14 years of my life spent in a cult.

DISCLAIMER

**Edit:
This post is not about Mormonism. So, a lot of people are not reading this entirely. Wall of text hits you for 9,999, you die.

This post does talk about Mormonism, and all of my early childhood was spent being Mormon. The reason I refer back to Mormonism constantly is that the TLC stole everything from Mormonism.

So I was Imguring when I came across a post by @PregnantWithSatan. It outlined several films about cults, which I found interesting. After siphoning off some upvotes via comments I got some feedback and I've now decided to create a post about some of my experience, maybe more to follow if this is popular.

I may say some things about religion, and specifically Mormonism, which may not be nice. I still love Mormons for the most part, even if they do fuck a lot of shit up. All of this is from my own perception, which spans from the age of 10 to 24. I don't claim this is 100% accurate, but it's how I remember it. I'm 28 now.

The silent killer!

My family was always a bit strange. Parents met when my dad (a lifelong Mormon from a family that had been Mormon since like 1890) began teaching my mother the ways of Mormonia. They were bad at that whole no sex before marriage thing though, so that's where my brother came into the picture, and eventually they got married and popped out my sister and me.

So, I grew up Mormon. Which is strange enough before your family goes and joins a cult. If Mormonism were perfect, it would be completely altruistic. Instead, it ends up about trying to keep the appearance of having it all together, despite having deep problems, mostly related to family.

So, I should mention some of my dads weirdness. Strongly political in nature, my father enjoyed guns and politics and the idea of United States freedom. I say the idea, because he never really did anything about his freedom. He taught us to use guns and prepared us for the end of the world. We had food storage, we did "Duck and Cover". We were pretty extreme for most other Mormons...which can be saying a lot. I would say that the most important thing my dad taught me would be thinking for myself, questioning authority especially. I'll always hand it to the old man, it didn't make my parents lives easier, but it did make mine better.

How does one join a cult?

I'm glad you asked little Johnny!

As it turns out, it was easier than Oblivion made it out to be. But then again, all of the shit our prophet promised us was bullshit. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

My parents were discontent with how content the LDS church had become. They felt that the church had lost its way. Something that churches often do apparently. Did no one read Hansel and Gretel? You're supposed to leave a trail of breadcrumbs so you can see where you started to fuck shit up.

Anyway, they started looking around this crazy new thing called the internet, which had only recently been gaining popularity. They bumped into these people in a chat room, who started to talk to them about this group of people who broke off from the Mormon church to enact the "Gathering", which is a Mormon concept which basically means "Hey, lets all go to Utah and hang out there now." These people talked about this guy who was bringing a lot of ex-Mormons together to discuss religion, politics and life. He started it all as a sort of bible-study group for Mormons, where he mixed in all these radical, new ideas of his own. How enticing! He claimed to only bring the truth of what he believed. My parents wanted truth, and answers and all that fun stuff, so why not drop everything and move to Utah. Again (we'd lived there previously.) And so we moved to Manti, Utah. Home of the temple found in the previous image. (Go Templars!)

The Red Brick Store and the True and Living Church of Jesus Christ of the Saints of the Last Days(TLC for short).

This was the second time I'd been through the tiny town of Manti. Home to about 3,600 people in the middle of rural Utah. Manti attracts thousands of Mormons every year with the Mormon Miracle Pageant, which is held at the temple and is an elaborate play on the hillside, recounting an abridged version of the Book of Mormon. I sold hot cocoa and cinnamon rolls to passersby on occasion.

Now, the teachings of such a great and wondrous man could only be held in a place of great learning. Like the Red Brick Store(RBS). So-named after the original RBS which was constructed in Nauvoo, Illinois by Joseph Smith, founder of Mormonism.
This is where my family met James D. Harmston. Jim, as he liked to be called. A man who would later marry my beautiful sister.

Now, Harmston held group meetings where he would explain his worldview to new recruits. These meetings were absurdly boring for a 10 year old, but I got out of school and my parents brought snacks, and we were somewhere other than Nevada, so all in all it was a pretty good deal for me, I thought.
It wasn't.

Mormons in space? But why? Has god-science gone too far?

One of the first things Harmston said was that the time of the gentile had ended. What this meant was that it was no longer OK to send missionaries out to find new recruits. Gone were the days of sending G̶e̶e̶k̶ ̶S̶q̶u̶a̶d̶ ̶A̶g̶e̶n̶t̶s̶ Missionaries to the fucking moon or Uzbekistan. Instead, if you were really cool and awesome, you would feel the pull to Manti, and you would naturally find yourself there. My parents were like "Oh hell yeah! I feel it!"
These magic people were called "Elect" and boy oh boy, were they cool. How cool were they? Well, they had to be pretty fucking cool, because anyone who stuck around with Mr. Harmston was one of them. Pretty rad.
Harmston was all about getting down to brass tacks. He thought that the LDS church had gone astray a long time ago, and that things should have been different.

