While researching cults, I began to wonder if I’d been raised in one

It’s so easy to be judgy about people who get caught up in a cult, right? Even if you don’t want to be. I mean, it wouldn’t happen to us. We’d see right through all that weird stuff – like the specific language that means nothing to outsiders, knowing that only believers are on the right path, the rules which make no sense, and the charismatic leader who is clearly a bit off.

Hmmm. I recognised quite a few of those ingredients. I hadn’t joined a cult. But maybe I’d been born into one. We held a comprehensive set of beliefs that, without a normalising lens, are hard to get your head around. Such as Mary’s virgin birth.Then there were the rules about when you ate and what you ate, such as no eating before Mass, and no meat on Fridays, which I loved because we got to have fish and chips once a week – religiously. You had to regularly confess your sins, which led to considerable pre-reconciliation whispering as us kids figured out which sin we could make up this week.

Obviously, it was a unique set of conditions that meant I experienced cult-like conditions as a child. Very few people can now live in that kind of isolation. We have the internet, which beams in all sorts of ideas all the time. As well, the modern Catholic Church has shared leadership between priests and parishioners, so authority no longer rests in a single godlike being.

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