Uncultured: A Memoir

But the thing nobody ever tells you about the shepherd analogy is that shepherds always eat their sheep in the end.

Good' people who do terrible things are often supported, protected, and sometimes empowered by organizations we love and respect. And almost always it isn't merely a case of one or two bad apples, but that the tree has rotted from within.

My body was the strongest it had ever been, and no one knew there was really a six-year-old girl inside it, small and terrified.

The first rule of cults is we are never in a cult. It’s always them, not us.

And as belief builds in its followers, the less likely we are to question. The easier it is to hate, harm, and even kill. Because we are the good guys, we are right. No matter how many signs point in a different direction or how that direction shifts with the course of the wind.

Good men, like the good uncles who didn't rape us or beat us, but who nevertheless upheld the system that abused us. Men who stayed silent or agreed to tepid changes that never thwarted the power dynamic they held, locking us in groups that failed the whole.

Do people even realize that it’s possible to become an adult without ever having been a child? How could I explain that yes, I looked whole on the outside but my skin was just a thin bag holding the jagged pieces together.

Again and again he picked me, and no one had ever taught me how to say no.

I can run and run, but I’m always still here.

...the only real friend I had, and would ever have, was myself.

On those Female Engagement Teams, I’d had my own experiences of being out front, forging a path for women, hoping to maybe break the glass ceiling, but always coming just a bit short. When will it change for us? I wondered. Would it ever? The cracks were forming, everywhere, but it was still painfully, inexcusably slow.

I understood that girls were supposed to sleep without underwear because we had to “air out” the smelly and disgusting parts of ourselves, but I still burned with rage every night when the Uncles, especially Uncle Jerry, came into our dorms to do panty-checks.

I’m not from another country, I thought, my heart sinking through the floor. I’m from another planet.

I found myself asking the big question in spy school that wasn't on any test: How does a scholar, a strategist, or a soldier understand a culture well enough to predict future outcomes without being willing to understand that all humans, from their own perspectives, are living a truth and reality as valid as ours?

I cried because I was a girl from nowhere, and all I wanted to do, like any soldier just back from war, was go home.

I see traces of the Children of God, with all its inherent cult-think and harmful behavior, in almost every group, organization, or team I have ever joined or studied. And I'm always asking myself: Where does a cult end and a culture begin? What is the difference between a good organization and a bad cult? I don't think there is a difference, ultimately. Most groups are just groups. Evil cults. Great armies. Wonderful families. Amazing countries. Pile whatever modifiers on them you want. Each one has the same inherent strengths, weaknesses, and potential pitfalls.

of a shepherd, and began to corral them into his flock. But the thing nobody ever tells you about the shepherd analogy is that shepherds always eat their sheep in the end.

I hadn’t gotten the same indoctrination as everyone else growing up. America does what the army does just at a larger and more insidious scale the programming begins at birth America is the greatest country on earth we are the best down with all the rest and if we have to torture 1000 innocent people to prove it so be it when you believe you're the best the chosen ones then the end can always be made to justify the means.

I thought about a game we loved to play called The Heavenly City. All the kids would design our mansions in Heaven, the ultimate reward we were told we'd be granted in exchange for all the deprivations and pain during our lives on Earth. Different kids had different dreams: Many wanted a house all to themselves, all the food they could imagine. And typical kid desires too: pets, toys, candy. All the things we never had. But not me. I didn't care about streets of gold or all the clothes in the world, or the real jewelry that Dorothea and the other girls fancied. I wanted books. I had a secret dream that my mansion in Heaven would be a giant library, beautiful, with tall shelves in every room, filled with every book that had ever been written. I pictured myself like the cartoon Belle, a sparkling girl with a worldly name that didn't come from anywhere in the Bible and meant beautiful, who'd been gifted the most precious thing I could imagine- the freedom to read, the ability to teach herself anything she wanted. Even though she was a prisoner in the Beast's castle, Belle had the freedom of her own mind.

After fifteen years of being forced to worship a Prophet I never believed in, sacrifice for a God I didn't love, and live a life in a religious prison camp, where they controlled my every thought and movement, I was drowning. It didn't matter how much loved and didn't want to disappoint my parents. If I didn't come up for breath soon, I wouldn't survive. But how could I tell the people I loved that I was rejecting their world, and everything they believed in, forever? That I was prepared to never see them again because I didn't have faith? That I was willing to go to Hell to escape them? That I was choosing me over them? I couldn't do it.

Have I just made the biggest mistake of my life? Forsaking everything I'd known--home, family, friends, and the security of being a part of a community regardless of how dysfunctional? I didn't care about losing the privilege of being a soldier in God's End-Time Army, but I did wonder if they might be right about Hell. I wondered if freedom was really worth all this uncertainty and the what-ifs.

I wrote my graduation speech, extolling my fellow graduates to follow their passion, the same advice always given to, and usually ignored by, all college graduates. I told myself I was following my passion, that I wanted to do this. And I believed it. I was determined once again to show the world I was right. That I knew how to choose the life and the group that was best for me. I was sure I could be a part of the army but not owned by it, that a person could have brains and independent, innovative thoughts and still be part of a larger group that gave their life purpose, meaning, identity, and structure, even if that culture demanded uniformity. I wouldn't be a brainwashed automaton, I'd be different. I was sure I knew what I was getting into, what I was signing my life over to, and how it would play out. I was wrong.

Daniella,” he said to me…”Tell your story.” Could I? Exit. Excommunicate. Backslide. Leave. Could I recover from the life I had lived? From the cults I kept joining? From never having learned to be myself?

How different am I, how different are you, how different is any human—all of us with instincts that tell us we are safer in our groups?

As hard as this story felt to live through, it felt tremendously harder to relive.

The body keeps the score.