Things commonly accepted by the people of Harmston:
Something Harmston called MMP, multiple mortal probations.
The idea was that god put us down here to test us, but one life was not enough, so we return over and over and over again. As each life passes, our spirit is able to retain an amount of that experience and use it to improve the next life. This process is repeated ad nauseum until the soul of the person has been refined in the fires of tribulations so much that they are perfected into a god. This leads to...

General racism.

Now, in the old timey days of Mormonism there was a belief that when Cain son of Adam murdered his brother Abel and was subsequently cursed with "The Mark of Cain" forever marking him as a murderer, this mark was actually dark skin. Harmston extrapolated that all black people had committed murder in the previous life. Additionally, anyone not white or black was a descendant of Japheth, and had committed a less heinous crime in a previous life, like breaking one of the ten commandments.

Polygamy.

This was the favorite topic of the press, but honestly from the inside view, it wasn't nearly as big of a deal as it was made out to be. I don't condone it, but of the things done, I would say it was the easiest to swallow. There were rules though.
Only one wife in the bed with you. No gays.
Thems are the rules. I suspect more than a few gay people joined and subsequently destroyed themselves trying to deny who they were. This one will always seem like one of the more normal things to me, but I would never consider it myself.

Adam=God Doctrine.

This is the belief that God and Adam were the same person. It's very quantum mechanics. I understand it, but I'm not gonna write about it. Feel free to PM me with questions. There are books about it.
Priesthood for Women.
Something that I always thought was good in concept. Unlike some religions women had priesthood. However, there was stick a Hierarchy and men were always on the top. Still, women had a lot of say and held their own separate meetings.

Modesty.

This isn't a strong enough word really, but by the time I ended up in the TLC had gotten to a point where they wanted to be very modest. Partly because if you were cool enough you got to wear magic underwear called Garments. These went down to your ankles and up to your wrists. I was bad at being a drone, so I never got mine, but the rest of my family did. Anyway, the more modest you were the more everyone loved you, so of course there was definitely no insane competition over who was humblest and best at being super repressed. Definitely nothing like that which would cause enormous rifts between the people within such a tight-knit group of about 300 people. No siree, we were all great.

Word of Wisdom.

This was coming back right around the time we joined. It was and old Mormon thing put together by Joseph Smiths wife which basically said "Stop getting drunk and spitting your tobacco all over my goddamn floors you heathens!"
Of course, it ended up being much more extreme in the end. Drugs, alcohol, caffeine, all bad. Then later, it became a diet. It controlled the food we ate. We did all the fad diets. Raw food, Eat Right for your Blood Type. All sorts of things.

We also read a lot of books. Books about everything from gold hidden in the Rockies, secrets hidden in the Hebrew alphabet, the holy grail, knights templar, everything you could think of that was as close as you could get to being a fantasy novel, but was written by someone who thought it was all true.

Other things:
No sex before marriage.
Underage marriage is OK as long as you tell everyone that God is alright with it.
Oral sex is gross and you're a perv if you think otherwise!
Church leaders anointed Mormon temples with olive oil all around the world for god to destroy them. Kind of like a targeting laser I guess?
Many, many, many other weird things, like time travel.

So, what was it all about?

Well, of course with all of this, we start to find out that "Jim" is Joseph Smith reincarnated, of course. His second in command is Brigham Young (The second ever Mormon president.) Everyone is someone famous. Does Jim like you? Then you get to be the person you really want to be. My dad was Isaac Newton. I was a my own great grandpa. How do you know it's true? Jim prays about it, god answers. They even transcribe the sessions. Hundreds and hundreds of hours go into transcribing all prayer sessions...but it wasn't ordinary prayers. It was ToP, the True order of Prayer. It's complicated, but basically if you're special enough to get your new underwear you can then tap into your council of guardian angels, called your Holy Order. These were a bunch of dead people who at some point after they died were assigned to watch yo' ass, stop you from gettin' beat or whatever. They were guardian angels, only there was a group of them and they were the ones who kept demons at bay. Literally. Only Elect had holy order, and only people with an Endowment (underwear) could speak to them.
Talking to your Holy Order also allowed you to speak to dead people. This is where The Work For the Dead came in. You see, if someone had died you could interview them through a special session with another person from the TLC who was especially receptive. The idea being that you ask questions to the other person, they respond as the dead person, and you record the entire thing, the end goal being a baptism for the dead, where you are baptized into the TLC, in proxy of the dead person.

I could not make this shit up. There are records somewhere. My dad designed an entire database for these people so that they could track all of this.

While all of this was going on, and there was a lot of hubbub about who was the most righteous, it really came down to what my dad referred to as "Jim Juice". This is used to describe the amount of power you had within the TLC, based on how much Jim liked you. If you had stupidly high Jim Juice, like you were his favorite/hottest wife, you could pretty much get away with anything. Church efforts would be at your disposal. Need your kitchen sink fixed? Need a new car? The church will provide! Hmm...wonder where all that providing came from.

