Note: The first edition of this article was originally completed in 1990, based on the author's personal experiences with the Worldwide Church of God from 1978 to 1984. While many changes have occurred in this church since that time, it is the author's personal contention that doctrinal changes are completely irrelevant to the core of the Worldwide Church of God's destructiveness, that is, the cruel psychological manipulation of its membership.This treatment of its members is common to many harmful groups, and understanding how people are led into this situation is more generally useful than details of one small, nearly-defunct church group.
1. Getting Out: the Aftermath
I VIVIDLY REMEMBER the Worldwide Church of God minister coming into my home in 1978 to counsel me for baptism. He stopped at my bookcase to look at the various books and booklets I had picked up, each making its case against the Worldwide Church of God. Not only had I read every WWCOG publication I had been able to get my hands on for the previous three years (including their Bible correspondence course), but everything I could find that spoke against them. Above all, I wanted to know just what I was getting into.
"Checked us out pretty good, have you?" the minister said with a warm smile, perusing those books he had not seen before. "I always like to see what they're saying now." He asked me if I had any misgivings based on anything I had read, and I hadn't. The attacks on the Worldwide Church of God focused mainly on their doctrines, which I had come to agree with, or on confusingly-detailed accounts of headquarters politics involving strange names and conflicts I did not understand. Every organization has its political problems, people and organizations being what they are, so I did not see their relevance to my own quest for Truth, as I saw it then, with a capital "T."
Six years after my baptism, having just left the Worldwide Church of God, I was shocked to find myself experiencing withdrawal symptoms more intense than I had felt at the breakup of my marriage. For more than a year, I had repeated nightmares; longer still, bouts of free-floating terror, depression, hysteria, continuous guilt, and an overall sense of dislocation of reality. When I left the church, I felt myself stepping into an alien world that appeared to exist on a science-fiction plane: I could not recognize ordinary life as being real. I showed classic symptoms of someone who had been brainwashed, not the least being my lingering loyalty to "The Church," despite how devastated it had left me.
I felt I had left reality behind, and had stepped into a surreal dream, as though someone else had taken over my body, and I were merely an onlooker, watching my outer shell move through unusual space, while inside I was paralyzed and confused. (Years later, "Amy," a friend who had also left the church, told me that after she left, she would be speaking to me, and throughout the conversation, I would seem to be at a great distance, my voice far away, although I did not seem to diminish in size--as if an insulating film separated her from me and from everything else outside her.)
