Business coaching from a Fundamentalist pastor
Or, what happens when your path to success was paved by a cult you've never even heard of
If you’ve followed me here from my business email list, I need to tell it to you straight: I’m going to start diving into some pretty dark and uncomfortable stuff from my upbringing in the world of Fundamentalist Christian home schooling cults that you might think has very little to do with your world as a progressive online business owner. Unfortunately, that’s where you’d be wrong.
Unlike the last 4 essays arranged into chronological chapters, leading up to the oh shit moment when I realized things were very awry in the world of online business coaching, the forthcoming essays will be topical rather than chronological. Through personal essays, I’m going to be sharing pieces of my experience in (very non-linear) recovery from cults and coercive control. Don’t worry, it won’t all be dark and drab. I did plenty of fun, wild, weird, and beautiful stuff inside of cults, too!
Specifically, though, I’m going to be sharing how the very ugly roots of my upbringing are alive and well in the progressive online business groups you may have already spent an hour or more hanging out in today.
Of course, if someone started going to a new church and spending an hour a day in its online forums, 5-10 hours a week binging its leaders’ podcasts, hours a week on seminars and classes, $20-50k/year on tithing and retreats, consulting people in their accountability group about every decision, and blocking friends on social media who dared to say that all the new religious stuff they’re posting seems kinda weird…
…most of us would raise our eyebrows and think something was up.
If you sub church for business coaching community, suddenly it’s “investing in your business” and “leveling up”. Blocking all your family and friends isn’t shunning or excommunicating outsiders, it’s “protecting your peace.” You have to get rid of anything that could contribute to an “upper limit problem.”
Unsubscribing from everything that gets you down and makes you think critically about your behavior? It’s not information control, it’s time management like any good CEO would practice.
Oh and don’t even worry about that $20-50k. You’re not being exploited for a tithe or crummy, fundamentalist seminars schilling dangerous ideas in the name of “Biblical Living” out of a cassette tape. You’re an entrepreneur, and you have to invest money to make money… right?
Besides, you talk to tons of different people. You’d never isolate yourself like those church folks do! Your friends are diverse. Why, just today you talked to members of your mastermind, group coaching pod, and your biz besties. Totally different. Totally varied perspectives. Totally harmless.
One of the perks of closing my business and getting employment outside of the online business world is that I’m now very free to open my mouth. Also, because I’ve lurked more than bought (despite getting drawn into a couple of very coercive and cult-like communities), I seem to be one of too few folks who skated out without a trail of messy contracts and NDAs to shape my story.
I have no desire to write any sort of splashy, name-droppy tell all. This is not The Enquirer, and I am most interested in addressing the harms I have personally done and the thinking errors I have been complicit in. However, I want to be honest about the fact that my lifestyle and employment changes have removed any financial barriers that telling my story might have posed. Financial coercion is often an instrument of cultish groups, and can severely limit members’ sense of agency and distort their truth. It was important for me to make sure that when I started writing my story, I had access to as much agency and choice as possible so that I could speak clearly.
Yes, I could have written what I have to say while running my business. But it would have required some exhausting reconfiguration.
That realization was one of many that drove home my suspicion: while the online business world might not be a typical “cult”, the playbook sure felt familiar.
If you cannot speak honestly and openly about what you see with your own eyes, if you cannot ask questions in public forums, if you cannot hit pause for a substantial period of time to reflect and think critically before making (time, energetic, or financially) expensive decisions, something is not right.
As a child and teenager, I was exposed to a number of intersecting yet distinct Fundamentalist Christian cults.
I have lived experience with the tactics of indoctrination and coercion used by these cults to weaponize people’s idealism, trauma, financial vulnerability, mental illness, work ethic, dedication, values, fears, and hopefulness against their own best interest. When the indoctrination and coercion process is complete, even the most otherwise reasonable and compassionate people can find themselves complicit in a system of Christian Nationalism, colonialism, white supremacy, financial exploitation, homophobia, and violent misogyny. It is a process that has taken the minds of many of my loved ones, and I’m not sure how many of them will get out.
That is the world I began writing, reading, and wrestling my way out of as a young queer kid. While in many ways I’ve run far, I’m still deconstructing beliefs and correcting the many thinking errors that I’ve internalized since infancy. I expect I will be doing so for the rest of my life. To be clear, I am not doing any of this to “be right.” In fact, I am doing this to unlearn the Fundamentalist idea that there is one right way to do, think, or be anything.
That’s why my words are written in water, rather than stone.
One of the things that is really triggering about leaving the cult of Fundamentalist Christianity is that its foundational belief structure plays very nicely with (and is echoed in) the mythical American Dream, so it winds up being co-opted by all sorts of organizations outside of religion for financial, social, and political gain.
It makes sense. Fundamentalist Christianity, at least in every form that I’ve encountered, is built on a prosperity gospel theology that offers a level of certainty many find attractive. How that prosperity gospel gets presented varies by each Fundamentalist group and their distinct values.
In megachurch Evangelical Fundamentalism, a fan favorite of celebrities like Justin Bieber, the formula goes like this: Obey (our specific authoritarian interpretation of) the Bible, and God will make you healthy, happy, and rich. Praise Jesus!
In the movements I grew up in, this kind of prosperity gospel was shunned as the obvious signs of a “false prophet.” Worshiping money?
Harumph.
