That’s what I thought when I started digging around,researching my latest novel that looks behind the walls of The Sanctuary,an imagined closed religious community dedicated to clean,organic living and environmentalism.
We held a comprehensive set of beliefs that,without a normalising lens,are hard to get your head around.istock
While there may be no single definition of a cult,they share a few potent ingredients,such as general isolation from the rest of society,an unquestioning adherence to a set of beliefs,a strict authoritarian hierarchy of power and a rock-hard sense of being among the chosen ones.
Hmmm. I recognised quite a few of those ingredients. I hadn’t joined a cult. But maybe I’d been born into one.
I grew up in a large Catholic family on an isolated farm outside Melbourne. I went to a Catholic school,we went to Mass on Sunday,we socialised with other Catholics. We basically didn’t mix with anybody else. We did know one or two non-Catholics and they were nice but they weren’t going to heaven. Not like us.
We held a comprehensive set of beliefs that,without a normalising lens,are hard to get your head around. Such as Mary’s virgin birth,eating Christ’s body and drinking his blood,going to hell if you missed Mass on Sunday. We even had a shared language that defined us,such as transubstantiation (bread and wine in the Eucharist becomes Christ’s real body and blood) and the Blessed Trinity (three Gods in one,but really it’s just one God).
We held a comprehensive set of beliefs that,without a normalising lens,are hard to get your head around. Such as Mary’s virgin birth.
ERINA REDDAN
Then there were the rules about when you ate and what you ate,such as no eating before Mass,and no meat on Fridays,which I loved because we got to have fish and chips once a week – religiously. You had to regularly confess your sins,which led to considerable pre-reconciliation whispering as us kids figured out which sin we could make up this week.
And most damagingly,there was the unquestioned power of the god-like parish priest. And we all know now what that resulted in. In fact,the 2017 Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse inquiry identified my parish and the local boy’s secondary college as one of the active centres of paedophilia.
I didn’t question any of these rules and beliefs.
The contest of ideas I discovered at university knocked our brand of Catholicism out of me. Yet,still,years later when I had my own family,the kids eventually did some of the sacraments so they wouldn’t feel too out of place at family church events.
When my youngest child was preparing for their First Reconciliation,we dutifully read the children’s Bible stories from the Old Testament every night as requested. Now this child,who had previously declared that they wanted to be an “evil overlord” when they grew up said to me one night,“Oh mama,I’m getting a lot of good ideas about how to be an evil overlord from God.”
I laughed out loud. I hadn’t seen it before. I had completely normalised that God could legitimately require Abraham to prove his undying devotion by killing his son. Or that it was perfectly acceptable that God would test Job’s excellent piety by taking away his possessions,his family and then his health. Yeah,now that I think about it,my child was spot on:you could say that the God of the Old Testament did abuse his power as leader.
Obviously,it was a unique set of conditions that meant I experienced cult-like conditions as a child. Very few people can now live in that kind of isolation. We have the internet,which beams in all sorts of ideas all the time. As well,the modern Catholic Church has shared leadership between priests and parishioners,so authority no longer rests in a single godlike being.
There are thousands of cults across the world,from self-help cults,to political and religious cults. Many of them don’t look anything like the doomsday cult,Heaven’s Gate,which ended in mass suicide,as members tried to catch a passing comet in 1997. Or Australia’s own Ideal Human Environment,which began in the ’80s as an experiment in happiness,harmony and ideal living. In 2019,leader James Salerno was imprisoned for unlawful sexual intercourse with a child,and the truth about the abuse behind those closed doors was exposed. The IHE had been operating for 30 years.
None of us joins a cult – we join a movement to make ourselves and the world a better place. But my experience taught me that it’s a fine line between intentional community and cult. That line is defined by how power is exercised.
So,whether you’re seeking your own happiness,or a new way of making the world a better place,like that great meditation group you just joined or that conspiracy idea that is sweeping around you,take care. Watch what happens when you ask questions. If they close you down,or make you feel guilty for asking in the first place,I’m guessing it is a good idea to keep asking those questions.
(Pantera Press) by Erina Reddan is out now.
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