Was my family a cult?

Cult: a system of religious veneration and devotion directed toward a particular figure or object.

Cult: a relatively small group of people having religious beliefs or practices regarded by others as strange or sinister.

Cult: a misplaced or excessive admiration for a particular person or thing.

A friend sent me this article by Stephanie Gail Eagleson describing how she grew up in a Rural Evangelical Daddy-cult. 

I chuckled when I saw the title of the article because I have called my family a “sort of cult” to try and describe it to others. I am well into studying Spiritual Abuse and working with survivors of this sort of abuse. The more I learn, the more I see my upbringing as not just a chronic experience of Spiritual Abuse, but yes—an actual cult. 

I’ll use just the definitions above to determine if this is true: 

Cult: a system of religious veneration and devotion directed toward a particular figure or object.

We were told explicitly (and behavior enforced this) that our father was the voice of God in our lives. To obey him was to obey God. God would never tell us to do something that our father would not approve of. 

We were encouraged to read and know scripture. I believe my father thought there was only one right way to interpret Scripture, and if we children were to read it and study it, we would arrive at the same conclusion he did. 

He was not prepared for when we arrived at different conclusions. I, for one, enjoyed reading and studying the Bible and began to see defects in his teaching and serious flaws in his beliefs. 

For example, I once asked if he could teach about Love in one of his Sunday sermons. Sunday sermons from Dad lasted for a good two or three hours and were usually some version of the same: God is God. We are imperfect humans. Our goal in life is to be perfect like God and to know his word so we can please him and do his will. (There was never any doubt that perfection was attainable.)

Anyway, when I asked him if he could preach a sermon about Love, he got really quiet and said, “Why don’t you preach it.” But of course, he didn’t really expect me to. 

You see, I’d noticed a lot about Love in the Bible and wondered, if we were supposed to study the Bible so thoroughly, why did we never talk about Love?

Or Jesus. We almost never talked about Jesus—except at Christmas. 

So you can imagine when he taught us to obey the Bible and God simultaneously alongside “Dad is the confirmation and voice of God in your life,” it would cause a bit of a stir if you actually arrived at a different interpretation of the Bible. 

I once asked my father, “What if we read the Bible and come to different conclusions?” He did not have an answer. Indeed, I’d say most of the conflict that existed between him and I (conflict that began pretty quickly after my older brother left for the army and I was first born and suddenly the focus of a lot of attention—attention my older brother kept away from me by being “rebellious”) existed because I could reason my way around his arguments and he couldn’t understand how we were on opposite ends of the spectrum. There really was only one right way to think, after all. 

I bet if he had it to do over, he would not encourage us to read our Bibles, if he’d known the Bible would lead to losing our devotion to him. 

Cult: a relatively small group of people having religious beliefs or practices regarded by others as strange or sinister.

While the Bible was a “safe” book in his mind, all other material in our home was open to censure. Books, movies, music. I was still calling home to ask for permission to watch movies when I was in my twenties. 

When my parents were out of town, I’d go to the library and rent books or movies my parents would not approve of (again, even into my twenties). I gave myself a cultural education, though I always felt guilty and feared I would get caught. 

I once read an entire banned book: Steven Pressfield’s Gates of Fire, while on a trip out west. My dad was in the driver’s seat, so he never saw. I did not read it at night before bed because I was afraid he’d find it. 

I was twenty years old.

The book had nudity and lots of F-words and definitely violence. However, my biggest concern was that my father would ask where I got the book. A family friend had given it to me—an adult who treated me with enough respect to give me an adult book and not check to see if my parents approved first. I wanted to protect this friend—and my access to the friend. 

Really the book was not about the F-words or nudity. It was about history and warfare. But I knew my dad would only see the nudity. 

He cared a lot about our bodies: he wanted them covered—nothing too form-fitting or revealing. It was because our bodies were so beautiful and he did not want other men to lust after us. 

He was very concerned about other men lusting after us. 

