Why I mourn for The Trump Cult
I grew up in a cult.
Fun, huh?
Born in the Independent Baptist Movement in Southwest Detroit where I grew up, we were about four hours away down I-94 from the hub, the source, the ‘palace’, the kingdom, of the biggest cult leader of the 20th century. Dr. Jack Hyles (neither an M.D or a PhD. the title was self given) of The First Baptist Church of Hammond, Indiana, ruled my world.
Cult (noun)
a misplaced or excessive admiration for a particular person or thing.
“a cult of personality surrounding the leaders”
synonyms:
obsession with · fixation on · mania for · passion for · idolization of · admiration for · devotion to · worship of · veneration of · reverence for
And by ruled my world, I mean his thoughts, his beliefs, his religious stances, his political views, his views on family, marriage, child raising, punishment, all of that ran my day to day life. My father was an acolyte of his as Hyles influence can not be overstated. Literature, cassette tapes, video tapes of sermons inundated my father’s collection.
The Jesus movement of the late 60s early 70s was hijacked by certain men (Hyles being one of them, Jerry Falwell being another although Hyles despised him) and turned into something completely different. Supposedly, it was just an offshoot of mainstream Christianity. An uber-Christian sect, some sort of hyper orthodox group of believers, with no convention to tie them together, but linked theologically and through a network of preachers.
The belief in God took a back seat to the worship of this man, Jack Hyles. Ironically, especially for Protestantism, he became their Pope. His words, his life, his beliefs became sacrosanct and this allowed him to manifest a kingdom of sorts, a feudal world in the midst of an American Democracy, and we were born into this world and apart from society as a whole.
Jack Hyles reach spanned the continent. He’d amassed power and at some point, God, as well as Christianity, had been jettisoned and all that remained was power. And as you might have guessed, with that amount of unchecked power, came an extraordinary amount of abuse.
This abuse didn’t just take place in his church but found its way into homes across the country (and possibly the world) thanks to the distribution of his literature, sermons, tapes, etc. including my own.
Being born into this movement handicaps my ability to say for certain as to why people join these organizations and abdicate their own power, and their own family’s safety and security by proxy. I can guess and that guess would be Jack Hyles used emotion, imagery, and plead to the darker side of humanity to ensnare people. Using God, using his charisma, using simple answers to complicated questions, using fear, using ‘salvation’, Jack cast a terrible spell over the masses and drew them to him like moths to a flame. And for sociopaths, Jack essentially chummed the waters and drew them in like sharks with the promise of unchecked power and authority over other human beings.
It seems to me that, in this movement, you were either a perpetrator or you were a victim. There was no in between.
I was a victim of physical, mental, spiritual, and arguably sexual abuse (and if not sexual at least a victim of humiliation) due in large part to the doctrine of a man who never stepped a single foot in my home but had the power to be present in it all the same.
After having left the movement, I wandered the world stumbling over myself smelling of sulfur from having spent nearly 20 years in that particular hell. I was completely disconnected from the world, recovering from unjustifiable abuse, and after 9/11 felt more kin to The Taliban, than I did to the average American. I ‘got them’, in a sense. Not that I wanted to run a plane into a building, but I understood — in some regard- how they came to be. Because I think their life and mine ran parallel with each other despite the separation of geography, language, skin color, and most obviously, religion.
Which leads me to believe that fundamentalism isn’t simply a part of religion, but is a lens in which a person views the world. That lens isn’t rosy. It’s dark. It’s distorted. It’s been manipulated against the world. And extracting that lens is difficult, grievously difficult, and takes resources that a poor person cannot afford because fundamentalism, at it’s core, is inherently political and it breeds in impoverished minds.
Marcus Aurelius, the Roman General and Emperor, once said that, “Man cannot be imprisoned. Not really. Because you can never imprison the mind.”
Well, he was wrong.
Fundamentalism imprisons the mind, and leaves the body to wander. Fundamentalism, as it is void of logic and reason, becomes volatile and unsustainable. The body is a ticking time bomb that is either going to explode (on the low end resulting in various types of abuse or on the high end the shooting death of an abortion doctor, 9/11, etc.) or it will implode and the person is snatched away and reconnects somehow to the world around them (a new job, a significant other, art, music, etc.).
