So lately I've been really into documentaries. I've been watching documentaries on Netflix on anything and everything, from Mitt Romney to asexuals to sushi. I've watched several documentaries on various cults, which I find extremely fascinating.
On a seemingly entirely different subject, I've recently really gotten into fitness and working out and (mostly) healthy eating. I've started a Love My Body project and have been focusing not so much on losing weight, but on feeling good about myself and embracing - and loving - the body I have. I can do a little to shape and sculpt it, but at the end of the day, the frame is the same and I am learning to love my curves.
One night, at a Zumba Toning class, a guy introduced himself to me and invited me to come along to a local fitness group. The Zumba Toning class already appeared to be made up of 30 or so people who clearly knew each other's fitness goals intimately, and they all rallied around encouraging me to join their group. I smiled and thanked them for the invite, and just barely stopped myself from quipping, "Thanks, but the last think I need is to join another cult!" I realized just in time that such a joke may not come across as funny as I thought it was.
Not only did I realize that calling their fit group a cult would be insulting, but it would also insinuate that I'd been involved in cults previously. And when one thinks "cult" they think documentary-worthy cults, like the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints or the Martha Marcy May Marlene variety. No, I was never in one of those. I never lived in a commune or was physically abused. All the religious organizations I've ever been involved with were more or less legitimate, mainstream churches. Some more mainstream, some definitely less.
Yet both of the two main churches I attended for a lengthy amount of time as an adult have been only two or three steps away from cultish. One church was loosely affiliated with a group that, if not actually considered a cult itself (though I'd consider it one), had some very cult-like offshoots; the other was literally a breakaway from a cult (even if the breakaway was decades ago).
It wasn't until I left that second church that I realized how cultish it had been. I'd been reading about the organization my church had separated itself from, and I was horrified by how similar they still were. While they'd relaxed rules about strictly not associating with outsiders or banning TV, and while thankfully the sexual misconduct that emerged from the original church was, as far as I know, absent in our current church, most of the rules were still pretty much the same, or at least had only changed in the last fifteen to twenty-five years (such as being allowed to marry "outside" the church). A couple of steps away from cult. And the freedom I felt when I left it! And the horror when I realized how long I'd just accepted it...
I must admit I now shy away from anything resembling a too closely-held belief system, whether it be political, social or especially religious. I was sucked into it for too long, even as an intelligent, thinking, supposedly not easily suggestible person. I'm afraid of getting sucked in again. Another cult is the last thing I need!