Haven’t those people ever heard of the Golden Calf—or that Jesus said it would be easier for a camel to crawl through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get to heaven? (Matthew 19:24, for those wondering.)
We were a quieter, more subdued set, and because of the frequent vocal rebukes from the pulpit that denigrated the “prosperity false prophets”, it took me too long to connect the dots between my childhood cult’s teachings and the prosperity gospel.
In our circles, the language was different—more subtle.
It wasn’t “Obey (our specific authoritarian interpretation of) the Bible and get rich!” It was “Obey (our specific authoritarian interpretation of) the Bible, and receive God’s blessing on you and your family.”
You won’t get money, you’ll get favor.
God won’t make you rich, he’ll provide.
You won’t be famous, you’ll be blessed.
If you unpack the beliefs, though, they’re built on the same premise and ideology: perfectly execute the one right system that only we have insider knowledge of, and get your desired—perfect—result.
Like the universe’s vending machine.
In many ways, the version of the prosperity gospel that I grew up in is far more dangerous because it isn’t flashy, and it can spread like wildfire even in communities that pride themselves on being “ethical,” or those that are economically disadvantaged. If you’re feeling echoes of the trend of “ethical” online business coaches who practice questionable methodologies while using their language and branding to cater to progressive values, marginalized people, and your own idealism—all while making it a point to call out their flashy, “money-obsessed” counterparts? Well, isn’t that interesting. I kinda was too.
No matter what flavor of it someone consumes, however, Fundamentalism conditions you to expect “blessings” based on performance and convinces you that if you aren’t as successful as you want to be? Have no fear—it’s totally fixable!
Because the problem isn’t the fool proof system.
The problem isn’t that all humans since the beginning of time have experienced suffering, that death happens, and that none of us is an island fully in control of our own destiny or immune to vulnerability.
The problem is clearly you as an individual, and the fact that you are secretly sinning! (Not working hard enough, going all in enough, following the system enough, or changing your mindset enough.)
This cult coercion trap is specifically designed to keep you from looking at perpetrators of harm, exploitative systems, or any structural inequities that might be affecting you.
As long as you blame yourself, you’ll stay trapped in a cycle of exhaustion, following more of the cult’s teachings, doing more work, and overall burning yourself out to prove that you are in fact good and worthy of results.
Maybe, you think, one day you’ll outrun your secret shame and finally find God’s favor success.
In Shiny Happy People, a docuseries about the Duggar family and the IBLP (one of the cult movements my parents were involved in), survivor Liz Hunter says that the program worked by turning your critical thinking against yourself.
I wonder how many entrepreneurs who have never set foot in a church can relate to staying up all night, seemingly of their own volition, endlessly worrying about what they’ve done “wrong” in the process of implementing the $10k program they just bought. If only they strategize harder, self-reflect more, get more coaching to overcome their “personal blocks”... surely then they’ll find what’s “keeping them from” their surefire, scalable, $10k months.
Not a prosperity gospel in sight here, folks.
I’ve thought a lot about who I want to write these essays for. It’s a complex question, and I’ve had to consider it slowly.
I’m not sure I can say anything to effectively reach back into the pew of a Fundamentalist Christian church and pull a doubting member out.
What I can do is share my story as clearly as I am able, and name my truth about how commonplace coercion, exploitation, and cult-ish ideology is, even in secular and entrepreneurial settings, and even from well-meaning people. I hope that doing so helps my fellow progressive entrepreneurs understand what they may be seeing around them, especially those who are evaluating their business plans and trying to make sense of experiences where they felt exploited, coerced, or like their idealism was weaponized against them. I hope to show how the ideology of Christian Fundamentalism is a specific structural blueprint that has been co-opted by many leaders in the online business coaching industry, much like it was by the MLM industry, and given a fantastic rebrand.
Most importantly, I hope by showing how I’ve found myself in similar high-demand groups and surrounded by mind-controlled communities more than once, you’ll see how language, branding, values, and social capital can be weaponized to get well-meaning people to become complicit in straight up harmful and exploitative things. It’s easy to stay quiet, feeling stupid or shameful (especially if, like me, you’ve fallen for the trap more than once). I have talked to too many people recently who have said things like “See, it does feel like a cult… but Jane is such a wonderful person, and I know she has great values so she didn’t mean to exploit me. I think I just should have trusted myself more.”
That’s exactly how the system of harm keeps working.
And look, maybe you don’t want to read all that heavy venn-diagram-of-awful stuff. That’s totally fair, and I welcome your unsubscribe to take care of yourself as much as your reading! But you may want to stick around for the cringey home school cult stories, like the time we went on a great American road trip to the pastel colored Fundie amusement park straight out of your nightmares, or when I got reprimanded by an elder for “distributing porn” at church after I was caught reading—you guessed it—Teen Vogue. Nobody can manufacture salacious drama like a fundie!
Either way, I’m going to keep writing my way out, deconstructing the harmful beliefs that have landed me back in this spot more times than I’d like, and being honest about what it’s like to recover from repeated coercion so that more of us can quit self-criticizing and start recovering out loud. I’m also going to keep telling my darkly funny stories, and being the first one to laugh
Thanks for being with me on the ride.
h/t to the book Cultish by Amanda Montell, Steven Hassan’s BITE Model, and the well-researched work of the Leaving Eden podcast for much of the information about cults, coercive control, and Fundamentalism that have shaped this essay and helped my world snap back into focus.