For more than twenty years, I feel as if I’ve been on the run from that part of my past, from that movement as a whole, from anything that smacks of cultish behavior or cult of personality of religious or political figures and I’ve spent the same amount of time trying to extract the hooks of all that from my thought processes and deal with the impact of it on me. Through therapy, through medication, through meditation, the pathway out has been rigorous and time consuming.
Then Trump happens and I’ll be goddamned if I don’t feel like all that distance and all that space I’ve created between me and “them” suddenly evaporated and now it looms over me casting it’s terrible shadow once more.
But what’s different, at least this time, is that the secular world has finally gotten an eye-full of this crap for the past four years. An irresponsible, charismatic, stupid man has done to the U.S what Jack, Falwell, and the others, did to the Jesus Movement. And perhaps because of the groundwork Jack and others like him laid out (the moral majority of the 1980’s) made it all the easier for Trump to sweep in like some kind of noxious gas.
And smack right in the center of this is an unholy, unreasonable, fear.
And now we are here, together, at this moment in time. Joe Biden has won the presidency, and the world is on pins and needles awaiting inauguration day where Biden will take his place as the 46th President of the United States and Trump’s future will be left in the hands of fate and by fate I mean his bill collectors and the New York District Attorney’s office.
And in the middle of all this are his people. The Proud Boys. The Boogaloo Boys. etc. whatever they call themselves and people are afraid of what they’ll do. I’m afraid of what they’ll do now that their “leader” is gone. There is fear, there. Because they are fundamentalists. They were sure of the inevitability of Trump. And just like Jack’s case, evidence of wrong doing, testimony, you name it has all been laid out before them or has taken place in real time right in front of their eyes, and they rejected it.
(Trigger Warning: Link contains references to rape, abuse of children, and so forth.)
Just like those who worshiped Hyles, Trump followers rejected all the scandalous, atrocious, and horribly disturbing evidence against this man and those who went to prison around him.
There is also, for me, a deep sense of grief and mourning where they’re concerned as well as compassion, as foolish as that might be. My heart is absolutely broken for them because I know that empty space, that void, they exist in right now and I know how absolutely fucking terrified they are because that ‘certainty’ the ‘inevitability’ of Trump has been ripped away.
Donald Trump, just like Jack, sold them something that was never once on sale to begin with. Or, it was never theirs to sell as it existed free of charge. Freedom and Faith are two things that have no dollar value, that you possess by thought and deed, it does not exist in some prepackaged fashion to be traded like stock, it is not bound by geography, or by political party, or by religious affiliation. It is something inherent to person who dares to hold it inside of them. These things are fundamental truths in a world containing a whole lot of gray and a whole lot of change and uncertainty.
That’s good news. That’s gospel. That’s Triumph.
Why do you think the immigrant flocks to these shores? Not to take away these things but to reignite them with their passion that perhaps we’re missing or that we took for granted. That may change the average skin tone of the country but dammit, I think the bones are good. The structure is sound. The walls will hold because they have that belief, that faith, that freedom, embedded into their being as well because they heard it proclaimed into the furthest reaches of their circumstances.
I wish I could sit these people down, one by one, look them in the eye and tell them I have the answers to the questions that they have. I wish I could offer them certainty in a world that is ever changing, ever evolving, morphing away from the familiar into uncharted territory. I wish I could somehow, given my experience, show them an easier way of un-programming that fear, to take off those distorted glasses, and see that the world is good, and that hope springs eternal.
But that’s the nefariousness of fundamentalism. People can be indoctrinated en mass, but the journey away from it is individual and it takes time and space. It takes good love, a calm presence, space in which to fall the fuck apart sometimes, to let that fear wash over you so that you can mourn and grieve, and someone to hold you and witness that grief and that outburst of fear, and let you be unburdened by the fact that no one has all the answers to the mysteries of life, and that complicated questions NEVER have simple answers. That is the implosion.
But trust me, you’re born again (ironically) from it. You reemerge into the world a babe, unsteady on their feet, questioning everything and that’s a magnificent thing.
But one thing you will know for certain, is that if someone comes around saying they have all the answers, you’ll know they’re full of shit and should be avoided at all costs.
Otherwise, you explode — and the damage done to the self and to those around you is more than anyone can possibly bear.
Come back to us, Countrymen. We miss you.
