, Child for the Truth.
Early in my sophomore year, I discovered that KPIC had once been the Carolina chapter of Maranatha Campus Ministries, one of the many “campus cults” that preyed on college kids during the 1970s and 1980s. Specifically, KPIC’s pastor, Ron Lewis, had seen fit to add KPIC to a directory of “friends and former members” of Maranatha. While it looked like Pastor Ron had curbed some of Maranatha’s blatantly cultish characteristics—such as a ban on dating—it looked like he was still peddling a watered-down version of 1980s Maranatha stuff.
Some more digging revealed just how whacked Maranatha was. Disobeying your pastor was considered no different from disobeying God. Members often plowed into funds intended to further their education in order to tithe to Maranatha. One student at Kentucky was told tampons were unsafe, and if she questioned it, she had a “spirit of independent thinking.”
Due to this and other anecdotes, an ad hoc committee of cult-watchers released a scathing report condemning Maranatha’s practices. While Maranatha had actually called this group in to give it a clean bill of health, the committee declared it could not do so. Indeed, it concluded, “we would not recommend this organization to anyone.” One of the committee members later said that they would have used even harsher language had they not feared legal reprisals.
I thought this would have been enough for my “brothers” and “sisters” in Waymaker to drop Pastor Ron like a piece of bad meat. But I thought wrong. When I passed this information on to them, they said they had no problem with Pastor Ron hiding this minor detail, even though on paper there was no good-faith reason for him to do so. After all, people were being saved through that ministry.
I couldn’t believe it. I wasn’t just telling them, “I think there’s something wrong here.” I was saying, “There is something wrong here. He’s been lying to you guys all along. Here’s the evidence.” By staying loyal to him, they were putting themselves—and their church—in astronomical legal danger. If they did anything to get themselves expelled and their parents found out about the Maranatha connection, KPIC could have potentially been sued out of existence—and the campus ministers sued into poverty.
Indeed, it was so incomprehensible that for a time, I wondered if the campus ministers had known about the Maranatha connection before my class arrived in Chapel Hill. But this was highly unlikely, as it would have required two of them to conceal this information from their fiancées. However, based on past experience of how this outfit was willing to tolerate outrageous behavior in the name of the Lord, it took me until this past winter to definitively rule it out. I spoke with two former campus leaders with Victory Campus Ministries (now Every Nation Campus Ministries), Waymaker’s parent organization and the campus outreach of Every Nation, the network of charismatic churches of which KPIC is a part. They only found out about the Maranatha past after they left.
Now what does this remind you of? Well, the religious right stood by Trump even in the face of his many outrages on the campaign trail, such as plastering a private cell phone number on social media, mocking the disabled and condoning violence at his rallies. After all, he made the right clucking noises on social issues. After the Access Hollywood tapes came out, you would have thought they would have dropped him. But no—we were told it didn’t matter as much as ending abortion, the Iran deal, and marriage equality. It continues even now. At last count, over 70 percent of white evangelicals still back Trump.
I’d wondered how it was possible for fundies to continue to bow down to a guy who found it acceptable to behave this way on both the campaign trail and in office. Well, I think I have part of my answer. Some of those same people find it acceptable for a pastor to hide his past in a Christianist cult just as long as people are getting saved. The mere thought I came close to subscribing to this mentality makes me retch.
If you want to find out more about what I’ve learned over the years about this Christanist cult, check out Child for the Truth on the Web. You can also follow me on Facebook and on Twitter.