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…I believe, biography, any and every biography, is inherently theological, in the sense that it contains already…the news of the gospel…We are each one of us parables. ~William Stringfellow1

A long, long time ago, in what feels like a galaxy far away from my here and now, two friends and I took a multi-state road trip. We stayed overnight with a family friend of one of us. We got into this family friend’s house late. Three AM late. After my friend, whom I’ll call Billy, and I woke up, we sat in our host’s cramped kitchen. For the next (probably) two or three hours, he enlightened our feeble understandings concerning the workings of the spiritual world. We came to find out and believe that our other friend and traveling companion (whom I will call Thaddeus) was: Possessed by devil spirits…because he smoked cigarettes (never mind that I also smoked cigarettes at that point). And we were instructed that we should leave our friend behind because he was a hopeless case. Our host (whom I’ll call Phil) spoke in phrases like “Don’t you know that…,” “You probably thought, but I’ll teach you…” He was the Teacher, and we were naive Students.

And so it was that my friend Billy and I (nearly) left our mutual friend Thaddeus in a cornfield (into which he had disappeared while we stopped for gas after departing Phil’s house). We did not want to become contaminated by his demons. We were better than that…

“I think we should just leave him.”

“Yeah, I mean, he is possessed!”

At the end of the day, Thaddeus and I had both somehow ended up needing to spend the night at a hotel while our friend Billy enjoyed the hospitality of mutual friends (?) extended to him–but perhaps not to us. I cannot quite remember why Billy got to stay there while Thad and I went to find room at the inn. Maybe Billy didn’t want to be contaminated. Maybe Thad (and I at that point) had had enough of the weirdness of that morning and wanted some space from that. By the way, dear reader, while I was freaked out by all of this, none of this was foreign to my experience of life up to that point. I had spent much of my life fearing devil spirit possession. We didn’t believe in Hell. But we believed in the devil. We believed that anyone could become “born again” of the devil and thus forever, hopelessly, separated from God. We believed and we feared. But we could never admit our fear to ourselves or each other. And so it festered and bore sour fruit.

But, mercifully, alienation is rarely completely complete. I desire connection with people strongly enough that even when I have broken a relationship, I often find the grace within me to lament my broken edges that have scraped and wounded another. That is what happened to Thaddeus. Later that night, I paid for our meal at a restaurant. We smoked cigarettes together, and he recounted the hurts that he endured from Billy, Phil’s, and my words and actions of condemnation and abandonment. We had both been hurt like that before and bonded over our common experience of pain. I repented of my cowardly actions. The next day we talked to our friend Billy. He acknowledged his harmful actions but expressed some reservations about this embarrassing episode getting back to his parents.

Just a year before that painful event, I had been at two Teen Camps put on by the religious groups2 with which Billy, Thad, and I were affiliated (by virtue of our respective births into the group that our parents had joined long ago.) I was sixteen, deeply depressed, and very suicidal. That, of course, wasn’t the whole of me, but it (suicidal depression) often wholly consumed me. What also consumed me was the fear that devil spirits caused my depression and suicidal ideation. For that is what I had been taught from as far back as I can remember. I was depressed and suicidal. And I feared depression and suicidality and what they said about me. Was I “born of the wrong seed”? Would Jesus come back for my family and friends but leave me on earth to perish forever in my demonic possession?

At those camps, I struggled to speak in tongues and interpret and prophesy. Many other teens struggled with those elementary (within that group) skills. So, the leaders decreed that we would be placed in groups in which we would practice these skills (by which we assured ourselves that we were saved and not just kind people– like Buddhists). I made the foolish mistake of confessing self-doubt concerning my ability to speak in tongues and interpret and prophesy. By the end of the second teen camp, I had been blamed for “ruining” these practice groups for the other participants (by expressing my doubts about whether I could perform these skills seen as essential within those groups). A youth leader had told me that I was using up my final chances with God.

Image Credit: Chibuzo Petty.

