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I think there’s a certain moment where every person who runs away from a cult realizes they’re in a world of crazy. As someone who grew up cult-adjacent and ended up rolling with a Christian fundie cult for a brief period of time, I had multiple of these moments.
If you have been there, you know the feeling: that weird, slimy feeling of realizing something is very, very wrong about the “morals” people around you have. It’s a feeling where your brain lights up and says, “This can’t possibly be what a loving God wants.”
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One of those moments was when I saw two “religious” Christians proudly talk about how the father beat the shit out of his sons. His son was still there, smiling weakly, yet I’ve seen him flinch multiple times whenever his father even raised his voice.
That was not a happy young man.
It’s the moment that most cultists have a crisis of faith, leading to many of them deconstructing. In the actual cults themselves, the leadership often does what it can to cover up any losses to the cult’s numbers. They make it business as usual with an extra dash of “they were sinners, anyway.”
In recent years, something a little strange has been happening throughout the United States.
Lately, there has been a lot of dark money flooding Evangelical and Mormon cults — often with a low-key emphasis on glamorizing these religions to people in a bid to get more converts. At first, it seemed coincidental but the pattern became too noticeable to ignore:
We see a lot of Mormon influencers getting major bank for mentioning their religion through “donors.” The 2020s saw the rise to a lot of Mormon TikTokkers, including that one dame who got arrested for that altercation inn a Mormon swing party. The flow of dark money into Mormon influencer pockets is not a conspiracy theory; it’s documented.
Then, we started to see the uptick in Evangelical influencers with a tradwife twist. This followed the same type of payout with a lot of the “donations” coming from churches and unusual backend deals.
Around the same time, we started to see TLC and other networks push shows like 19 And Counting or Plathville. Did you notice how many TLC shows seem to showcase a bunch of religious, Evangelical types with crazy high birth rates? It’s not your imagination. This is not because they are trying to show those families like a freak show. It’s their way of pushing the idea that these families are good — and even common.
No matter how you look at it, there is a lot of money being spent by these churches to give them a facelift. They are desperately trying to push their member numbers up and make it look like the best thing since sliced pie, especially for women.
To a lesser point, I’ve noticed similar work happening in the Catholic church. The Pope has been doing a great job in defending parishioners against Trump’s regime and honestly, they have been throwing raves that have been getting me (of all people) a little interested in going to church too.
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