Why I'm about to take the word cult out of my vocabulary.
by Teresa

We, Shandra and JJ and Lyria and I, are watching Lynn, a multiple in her own right, engage in a pretty serious existential/spiritual battle. And we are wanting to support her in it, but we have no idea how. But it sure is teaching me a lot and so I wanted to write this essay on why I'm about to take the word cult out of my vocabulary when it comes to our background.

I suppose what's opened me to taking this angle on things is the process of becoming Catholic, or close to it, in a generally anti-Catholic environment. Every month or so I hear and read ex-Catholic stories, and fundamentalist denigration of Catholics as icon-worshippers and cannabals, and the news of the atrocities that the Church has committed in the past. And yet when I go to church I don't worship icons and I don't carve off pieces of people's flesh to eat and things, and if I ever caught a priest with his pants down around a kid I'd call the police so fast he wouldn't have time to buckle his belt.

In other words, my religion is composed of fallible human beings who often do lousy stuff and mess up what's right and what's wrong with what's righteous and what's cruel. And some of the rites and rituals - clean as they are in many ways - would be extremely bizarre symbolic acts if there wasn't a whole system of belief behind them that brings meaning to them for me. But I still consider it legitimate.

I mean really, some guy getting his friends to drink his blood and eat his body, before he goes off to hang off a cross? That's just crazy right? But between that extreme craziness and the sublime beauty of that sacrifice lies - only really my faith.

What I'm coming to realize is that what happened to Lynn and the Lynns, even though to me it was very extreme, and even though there are parts of it I cannot accept as justifiable for any reason whatsoever, and never will be able to - had equal meaning for them. That despite the horrible things there was a spirituality there that they truly believed in. Even harder to accept is the logical extension - that quite possibly there was also deep meaning for those adults engaged in it.

It's hard to get at that. It doesn't help that many of the feelings that filter through about it are very extreme. Where my experience of spirituality is a calm, solid, loving feeling, theirs seems to come with an extreme, terrified, pain. From my point of view it's like my religion was designed to ease suffering and theirs to create it.

So it's pretty easy to identify all that as _solely_ traumatic. And to carve out the pieces - the sexual and violent acts, say - and lay them out on a platter exorcised from their belief structure and to say: look! This was horrible and abusive and meaningless and all this has caused you to be the sick, fragile, unhappy individual that you are.

To ridicule the faith that they had. The faith that they have lost. And the deep psychic pain that comes from losing faith.

Society in general and many therapists and groups in specific find a way to ridicule faith quickly and easily through the use of the word cult.

The word cult forces a divorce between the physical and emotional experience of traumatic rituals from any sense of spiritual legitimacy. In a sense it takes a belief structure and turns it into a nihilistic experience of pain. It lets all the "good" religious people turn around and point and call the cults the Other and make them into the ultimate bad guys.

I think a good analogy for this are the Vietnam veterans. They went off to fight a war and were led to believe that what they were doing was for good. Then they came back, filled with horror, and were shunned, because the world had moved on in its views without them while they were in the jungle. They became despairing and angry and suicidal.

Pushing people - in a multiple system or not - to suddenly take the sum of a very complicated physical, emotional, and spiritual experience, and to see it as "cultish" (a derogatory term implying, I think, that one has been duped) forces a similar kind of despair.

What seems to be offered to "cult victims" instead is a kind of nihilistic world, where nothing really can fit together again. The full spectrum of their experience - that one can be at the same time a child experiencing the horror of rape and also be an ecstatic mystic giving her body over to a powerful deity - can never be put back into context if their spiritual belief system is never explored except as something to be disproven. Everything becomes senseless.

For this reason we are removing the word cult from our vocabulary as much as possible and substituting the word religion. If we're going to denigrate someone's faith, we'd at least like it to have to be using a language that presumes legitimacy first.

It will probably be complicated and painful to try to see something as horrible as raping children and cutting people and revelling in their pain as religious. We certainly will always see it as traumatic. We think that religious abuse of any kind is wrong.

But the alternative is that in our lack of willingness even to _call_ it a religion we will be implying that it was stupid or childish to to believe in it. This is a position we're just not willing to hold anymore.

Teresa & others, November 2001