On the greyhound bus journey back to my home state, I sat next to a woman who began to tell me about her son’s tragic car wreck that had left him severely injured. She seemed to intuit that I was in pain and was able to hear her pain. She saw that I was chilled from the bus’ air conditioning and lent me a blanket. When I arrived at my destination, I had a few hours to wander around the city before my mom came to pick me up. While walking around the city, I ran into a man with whom I struck up a conversation. We eventually came to a city park, where he introduced me to his wife. He then asked, “What do you think about homelessness?” I responded with a prepackaged formula that I had grown up hearing in various formulations: “People are homeless because they don’t believe the word of God.” He replied, “My wife and I are homeless.” Embarrassed, I sat with them. We talked for a while and shared what we each had that the other needed. They shared their graciousness in the face of my pretentious judgment. They also shared their knowledge of free things to do and see in the city. I shared what little travel money I had (which I no longer needed because my journey was complete) because they needed medicine. Through their presence and communion, I felt the winds of redemption.

I share these stories as a way to talk about how white people often abandon each other and other humans. We abandon those who embarrass us or otherwise “hold us back.” This is in no way surprising given that the history of European people becoming white is a history of forgetting and suppressing the truth about oneself and others. This truth is that aside from a small segment of very wealthy Europeans, most Europeans came to the American Colonies and then to America as poor or lower-class workers. Many came in chains as indentured servants. Others came as farmers or free laborers, but they were often indebted and in danger of falling into poverty. Speaking of the Virginia colony in the 17th century, Nancy Isenberg states, “As a small privileged group of planters acquired land, laborers, and wealth, those outside the inner circle were hard-pressed to escape their lower status. Those who did become poor tenants found that little had changed in their condition: they were often forced [to] do the same work they had done as servants. A sizable number did not survive their years of service.”3 According to historian E.E. Rich, “apart from the Puritan migration to the northeastern colonies, something between a half and two-thirds of all white emigrants to the Colonies were convicts, indentured servants or redemptions.”4 According to historian Theodore Allen, following a significant interracial uprising in the late 17th century in Virginia, the wealthy ruling classes began to solidify the lifelong bondage of African (racialized as black) indentured servants on the one hand and promotion of white identity amongst all people in that colony of European descent–including poor laborers and indentured servants. He argues that this move by the wealthy planter class placed newly designated white laborers, tenant farmers, smallholders, and indentured servants permanently above enslaved-for-life African laborers. He further argues that this racialized development in the social hierarchy of Colonial Virginia failed to significantly improve the quality of life of poor and working-class European Americans but instead worked to secure their loyalty to the ruling class over and against enslaved African Americans.5 Historian David Roediger echoes these themes as he writes about how white-working class people in the 18th and 19th came to embrace their white identity as a way to clearly separate themselves from black enslaved workers. Instead of rebelling against their masters, they reconceptualized themselves as having similar interests to their masters and participated in their own oppression and the oppression of enslaved African Americans.6 Thus, in Noel Ignatiev’s words, “…whiteness does not exempt people from exploitation, it reconciles them to it. It is for those who have nothing else.”7 Baldwin makes a similar point when discussing how Europeans became white by forgetting their previous identities.8 These previous identities were ones with histories and experiences of suffering. This repudiation of histories of suffering makes us white people bastards because it makes us think that we are heirs and joint-heirs with those few who rule rather than with all who labor and suffer. Because of their union with the suffering servant named Jesus,9 Christians should know that any union with a different savior than Jesus–i.e., saviors who preach salvation through getting rich by causing suffering to others–is idolatrous and bound for ultimate failure. Like many children born to un-official unions between a wealthy person and a poor person and consequently disowned by the wealthy partner (exploiter), so too are poor and working-class whites (and many middle-class whites who have “risen above” their poorer ancestry) borne of the abusive and coerced union between their working-class, poor and indentured forebears and the colonial ruling classes.10

