Cultus Deorum. The honouring of the gods.
On the night I met Bill Gothard I wasn’t interested in him or his organisation.
I’d attended his Basic Seminar because my parents thought I should. I’d talked to one or two of the beautiful young people who were travelling with him, neatly dressed in their pristine navy and white outfits with wide, American smiles.
I’d worked a long day at the local radio station. I was a copywriter and scheduler, writing advertising content and scheduling programmes for going to air. I had been approached with a job offer by a start-up television network and I had been offered an apprenticeship in an advertising company. Which to choose? I was at a crossroads in my young life and deliberating over which pathway to go down.
“How do you figure out which one to choose. Which one does God want you to choose?” I asked one of the young American women travelling with the large group. She couldn’t answer me. She just smiled widely and warmly, replied with some vague answer that still left me wondering.
My family scheduled a meeting with Bill Gothard. I had to go along with it because they were my ride home, but my thoughts were far from being focussed or remotely interested in this slightly odd American man in his late fifties, with his slicked back hair, his loose-fitting suit and shiny shoes. I shook his hand, noticed his gold watch, looked into his eyes and then I sat down at the end of the row with my family, waiting for it to be over so we could go home.
Instead of focusing on my sister, who wanted to go to his Headquarters in Chicago and my parents who wanted to discuss it, he locked eyes with me and started to ask me questions about myself and my life. I wanted to shrink into the floor, to disappear, evaporate, become invisible, but I answered him politely. He did not like it that I worked at a radio station where they played rock music. He said he was worried about me. Why? He wanted to get me away from there. To protect me? Weird, I thought. He offered me a free flight to America, to come and live at his Headquarters in Chicago for a few months.
I’d been to America before. I’d studied Communications at the University of the Nations in Hawaii less than two years earlier. I loved America. I wanted to go back. The offered free flight was too alluring to turn down. I thought I could go there for the 3 month stay that was allowed on my visa and then come home to New Zealand and pick up whatever career I decided on.
How wrong I was.
I was twenty years old when I met Bill Gothard and he was fifty-nine.
We thought he was safe. He had been in our churches. He had shaken the hands of our government ministers. He seemed to be this ultimate evangelical missionary who not only reached the masses, but also, incredibly, into the halls of influence and power. He really seemed to have God’s power behind him and he was fond of telling us so.
Cicero first used the expression, Cultus Deorum (Laycock, 2022). A latin phrase that means ‘the honouring of the gods.’ Cultus means to worship, to cultivate, to respect. In a high-control group, this usually centers around a prominent figure. The leader. The driving force behind the ideologies that make up a cult is a common pattern across all cults, not just religious ones. In this ongoing series, I also want to highlight the predatory grooming process, a tactic used by cult leaders and show how that is accomplished. I want to bring light into this dark place and as someone who has been on the receiving end of this process, I speak with the authority of my own experience.
The modern academic term for cults is New Religious Movement (NRM). It is applied to new faiths that have arisen over the past centuries that have roots in traditional faith structures. (Laycock, 2022). Bill Gothard and his Institute in Basic Life Principles (IBLP) take their roots from the Evangelical church, pulling together many of the variable tenets of that movement.
There is a move to push back against the word cult, because it is such a loaded word and as Catherine Wessinger, an expert and author on Jonestown (Wessinger, 1999), wrote; “The word cult dehumanizes the religion’s members and their children. It strongly implies that these people are deviants; they are seen as crazy, brainwashed, duped by their leader. When we label people as subhuman, we create a context in which it is considered virtuous to kill them.”
My own personal preference in terms of labelling IBLP and Bill Gothard is the theory of Totalism, a term created by Erik Erikson (Robbins and Palmer, 2013), and developed later by Robert Lifton (Anthony et al., 2011), and describes an affinity between totalitarian idealogies and people who respond favourably, for whatever reason, to those idealogies. To simplify the concept, it is “to suggest the coming together of an immoderate ideology with equally immoderate character traits—an extremist meeting ground of people and ideas.”
But is it enough to say that IBLP is a cult and Bill Gothard it’s cult leader? Let’s examine the traits of this totalism concept and hold it up against IBLP, his homeschooling program The Advanced Training Institute (ATI) and Bill Gothard. There are 8 points.
