Ed Bennett says that he began to doubt when he was 14. Doubts, he had been taught, were the devil’s work. He would say to himself, “If you could just pray a little more, if you could be just a little bit purer as a Christian, if you just dedicate your life a little bit more, maybe you’d get rid of those doubts and become the perfect Christian.” The result was that he nearly shut down emotionally.
Witnesses believe in the imminent destruction of all non-Witnesses in a bloody inferno that will mark the return of Jesus Christ to earth. They are taught that the U.S. Army is going to enslave the world and that the United Nations is the devil’s government on earth. They are discouraged from studying the Bible without sanctioned interpretive aids. They may not salute the flag or celebrate holidays, which is particularly hard on children in public schools. Witnesses are continually instructed to hold themselves apart from the rest of the world, which, Bennett pointed out, leaves them nowhere to go if they consider leaving.
There is no set of established criteria that defines fundamentalism or its many subsets. Fundamentalist faiths tend to share some beliefs and disagree about others. But all are nontraditional Christian sects; most fundamentalist religions active in the United States today were invented during this century. Although avowedly “old-fashioned” in outlook, they are a neotraditionalist modern phenomenon, a reaction to modern times.
On the extreme end of the spectrum beyond the fundamentalists are the religion-based cults. Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman–authors of two excellent books, Snapping and Holy Terror, on the social and mind-control techniques used by religions and pseudoreligions–found that more than 30 of 48 cults described to them by survey respondents “had emerged out of fundamentalist or other branches of conservative Christianity.” Most of the groups widely considered to be cults apply for and receive tax-exempt status as religious organizations.
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The similarities between Christian-based cults and the new wave of extremist Christian religions make the followers of the Swaggarts, Falwells, and Robertsons particularly susceptible to cult involvement. Most vulnerable are young people between the ages of 15 and 35 who have suffered a setback in their family, school, work, or marriage and who find that the religion that promised them everything isn’t delivering. The answer, it may appear to these idealistic young people, is a stronger, more committed religious belief.
Russell had the aggressive spirit of the late-19th-century capitalists. At 11, he founded a business with his father, drawing up the contract himself. Only four years later, the business had grown into a chain of clothing stores. In his spare time, Russell studied the Bible, became obsessed with the torments of hell, and wrote scriptures in chalk on sidewalks to warn the sinners who walked there. At 18, he attended a sermon given by a newly founded Christian group called the Second Adventists that convinced him that the Bible was the literal word of God, or Jehovah.
Most of the people whose stories follow are members of Fundamentalists Anonymous. FA, as members call it, is a three-year-old national organization that already has 46 local chapters, including one in Chicago and another, headed by Ed Bennett, in Chicago’s far western suburbs.
