I believe most cult leaders just sale their bull so they can get laid. Same as most pastors and ministers. I don’t know why some women get so turned on by a religion that preaches that women are the lesser gender. I watch these guys talk in interviews and I think, those people can’t really be falling for this garbage… can they?
Lol – his name is even “Bent”. There’s a clue.
At any rate there’s all sorts of psychological explanations for this, such as being part of a clued-in minority and therefore special, that attracts certain kinds of people.
IMO the only difference between a full-on “out there” cult and more typical denominational stuff is just a matter of degree. How far can you push people to be isolated and to burn bridges with the rest of society? If you have enough charisma and cojones, pretty far, I guess.
What you don’t see is the number of people who don’t “stick” with these cults.
My late / previous wife, before we met, had been involved in a low-grade form of this, a church in the so-called “shepherding movement” that had a very high degree of controlling behavior under the guise of “being accountable” for sufficiently righteous and/or dutiful behavior. My wife was one of those who had boundaries and walked out when things became intrusive (in her case, requests to share details of her and her then-husband’s sex life with the elder assigned to them).
For my wife, the only cost was changing churches. But if she had been living out in some desert compound and had never had salable skills her whole life, and no emotional support system outside of the cult, the calculus would have gotten a lot harder. If she had, say, never known acceptance and stability apart from the cult, even more so. That’s how these things work.
Not all of them are.