Milieu Control - this is control of the social environment. Control of the environment and information. In IBLP there were multiple environments to control: the home, where the homeschooling curriculum was enforced. The Training Centers, including the expansive Headquarters in Chicago, as well as the various apprenticeship programmes that were run, such as EXCEL, ALERT and Journey to the Heart. There were guidelines on what books to read and movies to watch and music to listen to.
Mystical Manipulation of Powerful Symbols: Leaders or ideologies are presented as possessing divine authority or insight. Events are interpreted as part of a grander plan, reinforcing the belief in the group's legitimacy and the leader's special status. A big part of this would have to have been the newsletters that were sent out regularly to every family enrolled, by Gothard and his office, always with exciting reports on what had happened and what was going to happen.
Demand for Purity: Sharp distinctions between good and evil, pure and impure, fostering an environment of guilt and shame. Gothard used this in multiple ways, the above example of rock music being one. There was also a strong buy-in to the purity culture, especially in the suppression of sexuality.
The Cult of Confession: strong emphasis on “personal confessions of violations of the absolute division between pure and impure ideas, feelings and actions.” As any former student will tell you, this was the accountability teaching, of confessing your innermost thoughts to your parent (preferably your father), or to some person of authority.
The Sacred Science: The ideology promoted by the group is considered absolute truth, often presented as a higher understanding that only members can comprehend. Questioning or challenging this ideology is discouraged or punished. Gothard’s week long basic seminar and the entry door to all other aspects of IBLP and ATI focussed on basic principles of design, authority, responsibility, suffering, ownership, freedom, and success, and is peppered with anecdotes by Bill of people experiencing success who followed this "formula.
The Loading of the Language: Specific terminology is used within the group, creating a unique vocabulary that reinforces the group's ideology. This language may simplify complex ideas, making critical thinking or dissent more difficult. This is a common theme in any group culture, but in a new religious movement language is a powerful tool. In IBLP and the ATI homeschooling programme some of the terminology were things such as ‘umbrella of authority,’ ‘obedient sons and daughters,’ ‘reversal choirs', ‘courtship,’ ‘they may, I may not,’ etc, etc.
Doctrine over Person: The group's ideology takes precedence over an individual's thoughts, emotions, and experiences. Members are expected to suppress personal desires or doubts that conflict with the group's teachings. This was constantly being reinforced, especially around sexuality. Young men were to protect their eyes and young women were to protect the men. Betrothal and courtship was the ideal method to marriage where natural feelings and attractions were actively discouraged and rather taught to rely on the parental guidance in selecting a life-partner. Women are taught to submit to their husbands in all things.
Dispensing of Existence: Those outside the group are considered inferior, dangerous, or not worthy of consideration. This mindset justifies actions that might harm outsiders and solidifies the "us vs. them" mentality. Many IBLP churches sprang up. Parents became paranoid about who their children were friends with outside the family, with siblings being encouraged to become ‘best friends’
For survivors of IBLP and ATI, this list will no doubt bring to mind many other common uses surrounding these eight points of the Totalism theory. This theory throws an interesting light onto Bill Gothard and IBLP and ATI and the question of whether it qualifies as a ‘cult.’
In the next article in my series, I would like to focus on the predatory grooming process that many cult leaders employ and my personal experience of this process. In 2015 I wrote an article for the IBLP survivor website Recovering Grace outlining how this process develops and I intend to unpack those here.
“maybe there is a beast…. maybe it’s only us.” Lord of the Flies
Rachel Lees is an author and student of the Social Sciences at the University of Waikato. Her experiences in a high-control religious cult as the chosen favourite of a cult leader inform her writings on this topic. She is an award-winning writer and lives in New Zealand. ©2023.
Works Cited:
Laycock, J. P. (2022). New Religious Movements. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003214212
Catherine Wessinger (1999). How the Millennium Comes Violently: From Jonestown to Heaven’s Gate. Seven Bridges Press, 4.
Robbins, T., & Palmer, S. J. (2013). Millennium, Messiahs, and Mayhem. Routledge. https://www-taylorfrancis-com.ezproxy.waikato.ac.nz/books/edit/10.4324/9780203613207/millennium-messiahs-mayhem-thomas-robbins-susan-palmer
Anthony, D., Robbins, T., & Barrie-Anthony, S. (2011). Reciprocal Totalism. Oxford University Press EBooks, 63–82. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199735631.003.0003