Dancing for the Devil (Netflix)
How cults sink in their claws
A tithe (10%), an offering (10%), and a Man of God fee (10%). Plus a 20% management fee, and rent. Massages for and from the minister.
If it weren’t so sinister, it would be boring. What mystery lurks at the centre of the confusing psyche of a cult leader; what motivates someone to destroy the lives of so many; from where does anyone get the drive to put in the time and energy it takes to control that number of people?!
And the answer to the mystery is… money and sex. Of course. Common enough desires, ratcheted up to an obsessive degree and completely internalised, almost certainly by a psychopathic personality.
Dancing for the Devil has been in Netflix’s top 10 since it dropped this week. What follows below is not a review, but rather a springboard to talk about cults in general.
The world is still deceiv’d with ornament.
In law, what plea so tainted and corrupt
But, being season’d with a gracious voice,
Obscures the show of evil? In religion,
What damned error but some sober brow
Will bless it, and approve it with a text,
Hiding the grossness with fair ornament?
There is no vice so simple but assumes
Some mark of virtue on his outward parts.
Bassanio
The Merchant of Venice. III.II
Vulnerability & Vice
One striking truth from the documentary is that many of those sucked into the Shekinah cult had a history with Christianity, but had slowly drifted away… they felt as though they were coming home, but they weren’t fluent in the language. Certain phrases and concepts were recognisable - ‘die to yourself’, ‘tithe’, and of course ‘judgement and hell’, and this was enough for Shekinah to look like the Proustian religion of their childhood - safe, controlled, familial.
These vulnerable people, many of whom had been deprived of family, security and of community in general, suddenly found that it was offered to them in spades.
They were so desperate with desire for these things that they didn’t stop to test if what they desired was truly what was on offer.
Like Prince Siegfried in Swan Lake, who is so consumed with love for Odette, (the white swan), that he doesn’t even blink when Odile, (the black swan) presents itself to him at the palace posturing to be her. Similar in shape and form, perhaps, yet as opposite as black and white.
A baser analogy: if you find a hungry enough man, offer him bread and give him a brick, he will shatter his own teeth. And if you’re wondering who is wicked enough to prey upon such desperate people as that… you just need to find a greedy enough tooth fairy.
Enter Robert Shinn.
The episodes explore the two different iterations of the cult (though the chronology is, at times, unclear). What emerged was a pattern of identifying a vulnerability, satisfying it on a surface level, then manipulating it to fulfil Shinn’s own vices. The young woman and the sister who raised her amidst dysfunctional and absentee parents. The dancer living out of his car. Struggling young artists who couldn’t afford rent. Robert Shinn could provide them with a shadow and a promise of what they wanted, and in return they ran his businesses, and later supplied content for his channels, the money for which would wend it’s way back to him. Privately, some would be encouraged to show gratitude in other ways.
However, what drew my attention was a side character - a young man from a stable home who had not drifted away from church - he was actively attending one - so was better equipped to avoid the counterfeit. When he was invited to Robert Shinn’s church by his old school friend, he looked, didn’t detect anything sinister, but saw enough to say ‘God bless you, but no.’ This shows the flip side to the pattern of those for whom religion was a memory - those who were already in a legitimate Christian community were better equipped to evade the false teacher. (That would have been it for this young man in the story, had he not shown up later with a van and a baseball bat to get his friend out.)
He wasn’t the only one to see through Shekinah, others looked around and went away, but it’s plain to see that forgery is harder when the genuine article is on display. Kevin ‘Konkrete’ Davis, a level and reassuring presence throughout the documentary, was a dancer who went in a little way, but Shinn pushed him too far, too early - telling him to cut off his son and to sign NDAs if he wanted to attend church services. Konkrete stayed a while after those incidents, but he had established an early pattern of rejecting Shinn’s instructions, which made the decision to leave easier.
This is not intended to be a review, so I will leave the documentary narrative there.
Creating a Context
How does a cult normalise the abnormal? How does one find themselves giving financial control to a mentor; or one day find themselves naked with a pastor?
I will give two brief case studies based on an observation Stephen Fry once made, that obsession with sex is like obsession with food - those who are obsessed are split in two camps: some deny themselves to the extreme, others indulge themselves. These two examples show how people can either hide abuse in obsessively avoiding any kind of male/female contact… or by brazenly rejecting basic safeguarding in the name of purity:
Ravi Zacharias was not a cult leader, but he knew how to manipulate a culture - he used the famous Billy Graham rule (never be alone with a woman other than your wife) in two ways: One - it protected him from accusation. Two - because he publicly claimed to abide by the rule, his team felt compelled to lie for him when he broke it. (This is easier than we may think - it’s very hard to keep that rule, and many innocent reasons why it might be broken. To accuse him of lying about the rule would imply a greater accusation, and who would do that, simply because he caught a cab with a woman, or went for a massage…)?
When I was a student, a friend took me to hear an apparently well-known preacher they loved, though I had not heard of him. At the event, he told a story about hiring child prostitutes (I don’t remember the country he was in), bringing them into his hotel room and ordering Disney movies and all the puddings they wanted. “I gave them back their childhood, just for that night”, he said.
I don’t remember the preacher’s name, or know whether he was engaged in abuse. But he certainly didn’t ‘give them back their childhood’… because he stayed.
What girl’s childhood was he recreating where they spent a night in a strange man’s hotel room being given sweeties and watching movies with him?
But, the way he told the story, the way he appealed to Jesus’ spending time with both prostitutes and children… the whole room applauded him, and so did I… it was my flatmate who pointed out the above to me, and I felt sick.
