He Escaped a Pious Cult—Then Found College to Be a New One

Author Ben Appel found that he didn’t need to live in a religious commune to experience cult dynamics. He only needed to go to college.

Source: Ben Appel/used with permission

Appel grew up in the Lamb of God, a patriarchal Christian covenant community. As he recounts in his newly released memoir, Cis White Gay: The Making of a Gender Heretic, members “pledge[d] fealty to a small group of self-appointed leaders,” men served as “coordinators,” women as “handmaids” (yes, that is what they were called), and wives were required to obey their “husband-masters.”

When he realized he was gay—something he was taught was spiritually contaminating and would not only condemn him but bring disaster upon his family—it drove him into compulsive, punishing rituals of prayer and self-surveillance.

Cult expert Janja Lalich describes the “bounded choice” of cult life as living in a system in which one’s entire reality is shaped by the group. “Members’ choices are limited by the structure and ideology of the group, which permeate their very sense of self.”

Cults Rely on Us-vs-Them Thinking

Cults isolate their members from competing ideas. The late cult psychologist Margaret Singer wrote that cults create “a polarized us-versus-them worldview,” in which the in-group is right and outsiders are wrong, insiders are enlightened and good and outsiders are backwards and evil.

In Appel’s childhood, the cult was the in-group and everyone else was an outsider. Secular humanism, feminism, and homosexuality were framed as morally dangerous. He was taught to fear the contamination of outsiders and that those who violated what the Lamb of God leadership saw as God’s order would “get sick and die and spend eternity in hell.”

Growing up terrified that even a single impure thought could condemn him, Appel experienced unrelenting psychological torment from guilt and fear. Consumed by obsessive, irrational, and intrusive thoughts about religious failure, he would compulsively repeat ritualistic prayers at night to prevent imagined catastrophes—a cycle he later learned was the “scrupulosity” of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).

In middle school, he attempted to relieve his emotional pain with drugs and alcohol, but the symptoms of OCD worsened, leading to panic, hallucination-like intrusive thoughts, suicidal ideation, and, eventually, hospitalization. Over time, sobriety and treatment stabilized him. Medication eased the OCD, and counseling allowed his life to restart.

In 2017, when he arrived at Columbia University in his 30s as a non-traditional undergraduate, the atmosphere he encountered felt like “a remarkably familiar reprise of the close-minded, intolerant orthodoxy of the Christian cult from which I had escaped at age twelve.”

A Secular Cult on Campus

On campus, Appel faced the secular version of the purity police in “Bias Incident Resource Teams.” The teams were comprised of people students could turn to whenever they believed another student’s behavior was offensive, echoing the cult dynamic of reporting and moral correction.

In cults, as in life, perfection is unattainable. But in cults, the impossible goal of purity can strengthen the authoritarian culture by encouraging purity policing, requiring groupthink, and relying on moral absolutism. The late cult specialist psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton argued that in such environments, the individual is “under totalitarian control” and “becomes, essentially, an agent of the system.”

On campus, Appel saw students trained to fear contamination of another sort: whiteness, Western liberalism, the biological reality of sex, and dissenting views in general. Academic discourse reflected a system that divided the world into oppressor and oppressed, enlightened and benighted—encouraging the same kind of purity policing, groupthink, and moral absolutism that he saw in the Lamb of God, but with different moral requirements.

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Being thrown back into a familiar us-versus-them culture left him once again struggling with intrusive thoughts, reviving the guilt and shame from his childhood.

Guilt as a Mechanism of Control

According to social psychologist Robert Cialdini, guilt is an extremely effective tool of control. “People feel compelled to comply when they believe they are responsible for having caused the problem,” he says. In the Lamb of God, guilt was tied to Appel’s feared gay identity. On campus, his guilt was tied to a feared identity as an oppressor.

But at Columbia, instead of being terrified of divine punishment, it was now the ideologically driven punishment of his peers that he feared. The campus’s “lockstep culture” of purity policing once again intensified his scrupulosity. He became so anxious about accidentally “misgendering” or otherwise offending someone that intrusive thoughts would keep him up at night.

The constantly shifting rules of acceptable language and behavior reawakened the moral perfectionism that had fueled his childhood breakdown. It heightened the obsessive monitoring of his thoughts and culminated in a second psychological unraveling.

When Dissent Is Seen as Dangerous

In the “totalist” environments of cults, says cult expert Steven Hassan, “dissent is framed as betrayal.” When Appel’s family eventually began to question the Lamb of God, they were punished. Relationships evaporated; no one wanted to be associated with the morally polluted. And his father lost his job within the cult.

Source: Ben Appel/Used with permission

At Columbia, similarly, questioning campus ideology, and especially dissenting from it, marked a person as morally deviant, and conformity was ensured by what Appel calls “a new army of zealots.” He saw that a cult-like culture is not defined by doctrine but by method.

Whether on the right or on the left, when a set of illiberal beliefs and practices suppress free thought and open inquiry, restrict speech, enforce ideological conformity, and treat dissent as moral deviance rather than part of healthy debate, the psychological mechanisms are the same as those used by cults: purity codes, surveillance, moral pollution, emotional manipulation, the punishment of dissent, and fear of retribution.

What Ben Appel came to recognize is that such mechanisms don’t require a religion, a charismatic leader, or a small an insular group. They require only an ideology that thinks it has all the answers and demands total loyalty.

His real recovery began when he was willing to accept the unpleasant and painful consequences of thinking and speaking for himself.