Leaving Isn't the Hardest Thing(80)

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“Cult” is one of those words thrown around a lot these days—all over Twitter and Facebook. It started sometime around the summer of the 2016 Republican convention and has continued right up through 2020, and I doubt this year will be the end of it. I don’t know who said it first. But goddamn if you didn’t catch on quick. It’s like a cult, you said. You posted a photo of rabid white boys in red hats. “This is a cult.” Took a screenshot of the local news comment feed. “They’re a death cult.” You watched an emaciated blonde lie through her veneers and said, “It’s like arguing with cult members.” You watched him ranting, bragging about his intellect, his crowd size, his deals. You said, “He’s going to bring about the Apocalypse.” It reminded me of watching my stepdad in a turf war with a Hare Krishna. That was our corner, right in front of the zoo. Gabe told the Hare Krishna his crew needed to move on. “You look like a cult, guys. I mean, come on. You’re a cult. The cops are going to make all of us leave.” The Hare Krishna lost his shit, threw one of his books at us, screaming about how we were a cult. It’s always someone else, never you.

   Then I watched the members of that shitweeble’s cabinet, each in turn, each trying to outdo the last, lavish praise on the…Messiah? And I thought, Well, fuck.



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After I left the ranch, I mailed the books to my friend who runs the Safe Passage Foundation, a group that helps people who grew up in cults. But I didn’t mail them all. Maybe I’m not the most trustworthy person, but in my defense, I only kept a book if there was more than one copy. As such, I ended up with a bunch of the comic books we used to read. And because the Children of God was a doomsday cult, many of them were about the End Time, the End of Days, the Apocalypse.

   These are the stories I return to time and again. I don’t know why. I’m not looking for answers. They’re not interesting. They’re not particularly funny even to my warped sense of humor. Maybe I just need to remind myself the Family was wrong.

The problem is, I’m not entirely sure they were wrong about everything.

I’ve never been much of a fan of apocalyptic fiction. The only Family comics I used to enjoy weren’t about the Apocalypse itself. They were the survival manuals. How to build a Dakota fire so your enemies won’t see the glow. How to build a shelter. How to make water with a plastic bag and a tree branch. How to build snares with wire and sticks and rocks. Did you know you can eat bees? Just pull off the stinger. Absent in those comics was the voice of our leader casually throwing in a little side note of his greatness, “I scored a 179 on the Army IQ test. Highest score they’d ever seen.”

The lack of David Berg’s usual insanity might’ve been why I liked those books. Or maybe I liked them for the same reason people fantasize about a zombie apocalypse or fighting for the resistance in a dystopian fascist dictatorship—that is, my real life was fucking miserable, and I was surrounded by people who were mean to me. Most of the people around me were supposed to die? Good riddance.

It wasn’t that I necessarily believed the prophecies. But I didn’t not believe them. I don’t know anyone my age who didn’t spend most of the ’80s convinced early death was all but a given. If it wasn’t Chernobyl, it would be the next meltdown, if the hole in the ozone layer didn’t fry us first, or the Russians launched and then the Americans would have to launch, or a computer exercise could go wrong and make NORAD think the Russians were launching and Ferris Bueller couldn’t stop it. Those were just the big ones. Our world was a death trap of razors in candy, men in vans, swimming within thirty minutes of eating, talking on phones during thunderstorms, AIDS needles in bus seats, crack pipes in playgrounds, quicksand, leaving the curtains open for serial killers, swallowing too much gum, bathing during thunderstorms (I wouldn’t even pee during a thunderstorm, just to be safe), spontaneous combustion, rusty nails, hiding in a fridge, the Bermuda Triangle, Colombian drug lords. I really did watch too much Miami Vice. So when the Family said the world was going to end, I thought, Tell me about it.

   The strangest goddamn thing when I got out of the Family was finding out evangelicals believe a lot of the same crazy shit we were taught, actually believe that if the temple is rebuilt on its eponymous mount in Jerusalem, Jesus will come back; believe that if the earth is no longer able to support human life, they’ll be raptured; believe in an Antichrist and a Mark of the Beast.

I’d dropped the belief in the Antichrist, along with most Family doctrine, by the time we landed back in Amarillo. It wasn’t really a conscious decision. I stopped hearing about it, so I stopped thinking about it. I didn’t notice I’d stopped believing until we went to church one Sunday. My parents had decided we probably should believe in something. So they brought us to a megachurch with a live band. The intensely shiny pastor started talking about the End of Days, and I froze, like, Oh. Hey. Uh. We don’t talk about that weird stuff out here. We never went back.

   I suppose the Family version of the story had to come from somewhere, and I appreciate that I don’t have to give David Berg points for creativity. He was raised a Pentecostal. All he did was add a couple notes to the already weird interpretation of Revelation.

Since the world began, people have been predicting its end—the Mayans and Mesopotamians and, of course, the Christian Bible. Somewhere, deep down, we’ve always known that it’s not just us but our entire society that balances one misstep away from unraveling. It’s why prophecies of the Apocalypse work so well on Americans, why postapocalyptic fiction has never seemed entirely fictional.