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I've been thinking more about the dynamic of the Manson Family & similarities to the evangelical Christianity I was raised with.
When I started to leave the evangelical church, I went through a process of looking at what I saw as my "options" -- everything from atheism to Buddhism to Wicca to Catholicism -- studying what they were & how they worked & sort of trying them on for size in a mental way.
I wanted to understand religion itself -- why did it exist? How did it work? Why did people believe in one thing and not another? How did people know they had started to believe in something? How did they know they had stopped believing in something?
And for me, I had rejected so many things I was taught, but why did some of them still resonate? Why did some of them still have a hold on me? What did my actual mystical experiences mean?
I eventually started categorizing what we call "religion" as having several distinct parts, where "mythology" was distinct from "mysticism" was distinct from "teachings" was distinct from "usual practice," etc.
So, if, for example, you're a Catholic, there's the church as an institution, a set of teachings (catechism), a practice (going to mass), a mythology (Bible stories), a mysticism (transubstantiation, holy water), a culture (Mardi Gras), etc.
Even very devout & dedicated Catholics vary quite a bit in terms of their attachment to these various aspects of their faith. For example, nuns who go against the church institution, or the faithful who ignore church anti-contraception teachings.
As an evangelical I was raised to believe I had a "personal relationship with Jesus Christ" but nobody could ever explain to my satisfaction what that was actually supposed to mean.
Like, in a practical sense, how does a "personal" relationship differ from any other kind of relationship you could have with Jesus? Worship, regard, veneration, following, believing in, believing on, praying to, looking to, etc.?
Eventually I concluded that it didn't mean anything, it was just an idiom, and using it was a way to signal that you were a particular sort of Christian. However, the evangelical church under DJT has got me thinking maybe I was wrong about that, or at least, incomplete.
And looking at the Manson Family, the ex members of the cult who speak out in the documentary, talk about how the Family changed over time --
From being about Manson's ideas of "peace & love" hippie stuff, to Manson himself as a godlike figure, to being radicalized and militarized for a coming battle, with Manson as the General.
It's almost like, those are the three phases of religion itself. From teachings, to absolute veneration of the central figure, to war. From the beatitudes, to worship of Jesus as God, to the Inquisition.
Of course, in Christianity, most of that has played out without an actual Jesus around to tell us anything -- neither "love your neighbor as yourself" OR "arm yourself for the coming battle"
I got both, as teachings within the evangelical church -- but I thought I understood that "love your neighbor" was real and "onward Christian soldiers" was metaphorical. But what if it was always the other way around?
Evangelicals, with their idea of a "personal" relationship with Jesus Christ -- who, I must remind you, died 2,000 years ago if he ever lived at all -- create a kind of empty place where a cult leader can insert himself.
And for years most of our cult leaders were people like Billy Graham, who told us to believe in him as a Jesus substitute, but didn't particularly want to arm us for the coming war.
That empty place -- that place where a cult leader can be inserted -- is what DJT occupies. And DJT is such an incredibly poor Jesus substitute that it boggles the imagination that evangelicals could embrace him as such, but --
It's entirely obvious that they do. All that talk of praying for him, supporting him while he's attacked by terrible demonic outside forces, how no other president has ever done more for their people, that is 100% how cult followers talk about their cult leader.
If you can understand how the Manson Family drifted from peace & love to slaughtering on his command, then you can understand how evangelical Christians have lined up behind DJT.
And it's because the Manson Family believed in MANSON, not peace & love, much as evangelicals believe in JESUS, not in anything Jesus had to say.
Evangelicals believe in Jesus as a cult leader, not as a teacher. It doesn't make them "fake Christians" -- in fact, their belief in Jesus as cult leader more than teacher is probably what causes them to call other Christians "fake."
To the cult faithful, someone who merely thinks the cult leader had some good ideas , but they wouldn't follow him off a cliff or anything, that person is an apostate.
Christianity is a huge worldwide religion that has been around for roughly 2,000 years, which might as well be forever, so you can't say it's any ONE thing, it obviously contains multitudes.
But that also means you can have toxic cults develop 100% within Christianity.
As an evangelical, I was raised to see certain Christian sects, such as Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses, as cults, and also to see that as bad, incorrect.
But the view I was taught, of Mormons or JWs as a cult, was entirely about doctrine, not practice. They were a cult because they believed incorrect things, not because they knocked on your door to try to convert you.
Evangelicals have to believe that, of course, because if harassing strangers to get them to join your church makes you a cult, GUESS WHO IS ALSO A CULT?
Meanwhile, in terms of official spoken doctrine, evangelicals remain fairly close to the standard, traditional, Nicene Creed approach, which they share with other Protestants and Catholics. So they can't be a cult. Right?
Except there's that "personal relationship with Jesus Christ" business. This idea of Jesus as a LIVING presence in your life, who walks beside you RIGHT NOW & tells you what to do.
As a child, I thought that was metaphor, & maybe a little mysticism. Because obviously Jesus, the person, died 2,000 years ago and went -- if you're a Christian -- to heaven, to sit beside his father.
So if you say "Jesus was in my life" you had to be talking about how the IDEA of Jesus was in your life, right? And maybe a mystical spiritual connection of some kind, like if you pray and feel a presence or whatever?
But, even as a child, I made a very bad evangelical because I am not literal-minded enough in some ways, while far TOO literal in other ways, and I think I never really GOT the religion I was being indoctrinated with, not the way I was supposed to.
I never really GOT that I was supposed to relate to Jesus the way the Manson Family related to Charles Manson.
And that this cult follower relationship with Jesus was supposed to be readily transferable to the same cult follower relationship toward whoever the church deemed to be a Jesus stand-in.
And I think I finally understand something I've been trying to understand for thirty years: how Jesus can still mean so much to me as a TEACHER, but I can't be an evangelical because he's not my cult leader.
In a cult like the Manson Family, the cult leader can turn on a dime from preaching "love everybody" to "hate these specific people" and nobody questions it --
Or, if you DO question it, you're probably starting the process of leaving the cult.
As an evangelical child, I was TOLD that we followed the words of Jesus, which had been written down in English for hundreds of years, and I was okay with that, but then I was confused --
Because the church did so many things that were not only not found at all in the words of Jesus, they were actively contradictory to those words.
And I think I finally understand: that's because, in evangelical theology, at any point, some human could become the designated Jesus and give a new teaching, and that would become the Word.
And at that point the faithful would retrofit the original words, cut them apart and shuffle them around and add commentary & speculation, until they could be made to seem as if they supported the new Word.
That's mostly the end of my thought. It's not just that DJT isn't Jesus, and modern evangelicals are bizarrely trying to fit him into that role. It's that even Jesus doesn't have to be a cult leader the way evangelicals want him to be. He can just be a teacher. The end.
