How My Mother Avoided a Cult by Reading

    My mother was an amazing woman who had many stories to tell. She lived a life worthy of a book, although I'm sure she would disagree with me. Unfortunately, she is no longer here to tell me I'm wrong, as she passed away rather suddenly in July 2021. We were very close and her loss hit me hard.

    I might not have my mom anymore, but I do still have the stories she told. There is one particular story that still fascinates me and possibly does the best job of showing who my mom was: a voracious reader with a love of learning.

    But first, we need to go back to the beginning. My mom had always loved reading. In fact, she devoured any book she could get her hands on. This became a bit of a problem for her mother, who had a fairly sizable collection of romance books that today we might call spicy. Very Spicy. Mom's older sister, Virginia, had her eye on those books. Their mother had promised both Virginia and my mom that when they turned 16, they could read them. While my mother was only 6 at the time, her sister Virginia had only a year to go.

    One day, I can only assume Mom ran out of books she hadn't read yet. So, the only logical choice (at least to a reading-obsessed, rebellious 6-year-old) was to snag one of the forbidden romance books from her mother's bookshelf. 

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    She probably would have gotten away with it too, but she made the mistake of asking her mother what something in the book meant. Now, my mom didn't remember what she asked about, it could have been something innocent and her mother just noticed that the book was one of her romance novels. Personally, whenever I picture this interaction, my mother, at the ripe old age of 6, was halfway through a particularly raunchy love scene and didn't understand what one of the sexual innuendos meant. That makes the wide eyes and panic that my mother described on her own mother's face that much more hilarious to me. 

    

    Naturally, the book was immediately confiscated, but my panicked grandmother didn't stop there. As my mother said when telling me this story several years ago: 

"The Nazis couldn't have gone through that bookshelf faster than your grandma did!" 

While she thankfully didn't hold a smutty book burning, she did get rid of them, never giving Virginia a chance to read them (as she would remind my mother for decades).

    Fast forward about 13 years. Mom has graduated high school and started college at the University of Iowa, eager to enjoy college life and make new friends. One such friend was "Addison." My mom didn't have a lot of friends in high school, so when she found a friend who cared about her, she listened to Addison. Addison was a devout Christian, part of a sect of Christianity that I will refer to as a cult due to their extreme and disturbing beliefs as well as their tendency to traumatize their church members (I am a Christian myself, so I obviously do not view Christianity as a whole as a cult). 

    It wasn't long before my mom was ready to join Addison's church. The way she described the gospel, her church's beliefs, and her church community had my mom itching to sign up. Decades later, when she told me this story, she mentioned how this cult preys on young college students on their own for the first time. Even worse, they single out those who had difficult home lives and few friends. The idea of a supportive community to lean on is very tempting to those who have never had it before.

    So there she was, eagerly waiting for instructions on how to join a cult. The first step was simple for a bookish girl like her, all she had to do was memorize some Bible verses. She was handed a Bible and a list of verses to memorize, which was all she had to read. She didn't need to worry about any other part of the Bible, just those verses.

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    Unsurprisingly, my book-loving mother read more than those verses. A lot more. She read the entire Holy Bible cover-to-cover, from Genesis to Revelations. After reading all of it and seeing that those verses by themselves were taken wildly out of context by Addison's church, not to mention that the Bible seemed to contradict the teachings of said church, my mom got the heck out of there.

    While their friendship ended, my mom never seemed to have any hard feelings toward Addison. I have no way of knowing if she felt this way from the moment she turned her back on the cult or if this was after a lifetime of contemplation, but she always seemed to feel sorry for Addison. Mom didn't talk much about her, but she always said she was a nice girl. Addison wasn't being malicious, she genuinely thought that she was saving her new friend's soul. But Mom also knew that sometimes you have to cut ties with people who can't or won't see what's right in front of them. 

    Sometimes, as much as it might hurt, you have to pick up the book and read the whole truth, not just the pieces that make you comfortable.