A significant way that poor and working-class white people, and sometimes “uneducated” middle- and upper-middle-class white people, are disowned in the present is by some progressive, moderate, and conservative white people who self-righteously assert their own moral goodness by pointing fingers at those bad racists. Stereotypes of poor white people living in mobile homes, flying confederate flags, and spouting bigoted nonsense abound in this era. An era in which white nationalism and overt white supremacist organizations have troubled the imagination of the mainstream in ways that they had not a decade ago. I remember conversing with folks during the run-up to the 2016 presidential election who seemed intent on either demonizing12 As a Christian, I found this kind of moral maneuvering ridiculous and unnecessary. Why could poor and working-class white people not be both victims of economic exploitation (which they most certainly have been historically and continue to be in the present) and sinners (as are we all) who participate in the system of sin and death known as white supremacy? I had a problem with the Hillary Clinton approach of labeling some poor, working-class, and less-educated white people “deplorables”–not because I doubt that they are deplorable in many ways but because that designation fails to account for the ways that all white people (and all humanity for that matter) are caught up in living deplorable lives. (If they are deplorable, so am I.) I had a problem with the Donald Trump approach because it not only failed to acknowledge the wretchedness of our nation’s sins but rather glorified and reveled in their continuation. Both Clinton and Trump live lives of lies that perpetuate the exploitation of all poor and working-class people. In part, they both do this by perpetuating the scapegoating mentality that animates much of white supremacist imagination. Clinton justified herself and her supporters by disowning those judged as deplorable and consequently her and her supporters’ own participation in deplorable politics. I am no stranger to Clinton’s deplorable politics of abandonment. I had done the same to my friend on a road trip. The bastard gospel that formed me to be fearful of rejection also formed me to quickly reject anyone who might contaminate me with their demons. Thus I have no problem saying, “We’re all bastards, but God loves us anyway.”13 We as people, and particularly as white people, are routinely abandoned and exploited by the very powers that promise to protect us. These same powers teach us to routinely abandon unworthy others as a sacrifice necessary to secure and retain the protections promised by the powers of death/whiteness.

My bastardly background likely played a large part in leading me to like Will Campbell and his profanely poignant gospel utterance. In one of Campbell’s books, Brother to a Dragonfly, he chronicles his involvement in the Civil Rights Movement alongside his friendship with his older brother Joe. At a pivotal moment, Campbell describes how he comes to see both his recently murdered friend–Jonathan Daniel–and Jonathan’s murderer–Thomas Coleman–as bastards whom God dearly loves. Jonathan was a brave white Episcopal seminarian and civil rights worker. Thomas Coleman was a bigoted white sheriff’s deputy. Jonathan used his last breaths to lay down his life by taking a shotgun blast aimed at seventeen-year-old Ruby Sales (a now-legendary civil rights activist and public theologian). Thomas used his breath to cruelly snuff out the life of another. There was no question in Will’s mind that Thomas was a bastard. Campbell describes his realization that Jonathan was also a bastard and that God also loved Thomas as a conversion experience. Over the next page, he describes his painful realization that he and Thomas are of the same kind. That they are kin.14 Campbell meditates on how poor and working-class white people were misled to believe that their common good lay with the white planter elite. He says, “…no wonder, as [she]he [a poor, working-class white person] strived to match the cultural and economic status of the aristocrat [she]he became a living denial of [her]his own servanthood, teaching [her]his grandchildren that [her]his fathers landed at Plymouth Rock.”15 Campbell realizes in this section that, although he was certainly right to fight for civil rights for his Black siblings, he had neglected to find ways to preach liberation to his own people–poor and working-class whites. He states that he “…like many another Southern liberal, had tried to deny that history [of the white poor and working-class’s origins in indentured servitude], to flee from it, to so insulate myself from it in learning and action and sophistication that it would appear never to have existed.”16 Is this not what many of us white people who label ourselves “progressive,” “liberal,” “anti-racist,” “leftist,” do with our own histories? Do we not disown our white supremacy-soaked pasts? And disown our friends and family members who wholeheartedly worship and serve at the altar of white supremacy?

I speak none of these words in condemnation unless I am also included. And so, I speak these words to recognize my complicity in this disowning of white people’s painful pasts and presents. I recognize this in some ways because—like all white people—I also grew up in a cult.17 I learned a false history that malformed my moral sensibilities. I learned to run from people whose problems might taint my appearance of righteousness. I learned to abandon others and thus my own soul. This is the essence of cultic training of white supremacy: abandon and disown your Black kin so that you can be better than them, abandon and forget your history of poverty and servitude so that you can be better than it, abandon and forget and make fun of poor white people whenever you feel a need for a (white) power boost.