James D. Harmston. Professional charlatan and overall fuckstick.

So, the concept of Tithing is that 10% of all your material wealth goes to the community of the church. Living in Utah was not easy economically, but families still managed to give much more than the 10%. This then fell under The Law of Consecration. It basically meant that people help each other. But over a long enough period of time it was never that simple.

My dad spent thousands upon thousands of hours creating and maintaining the database that held all of the Work For the Dead and also genealogy for the entire church. My dad had programmed for the government and Microsoft. He was making very good money before he quit his job to join the TLC. They then used him, and sadly are still using him to this day.

It's sort of like communism, but Jim would use everyone for his own gain. Everything he owned was paid for with money from everyone else. He had a nice house with his primary wife he slept with, and she had a love for growing flowers. So she had a very, very nice greenhouse which was always in great shape. She also got a nice set of boobs from a plastic surgeon. New cars. Telescopes, dancefloors (dance was a big thing in the church because of her.) And that was just one wife. At the most, he had 17 wives.

He planned it all this way. In the end, he had everything he could want. No need to get a real job, instead everyone paid for anything he could ever want. If he wanted a wife someone else had, he would talk to his wives, and those wives would have a Revelation from god, saying that the woman in question needed to be Rescued. I capitalize these two, because they are both part of the doctrine. Rescuing a woman from her man could be done if it was deemed that he was no longer meant to have her.

What it really meant was that Jim was tired of his old wives. He started to pick exclusively younger wives.

Oh, did I mention he was also the holy ghost? Yep.

This is where my family comes into the story. We were always lower on the radar. My dad was important, but important like your IT guy is, not like your dog, or your brother or whatever.
My mom had already left by this time. There were always problems between her and my dad, but when she left the brainwashing made the transition much easier. We shunned her instead of leaving with her.
Anyway, my sister got married to a guy named Joe. My dad did not approve, which was probably the main reason my sister married Joe. She was 16. They had a kid. Joe was a schlubb, though, so things went south pretty quick. He wasn't really pulling his weight in the family, and rumors abound that he was hanging out with ex-members of the TLC (we called them apostates). He was even said to be drinking! *gasp*
So, she left him, and was subsequently rescued by none other than James Dickbag Harmston (pictured in prayer).
Now, I was never good at the whole religion thing. My whole family had their garments, but I never got mine. I concentrated on my art, and although I was constantly afraid that god would smite dead for it (literally every day I thought I was going to be killed by god for my sins) I masturbated constantly (not allowed, considered homosexual), dropped out of the religious school that everyone went to, got a job and eventually got a girlfriend.

Meanwhile, my dad remarried a very nice woman (for once not being sarcastic, I still love my step-mom). My brother had a lot of doubts about the church and began to slip further and further into depression, eventually starting to threaten suicide. We managed to convince him not to kill himself. He ended up in a homeless shelter and has never really been the same. One of the places he stayed at diagnosed him with schizotypal disorder, which gives people delusions of grandeur and thoughts of having superpowers.

My sister on the other hand was thrown into the inner circle of Jim. This was something that I had no awareness of. It was a filled with cruel manipulations and gaslighting. The men and especially women in the inner circle threw my sister around mentally so much that she completely changed her personality. She coped by getting a job, which she excelled at. She ended up as the manager at the job and despite being about 20-22, she managed the shit out of it. Until she freaked out one day, slept with a coworker and then broke out of the church, started living life. She was going to parties, screwing around, drinking. I thought she had gone crazy.

Turns out she was normal and I was crazy.

My sister needed help though. She had a daughter through Joe (thank god not through Jim). My niece, Juliah didn't have the best environment to grow up in. There was a lot of alcohol for awhile. I eventually moved in with my sister to help her cover her rent. By that time I had fallen out of favor with the TLC because I slept with a woman I met online. I didn't officially leave until after I moved in with my sister though, and she and her hot friend Brooke convinced me to drink. Strangely, it was like an epiphany.

I got drunk for the first time and it was like all my worried disappeared. And I realized that if booze hadn't instantly made me into a horrible person, but in fact made me slightly more charming if I had it in moderation, then maybe all the other bullshit I'd been buying into was also stupid.

My big sister got me out of the stupid church. She convinced me to go to college, something my dad had always taught us was useless. Then she convinced me to go to Europe with her. We spent 2 and a half months working as housekeepers in an Irish youth hostel. Probably the best months of my entire life. My best friend at the time, Chris was still in the TLC. He continually told us we would end up dead if we went anywhere else. Guess he was wrong.

Anyway, now she's remarried, I have a job with the Geek Squad and Jim died of a heart attack in 2013. Fuck that guy.

TL;DR

Cults are weird, I'm kinda weird because of it. My sister is a BAMF. Europe was awesome, fuck you Jim.

**
Wow, front page, that's weird. If you guys have enough questions, maybe I can put together a sequel.