As UCG decides to scrap its massive Home Office expansion plans, having come to terms with its lack of financial resources after purging all of its dissenters, it’s done some additional soul-searching as well.
UCG seems to finally recognize its history of isolationism, brainwashing, tyranny, activity slavery and other cultish traits may have lead to widespread, rampant mental health issues within its congregations. Those with friends and family in UCG recognize the sorts of issues they’re tackling, as they are systemic to many families within the church and the greater COG as a whole. It’s only just that they try to cleanup the mess that decades of cult abused has created.
We are placing more focus on educational issues such as addictions, anxieties, self-injury, depression, abuse and other relevant maladies that afflict many in our congregations.
We would like to form a team of “experts” who might be able to write or bring presentations to educate others on the seriousness of abnormal behavior. With that knowledge our brethren will be able to get the affected person the necessary help and encouragement needed to overcome one’s difficulties.
Admirable if true, but potentially damaging. Aside from having to shudder at what the COG traditionally considers to be “abnormal behavior,” dosing a sickness with the same lunacy that caused it is a recipe for disaster. It’s UCG’s doctrines that create the culture poisoning the minds of its followers and turning them into barely-functioning members of society, unable to properly interact with their fellow human beings and connect with others on a healthy emotional level.
So this begs a question: what would it be like if a UCG member, or someone raised in any of the COG sects, were to run for president?
Well, we’re witnessing probably the closest we’ll ever see to a cult member running for president in Mitt Romney. Usually, we shy away from political commentary, and this is no exception. Our interest in Romney is as a Mormon, a member of the Church of Latter Day Saints, an organization long considered a dangerous, oppressive cult. He is someone born and raised in the LDS, and remains ultimately loyal to his church.
That loyalty and upbringing has come with a price as he stumbles through life as a hollowed shell of what a human being is supposed to be, his deeper emotional intelligence stunted from an early age within the oppressive confines of the LDS.
Frank Rich wrote a piece for New York Magazine that appeared last week asking some fundamental questions about who Mitt Romney is and how his faith has affected his life. The way Romney is described by his friends, colleagues and former coworkers paints a picture of someone who isn’t all there.
“A wall. A shell. A mask,” they write at the outset, listing the terms used by many who “have known or worked with Romney” and view him as “a man who sometimes seems to be looking not into your eyes but past them.” Former business and political colleagues are in agreement that he has scant interest in mingling with people in even casual social interactions (in a hallway, for instance) and displays “little desire to know who people are.” He so “rarely went out with the guys in any social venue” that one business associate dubbed him the Tin Man for “his inability to bond.” During his one term as governor of Massachusetts, Romney was inaccessible to legislators, with ropes and elevator settings often restricting access to his suite of offices. He was notorious, one lawmaker explained, for having “no idea what our names were—none.”
This description could be applied to many COG members to this day. They are often known to their coworkers as hardworking recluses who tend to be good at their jobs, but emotionally distant and impersonal.
His otherness seems not a matter of style and pedigree but existential.
This “otherness” is a systemic cultural value held by many cults, including the COG and LDS. They have been trained to believe they are “in the world, not of the world” and tend to move through society as if that were true.
We don’t know who Romney is for the simple reason that he never reveals who he is. Even when he is not lying about his history—whether purporting to have been “a hunter pretty much all my life” (in 2007) or to being a denizen of “the real streets of America” (in 2012)—he is incredibly secretive about almost everything that makes him tick. He has been in hiding throughout his stints in both the private and public sectors. While his career-long refusal to release his tax returns was damaging in itself, it resonated even more so as a proxy for all the other secrets he has kept and still keeps.
Cults thrive on secrets. Members do as well. Their faith is so valuable to them, they cannot bear to have it challenged. And because it is such a huge part of a cult member’s life, they will consequentially have to keep large portions of their life secret from the outside world, lest they “cast pearls before swine.”
In Romneyland, Mormonism is the religion that dare not speak its name. Which leaves him unable to talk about the very subject he seems to care about most, a lifelong source of spiritual, familial, and intellectual sustenance. We’re used to politicians who camouflage their real views about issues, or who practice fraud in their backroom financial and political deal-making, but this is something else. Romney’s very public persona feels like a hoax because it has been so elaborately contrived to keep his core identity under wraps.
Cult members simply cannot be themselves in public. They feel threatened by the idea, as they have a deeply-embedded persecution complex. They feel they have to hide their faith lest revealing it destroy them.
Like Romney’s evasions about his private finances, his conspicuous cone of silence about this major pillar of his biography also leaves you wondering what he is trying to hide. That his faith can be as secretive as he is—Ann Romney’s non-Mormon parents were not allowed to attend the religious ceremony consecrating her marriage to Mitt—only whets the curiosity among the 82 percent of Americans who tell pollsters they know little or nothing about Mormonism.
And this is how it would destroy them. Having a national discussion about the LDS, or about the COG, is a recipe for disaster when it comes to these cults’ longevity. It’s why the COG doesn’t really want to “preach the gospel to the whole world” and prefers to fly under the radar attracting as many underground religious kooks at they can, the types of people who get up at 6:00 a.m. on a Sunday morning to watch WGN.