And yet, “…God loves us anyway.” This is truly astounding. We are both of the prodigal children in Luke 15. We are the deplorable child who unabashedly embraces white nationalism and supremacy and wastes our lives and the gifts of God through profligate living. We are the older (deplorable) child who pedantically judges–but does not seek to redeem– the former group under the banner of a narrow type of anti-racism. But God loves us anyway. We call cops bastards (sometimes in a demonizing kind of way) but fail to recognize our common bastard hood with them.18 But God loves us anyway and shows us that Jesus destroys the white supremacist works of the devil that produce and sustain people like us and frees us to enter into the kin-dom19 of God alongside all our BIPOC kin and all of humanity at the great banquet feast.20

How shall we respond? Some of us will continue to attend #blacklivesmatter protests–and we should because Jesus is alive and active in this struggle against the powers of death. Furthermore, we should press on towards the goals of true repentance, which entails restoration and reparation. Towards this end and in no way opposed to it, some of us may be called to preach the Gospel of reconciliation, to evangelistically proclaim the Good Shepherd, who seeks and saves our white kin who are lost (yes, our very own white-washed souls). And perhaps those of us called to this ministry are already “in the place just right”21 to do this kind of work. We likely have family and friends and parts of our own distorted souls that need to hear and believe the good news that we’re all bastards, but God loves us anyway. That whiteness is not the last word about us. That its judgments fail and fall under the gracious and merciful judgments of God in Jesus Christ.22 That its way of ordering the world is false and judged so by the God who calls all to enter the kin-dom in which each member works for the common good and each member receives an abundance of good from the goodness that all share in common as a gift from God.

And so my dear friends, siblings in Christ, my dearly beloved bastards, we have work to do. We have work to do because God in Christ through the Spirit has worked, continues to work, and will work for the redemption of all of humanity and all of creation. The Good Shepherd is calling all of God’s lost sheep to return to the pastures of peace. Let us join in this rich work and lay aside everything that hinders us from this task. I am chronically unfaithful to this task and need y’all’s help. Please join me.

Epilogue

You may be wondering “What kind of group did the author grow up in?” The groups were “splinter-groups” of The Way International. The Way International was founded by a man named Victor Paul Weirwille in Ohio in 1942 (although there is some debate about the accuracy of that date). The Way rode the crest of the Jesus People movement in the late 60s and into the 70s and reached its zenith in those years. The group held to non-trinitarian beliefs, emphasized the importance of speaking in tongues and other charismatic gifts (termed manifestations in the group), taught that the Bible is the revealed Word of God, that the Bible interprets itself, and that the group’s class Power For Abundant Living could help a person learn the keys necessary to understand the Bible and manifest God’s power to lead a more than abundant life. It mixed Norman Vincent Peale style positive thinking with a charismatic emphasis on gifts of the spirit, a brand of conservative politics and family values with a kind of libertine ethos. There were (and are) a number of unhealthy, manipulative, and abusive group dynamics that have led many to term it and many of its offshoots “cults” or, more clinically precise– “closed, high demand groups.”23 For any who want to learn more about The Way, I would recommend Losing The Way by Kristen Skedgell.24 For more information on why some clinical mental health workers term some groups cults, I would recommend reading “Robert Jay Lifton’s Eigh Criteria of Thought Reform (Brainwashing, Mind Control) by the eminent clinician, researcher, and cult-expert Steven Hassan, that exposits the eminent psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton’s criterion for determining if a group qualifies as a cult.25

The groups I grew up in were offshoots from The Way International. (For people in the Brethren world, you can think of the relationship between the groups that I grew up in and the Way as being similar to the relationship of the original Brethren who emigrated from Germany and the various Brethren denominations that have branched from that original root-stock. I am not making a one-to-one comparison but rather drawing what might be a useful analogy.) With some reservations due to the ambiguity of the term, I tend to refer to these offshoots as cults or “closed, high demand groups.” I would emphasize here that people don’t generally join cults. They join groups that espouse an incredibly idealistic ideology that seemingly makes sense of the many senseless and ambiguous parts of human life. People join groups that feel like a family that they never had. It is only later that (some) people realize that they got more (and less) than they bargained for in joining a group like The Way. I have talked with people from more mainstream backgrounds than mine who seem incredulous about the fact that many college-educated people join “closed high demand groups.” I would caution anyone who thinks this way to pause because I think that this very attitude makes it difficult for people to think and talk realistically about the myriad forces that influence people to join and stay in such groups. I would also invite people to consider the ways in which demagogic leaders of these groups are similar to and different from the followers who flock to them. Finally, I would caution anyone tempted to poke fun at these groups from making that their go-to response to these tragic institutions and the people who have fallen prey to them. I was born into these groups that ironically emphasized free will. I was likely drawn to elements of Mennonite, Quaker, and Brethren (I have been involved with each of these broad groups in that chronological order) life and thought in part because they, to varying degrees: take seriously the call to follow Jesus as disciples, emerged as protest groups against dominant forms of Christianity, emphasize Bible study towards the end of “doing the Word,” and finally they each emphasize living in love towards neighbors, enemies, and God. Some of these qualities somewhat align with my upbringing and some contradict it. This speaks to how everything in creation can become distorted by the powers of sin and death and how these same gifts of creation are redeemed by God in Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit. Thanks be to God!

