You just sit quietly and be a good victim now, won’t you?
It was about 11 years ago that I was first drawn into contact with a modern day Christian cult. You will not find it alongside Jehovah’s Witnesses and Latter-Day Saints in an encyclopaedia of religions. In fact, it took me a while to realise that it was a cult. At first I thought that these were just Christians with some really weird and difficult pastoral problems. It gradually became clear that they were not really Christian problems at all. They were problems created by a subtle but very, very nasty distortion of what the bible teaches. This false teaching created an environment in which spiritual, physical, emotional, and sometimes sexual abuse thrived. God was not a gentle and loving Father but a moody tyrant in the sky - and human fathers were taking their lead from the bad example of this devilish false-god which they had cooked up in their own imaginations. It was worked out to different degrees, depending on the temperament of the parents, and could be particularly harsh ...