However, clothing that was approved by dad was not always fashionable. I had large breasts and it was impossible to hide them—I ended up wearing clothing that made me look fat. Yet my father’s body obsession did not extend merely to an extreme form of modesty—he also wanted us to be fit and exercise and work out. Working out was a family form of worship. I complied, but I was never obsessed with this worship. 

I remember my dad coming into the family gym once and trying to correct my form on one of the machines. I ignored his advice. He left. Then he came back and said angrily, “You’re going to be one of those moms one day who lets herself go and gets fat and then blames her kids.” After this prophecy, he left. 

For years after leaving my parents’ home, I could not go to a gym without experiencing post-traumatic stress. I finally got a membership in my thirties and was able to work through this fear and eventually come to a place where I actually enjoy a gym—and working out. 

Then there was the matter of slave labor. Every Saturday, beginning when I was an adolescent, all the kids were required to work on building my parents’ mansion. Of course, my father told us this was for us—us and his grandkids—to enjoy. The irony is, none of us actually visit them very often, or ever, so it’s now just a giant home where nobody wants to go. 

Another irony is that we’d often get in trouble for not getting our schoolwork done. It took me a while to discover that most of my friends got to do school on Saturdays. They had a whole extra day to do homework. If we asked for the Saturday off because we had a paper due or because we were studying for a test, we had to prove we’d worked sufficiently during the week and genuinely needed the extra time. 

Education became decreasingly less of a priority as I got older and as my father realized so much of what we were learning in school would not help us as wives and mothers (if we were going to fulfill his definition of wife and mother). 

It was bizarre to most folks that the daughters were living at home and not going to college. Our goal in life was to fulfill our (earthly) father’s vision and after marriage, to fulfill our husband’s vision. This was pleasing to God. 

Marriage was our only escape from my parents’ home. Until a man my father approved of came along (we now know from experience they do not exist) we served the family.

Literally served the family. 

We cooked, cleaned, organized the meals, helped my parents manage their budget, built their house, watched their younger children. All so we could “prepare to be wives and mothers.” Sometimes we would get paid, but nothing close to what an outside contractor would make. 

I would justify it in my head. Tell myself my work was paying for my rent. When I was in my mid-twenties, I extracted myself from building the house by actually paying rent. 

This positive thinking broke down for me, when I realized someone who was just renting a room would also have complete autonomy over their life. 

I never did—not while living with my parents. Autonomy was actually considered a dirty word.

Cult: a misplaced or excessive admiration for a particular person or thing.

I was once trying to describe to my therapist some of the more incestuous aspects of my relationship with my father. The words “Emotional Concubine” slipped out, and I sat in awe of the term for a moment. 

It’s exactly what it was. 

He would often say (and by “often” I do not exaggerate) that we should be “sitting at his feet” begging him to teach us. 

So we would reach down deep to come up with questions. He lit up like a kid in a pet shop whenever we asked his opinion on something or asked him to teach us. If too much time had passed without one of us seeking his advice or his wisdom, he would admonish us, saying he did not “have our hearts.” Jokingly, we would try stroking his ego: “You’ve just done such a good job teaching us so far, we don’t have any questions!” 

This usually worked to appease him and bolster his self-esteem for a few more days. 

It’s been ten years since I’ve lived with my parents. I still feel fake sometimes when I give someone a compliment. Especially when I’m saying something encouraging to a man. I ask myself, “Am I just trying to appease his ego? Or do I really mean this?” 

Feeding my father’s self-worth was a survival strategy. Everything—everything—revolved around him. And this, he said, was pleasing to God. 

Was it a cult? 

This is only a small assessment, with a few examples, but when I weigh all of this on the same scale with Steve Hassan’s BITE model (Behavior control, Information control, Thought control, Emotional control) it’s not difficult for me to call my family a cult. My recovery process after leaving my parents’ home mirrors the recovery process of those leaving cults—complete with Post Traumatic Stress. 

It was helpful for me to read Stephanie Gail Eagleson’s story, so if this post is helpful for one person who has experienced something similar, then this post is for that person.

~ Kathrine Spearing