Image Credit: Miami Valley Music Therapy.

Isaac Zika is a husband, part-time piano teacher and music therapist, full-time parent, part-time seminary student, gardener, carpenter, and also a congregant at West Charleston Church of the Brethren. He lives with his wife Julie and their two kids, Arthur and Rosemary, near Greenville Ohio.

  1. William Stringfellow,  A Simplicity of Faith: My Experience in Mourning, (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1982), 20.
  2. If you are wondering, as I would be now, “what kind of group is the writer talking about?”, then take heart because this shall be revealed at the end of the essay. If you are one who is anxious to know,  like I am, and cannot wait until then, then skip to the Epilogue and read up on this group there.
  3. Nancy Isenberg, White Trash: The 400 Year Untold History of Class in America, (New York: Viking, 2016),  26. Also of note: “During the 1600s, far from being ranked as valued British subjects, the great majority of early colonists were classified as surplus population and expendable “rubbish,” a rude rather than robust population. The English subscribed to the idea that the poor dregs would be weeded out of English society in four ways. Either nature would reduce the burden of the poor through food shortages, starvation, and disease, or, drawn into crime, they might end up on the gallows. Finally, some would be impressed by force or lured by bounties to fight and die in foreign wars, or else be shipped off to the colonies. Such worthless drones as they could be removed to colonial outposts that were in short supply of able-bodied laborers and, lest we forget, young “fruitful” females. Once there, it was hoped, the drones would be energized as worker bees” (12-13).
  4. E. E. Rich, “Colonial Settlement and its labour problems,” In vol. 4 of The Cambridge History of Europe, edited by E. E. Rich and C. H. Wilson. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 342, quoted in Michael Perelman, The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), 248.
  5. Allen, Theodore W. “Summary of the Argument of The Invention of the White Race by its author, Theodore W. Allen.” Cultural Logic 1, no. 2 (Spring 1998). http://www.elegantbrain.com/edu4/classes/readings/race-allen.html & http://www.elegantbrain.com/edu4/classes/readings/race-allen2.html 
  6. Roediger, David. “The White Question.” In Race Traitor. 1, no. 1. Cambridge, MA. 104-107. Accessed November 22, 2021. https://libcom.org/files/Race%20Traitor%2001%20(1993%20Winter).pdf
  7. Ignatiev, Noel. “The Point Is Not to Interpret Whiteness but to Abolish It.” Talk given at the Conference “The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness” University of California, Berkeley, April 11-13, 1997.
  8. Baldwin, James. “Black English: A Dishonest Argument.” in The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings. New York: Pantheon Books. 2010. Accessed on November 20, 2021. https://archive.org/details/crossofredemptio0000bald_k3q5/page/128/mode/2up And, Baldwin, James. “On Being “White”… and Other Lies.” In Black on White: Black Writers on What it Means to be White, ed. by David Roediger. New York: Schocken Books, 1998. Accessessed November 16, 2021. https://bannekerinstitute.fas.harvard.edu/files/bannekerinstitute/files/on_being_white.and_other_lies_baldwin_0.pdf
  9. cf. Romans 6:1-23, 2 Corinthians 4:1-17, Galatians 2:20.
  10. See Brett Gershon and Isaac Zika, “Collapse or Eschaton?: A Soteriology of Faith Against Law and Order” Rock! Paper! Scissors!: Tools for anarchist+Christian thought and action, 3, no. 1, “Exit Left: Fugitivity and Destituent Power” guest ed. Katrina Kniss. https://www.jesusradicals.com/rockpaperscissors-427450/collapse-or-eschaton for an explanation of the author’s use of the word “bastard” in this particular way which is counter to its archaic usage as a slur cast towards people born of non-normative unions.
  12. or exonerating the so-called “white working-class.”11