Weeks before his death, Christopher Hitchens, no more a fan of LDS than of any other denomination, wrote that “we are fully entitled” to ask Romney about the role of his religion in influencing his political formation. Of course we are. Romney is not merely a worshipper sitting in the pews but the scion of a family dynasty integral to the progress of an American-born faith that has played a large role in the public square. Since his youthful stint as a missionary, he has served LDS in a variety of significant posts. The answers to questions about Romney’s career as a lay church official may tell us more about who he is than his record at Bain, his sparse tenure as governor, or his tax returns.
Understanding the culture, history and doctrines of a cult is the key to understanding its members. Knowing what the LDS believes and practices is the only way to unlock the mystery that is Romney, a COG member, or any other cult victim.
Silence
Absolutely no one should be happy with the UCG attempting to address mental health issues: They don’t have a clue on how to start to resolve the problems they have themselves created (even dispensing with Herbert Armstrong and the Worldwide Church of God). The are looking for people to join up to help them with the program.
As you point out, no one can know a cult member because their inner personna is secret. I maintain that it is worse than that: They themselves don’t know who they are.
Just look at United is doing for a moment: Dennis Luker has formed yet another committee to sort out their doctrines. “Who are we?” is really good question and one which does not have an answer. The best you could ever come up with is as a group, they are a giant cash machine to provide salaries and retirement for their paid ministry. That’s it. There’s nothing beyond that.
What it really looks like is that the UCG is attempting to create a branding for marketing purposes for their product. The only thing is, they don’t know what their product is and it gets worse when they have to go out there and sell it for all their worth. The latest push is to put their booklets on Amazon.com Kindle and then have a bunch of people from the church give the booklets five stars. It’s just disgusting.
No cult member should run for president because, as you say, the American people can never know what they are getting. Mr. Romney has been analyzed by observers to be “flexible” to follow whatever trend he perceives will get him votes.
In the end, that’s all about all we can ever expect for cult members, with the caveat that while they may appear to be amenable to change and making progress, they are extremely inflexibly rigid, even if they don’t know for sure who or what they are.
The problem is not limited to Romney. Ron Paul is the only politician I trust. None of the others are who they pretend to be. It’s always like that. And none of them put the country or the constitution first (with the exception of Paul). They all have an agenda. The party always comes before the country; as do other agendas. The political parties a lot like cults in that sense. They are controlling and have a biased (brainwashed) perspective on the world. They are secretive in the sense that they are always lying to the public to hide their own views.
It seems to me that when Mittons makes a verbal blunder (I am speaking of blunders where he comes off as uncaring), he like any candidate with two brain cells corrects or clarifies his statements. While this is normative as that person is expected to speak a lot while under great scrutiny, I notice that his corrections and clarifications feel (and it is only a feeling) like he is simply correcting an error. As if he were a rat in a maze and he got zapped, and so made a correction. His corrected statements seem to be less about deeply held convictions born out of sleepless soul searching. His statements are reactions.
Any organization where success is had without a requirement to be a “decent guy you would like to hang out with” (and cults are definitely like this), they tend to foster people who fake it very well. They have learned through trial and error what to do and what not to do. For these people, survival of the organization trumps survival of the individual. They do not do something simply because it is the “right thing to do”. Instead they do what they are implicitly told.
Lyle Lange wrote:
I agree. I would further add, that under pressure (responding to an attack from Gingrich, for example) Romney comes across as… robotic. Where Santorm (shudder) reacts with passion, Gingrich with humor, or Paul with his nasally, canned talking points, Romney is emotionless, as he with almost surgical precision goes back through and responds point by point. At first it appeared to be him just keeping his cool, but seeing it in debate after debate, he just seems practically hollow to me now.
I’ve promised myself I won’t be automatically discounting the GOP candidate just based on religion or social viewpoints, as much as it pains me, but will give the nominee (Santorum excluded) a reasonable chance based on what I think they can do with the economy. That said, robotic or not, I may still cast my vote for the cultist candidate, based entirely on his corporate experience. Presuming he wins the nomination of course, and entirely contingent on how he does in a debate with Obama.
Douglas Becker wrote:
Indeed. That’s perhaps the scariest thing about it. They’re only going to ruin their victims further.
Jack wrote:
Agreed, though Romney seems to have a worse problem, because while the others can actually pretend to be something substantial, he has a really hard time even faking it.
Lyle Lange wrote:
Yes. He’s like a robot trying to understand humanity through trial and error. He’s like Data.
Jace wrote:
Yes. It’s not to say that Romney hasn’t been successful all his life. He clearly knows what he’s doing in many different arenas, including the business world and as a governor. But talking to people surrounding him from each of those arenas, the consensus seems to be his success isn’t rooted in a deeply-seated conviction, at least one that can’t be defined without understanding his faith, where he hides his real self. It’s likely because he doesn’t understand himself, as Douglas points out. He goes through the motions the LDS raised him to without really understanding the reasons why, other than because it’s part of his religion.
Romney is an empty suit with empty eyes and an empty head save for what the LDS has pumped into it. Know his cult, then know the man. What I see in him I’ve seen in COG members I know who behave much the same way, keeping others at arms length, never using anyone’s name (which gives the impression they have no clue who they are) and keeping themselves very guarded in the presence of non-believers.
The question is, will he be able to connect with the American people and actually understand their plight instead of just acting upon what others tell him is wrong with this country? Bush was a puppet too, in a different sense, and we don’t need another.