Cult leaders, like any abusers, will seek to create a unique base of ‘normal’ behaviour, and from that context, drag people into increasingly abnormal activity.
Is Christianity intrinsically controlling?
Many of the dancers who escaped Shekinah still indicated some level of Christian faith in their language, as did the two sisters who had been with the cult from the earlier days. This sets them apart from the Documentary runners, and the central Wilking family (Miranda Derrick’s sister and parents), who occasionally imply that Christianity is sinister at it’s most basic level - establishing shots will eerily show Bibles being placed around a table; or a plain wooden pulpit shone under red light with sinister background music.
As a pastor who stands regularly behind a wooden pulpit (albeit without demonic stage lighting), and who passes round Bibles in my home, this misfired for me - the music and the cinematography told me I was seeing something terrible, yet I knew that I wasn’t. The fact is though, that many would not have felt that disconnection at least in part because, for myriad people, it is impossible to fully distinguish cult from religion. Certainly, the third part of the documentary exposed the legislative reality of that (Shekinah are largely protected under religious rights), and in terms of wider culture, it seems that the difference between a cult and a religion is largely one of PR: Mormons are regarded as quaintly odd, impeccably dressed and provide harmless celebrities and politicians; Jehovah’s Witnesses are like Christians, only friendlier; and Scientologists have Tom Cruise. All of them are regarded and protected as religions. The darker elements are buried under a persona of eccentricity (a trick used by multiple individual abusers as well as cult leaders).
Then, like Robert Shinn’s, there are many single-church cults that operate, not as a separate religion, but sit under the umbrella of Christianity, and rely on that reputation to cover them. But in those churches, there is control, coercion, and a culture of retribution for those who question or leave… and a fear of the surrounding culture:
Three years ago, along with my wife and a friend, I ran a residential weekend exploring abuses of power. At one point I put up on the white board a list of characteristics and asked the room what they thought it was. One young man put up his hand and asked if I had gotten hold of the summary page of an investigation that was happening in his previous church. I had not. I had written out a list of ‘warning signs of a cult’.
So how can you tell a cult from a Christian church? Is the difference really just of taste and public image? Absolutely not - I will follow up this article with a review/compendium of Jim Sire’s ‘Scripture Twisting’, subtitled ‘20 Ways the Cults Misread the Bible’ - but first we’ll take a look at some of the more notable elements of a cult.
Cult Culture
This is the list, I’d put on the white board at that weekend away:
1. Opposing critical thinking
2. Isolating members and penalizing them for leaving
3. Emphasizing special doctrines outside scripture
4. Seeking inappropriate loyalty to their leaders
5. Dishonoring the family unit
6. Crossing Biblical boundaries of behavior (versus sexual purity and personal ownership)
7. Separation from the Church
Subsequently, the man who compiled that list, Mike Bickle was exposed in an array of sexual abuse allegations from numerous women, the most serious detailing how he preyed on a 14 year old girl in the 1980s. Perhaps the list should be made redundant. I suspect, rather, we should add one, which explains his tactic:
8. The leader of the Church is presented as your sole source of protection from the outside world.
It’s amazing what people will put up with in the frying pan, when they are constantly told of the fire that surrounds it, though even that, mercifully, reaches breaking point for some, such as Priscylla in Dancing for the Devil - “I’d rather go to hell than stay here.”
This eighth element provides explanatory power as to why many abusers/cult leaders are vocally against abuse/cultish behaviour. It is a mask - it simultaneously communicates that I am a safe person, and that you are in danger from the outside. It also demonstrates why some cults hide under a more conservative guise, contra to the expectations of us conservatives. We find it easy to believe that non-critical thinking, non-scriptural doctrines and sexual promiscuity are the predominant purview of liberals. So a strict conservativism that sneers at the folly of those outside the camp, presents a useful umbrella.
Again, I am myself a conservative minister who talks about abuse - both these things are necessary and good in ministry, but both can function as a façade for a controlling environment. Thus, neither of them could ever be appealed to as proof that a person or place is safe.
One must actually listen to what is taught, and see what is done.
How are those who leave treated or spoken of?
What are the repeated instructions and adages?
Is bad behaviour tolerated because of gifting/eccentricity?
Is loyalty to the leadership appealed to in order to encourage certain actions/inactions?
Do members feel comfortable disagreeing with the leadership?
Are those who are predisposed not to challenge leadership given particular space to do so?
And finally, would the ministry survive the sudden departure of its leader?
What song always makes you dance?
I will, as I say, follow this article up. But, fellow Brits, cults are not an exclusively American phenomenon - theirs are just easier to see through from our cultural standpoint. We have had in recent years poorly paid interns compelled to live in properties belonging to the minister (bought with interest free loans from the church) and charge them rent. We have had dissenting ministers told that they would be spared ritual slander and worse provided they left the city/country. We have people who have been cut off by friends and family on a minister’s say-so because they dared to disagree with them, even in private. And we have had sexual abuse across multiple denominations, some in cultures which ‘promote’ victims to abusers as they are given power. We have cults.
So…
What “fair ornament” would be enough to disguise wickedness enough for us to trust it? What context would have to be created to make us victims and/or abusers? I have friends in my conservative Christian circles who carry shame from what happened in settings where mutual massage, and ritual wrestling were commonplace. But those cultures produced ‘fruit’ that we approved of… fruit sweet enough that we simply would not examine the rot in the tree. Conversions, resistance to unbiblical social changes, growing churches, large scale social action…
What ostensibly virtuous obsession would lead you or I to dance with the black swan? Or, indeed, for the Devil?