    See these articles for a complexification of the designation “white working-class” as it has been employed by many in the news media to explain the popularity and electoral success of Donal Trump. Kathryn Royster, “New Political Science Research Debunks Myths About White Working-Class Support for Trump,” posted on Vanderbilt University’s website News Research webpage, July 29, 2020. https://as.vanderbilt.edu/news/2020/07/29/political-science-research-debunks-myths-about-white-working-class-support-for-trump/ Nicholas Carnes and Noam Lupu, “It’s time to bust the myth: Most Trump voters were not working class,” The Washington Post, June 5, 2017. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/06/05/its-time-to-bust-the-myth-most-trump-voters-were-not-working-class/

  13. Campbell, William D. Brother to a Dragonfly. NewYork: The Continuum Publishing Corporation, 1998. 220.
  14. Ibid. 217-227.
  15. Ibid., 226
  16. Ibid., 225.
  17. I acknowledge that labeling such a large group and ideology as “white people” and “whiteness” as a cult is controversial. I am using cult in a less technical way here than would a clinician or researcher. I am hoping that it may serve as a helpful metaphor for white people as we come to grips with how white supremacy entraps us in oppressive systems.
  18. This theme is more fully developed in this article: Brett Gershon and Isaac Zika, “Collapse or Eschaton?: A Soteriology of Faith Against Law and Order” Rock! Paper! Scissors!: Tools for anarchist+Christian thought and action, 3, no. 1, “Exit Left: Fugitivity and Destituent Power” guest ed. Katrina Kniss. https://www.jesusradicals.com/rockpaperscissors-427450/collapse-or-eschaton
  19. I use this term as it is used by Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz in “Identificate con Nosotras: A Mujerista Christological Understanding,” in Jesus in the Hispanic Community: Images of Christ from Theology to Popular Religion, ed. Harold J. Recinos and Hugo Magallanes (Louisville: Westminster John Know, 2009), 240-265.  Reta Halteman Finger says that “…research indicates that the term was introduced into public discourse by Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz who said she learned it from her friend Georgene Wilson, O.S.F.” See Finger,“From Kingdom to Kin-dom and beyond,” Christian Feminism Today. 2013. https://eewc.com/kingdom-kindom-beyond/ For a different perspective on Kingdom language see: Callid Keefe-Perry,“Why I Still Say Kingdom”  https://youtu.be/j5cDov2UNxM. I am drawn to the kin-dom language, especially after reading the essay by Isasi-Diaz mentioned above, more than I am drawn to kingdom language. I think that kin-dom can evoke themes of the incarnation and the Imago Dei in that those theological ideas speak of God in Christ through the Holy Spirit making us kindred with the Trinity. I can appreciate that Keefe-Perry wants to stress the reality of God which is important because–in my view– many of us who hold Christian left/progressive convictions can lose sight of God in our radical politics. However, I am not sure that I am convinced that the word Kingdom is that helpful towards that end. For an excellent take on how Jesus subverts the concept of kingship see unKingdom, Repenting of Christianity by Ashe Van Steenwyk (FKA Mark Van Steenwyk), [2nd Edition] (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2020).
  20. Cf. Luke 14:15-24.
  21. Allusion to the Shaker Hymn “Tis A Gift To Be Simple.”
  22. For a wonderful exposition on this theme, see Rowan Williams, “The Judgment of Judgment: Easter in Jerusalem” in Resurrection: Interpreting the Easter Gospel, (London: Darton Longman & Todd, 2014).
  23. See Leona Furnari, “Born of Raised in Closed, high-Demand Groups: Developmental Considerations,” Spiritual Abuse Resources e-News 4, no. 3 (2005). https://www.spiritualabuseresources.com/articles/born-or-raised-in-closed-high-demand-groups-developmental-considerations
  24. Kristen Skedgell, Losing The Way: A Memoir of Spiritual Longing, Manipulation, Abuse, and Escape, (Point Richmond, CA: Bay Tree Publishing, 2008).
  25. Steven Hassan, “Robert Jay Lifton’s Eight Criteria of Thought Reform (Brainwashing, Mind Control), Freedom of Mind Resource Center, May 30, 2019. https://freedomofmind.com/robert-jay-liftons-eight-criteria-of-thought-reform-brainwashing-mind-control/
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