When Faith Becomes a Death Cult
In the natural world, the most dangerous landscapes are often the simplest ones. A monoculture looks orderly, every stalk alike, every row predictable. But it is an ecosystem stripped of its diversity, and it cannot survive what a living, tangled world survives. Belief systems can function the same way. Some nourish, offering reciprocity and care, room for many kinds of mind. Others simplify: one truth, one authority, total obedience, even at the cost of life itself. My years as a Jehovah’s Witness taught me how completely a mind can be replanted as a single crop, and how much that pattern mirrors the systems of control at work in our world today.
I was saddened when I read this article. It reminded me so much of the strict religion I grew up in and belonged to as a young adult, the Jehovah’s Witnesses. We were taught that the death of ourselves or our children was acceptable because we would be assured of resurrection to a better life without struggle. That abstaining from blood transfusions, organ transplants, and even vaccinations at one time was biblical. We were threatened with disfellowshipping, which, in reality, meant being removed from God’s promises, cut off from family and community, and cast into an isolation that felt worse than death itself.
When I was in the hospital and had a C-section, I lost so much blood that recovery was long and arduous, because I had signed a “no blood” waiver. I remember the fear: of dying. Of leaving my children behind. Of living and being responsible for their eternal deaths. Of making the wrong decision, of losing my place in the only world I knew. That fear had been instilled in me since childhood, reinforced through endless repetition: better to die faithful than to live in sin. And so I suffered, because suffering was framed as holy. A sacrifice.
I’ve come a long way since those days, but the terror I lived through lives on inside me. It likely always will. It informs my anthropology now. Because what I see, again and again, is that good people are drawn into high-control groups. Traumatized people. People who were simply never given the tools to recognize what was happening to them. And these systems are not only religious — they can be political, ideological, sometimes woven so tightly into a culture that we can’t see them for what they are.
This is why the dismantling of the Department of Education is so chilling to me. It mirrors the teaching I was raised with: that higher education is dangerous. Why? Because education allows critical thinking, historical context, and the ability to recognize manipulation. High-control systems, whether religious or political, can’t afford for their members to think that deeply. They rely on fear of the outside world, control over information, surveillance and punishment, and the promise of paradise.
I look at this article and I see a six-year-old girl who didn’t have to die. A girl who was sacrificed, not to God, but to a belief system so rigid it convinced her parents that her death was preferable to her survival. It’s the same mechanism I was caught in.
I don’t write this from a place of superiority — far from it. I write from compassion, as someone who knows how deep indoctrination goes. How easy it is to become enmeshed in the promise of a better life. It isn’t stupidity. It isn’t malice. It’s a system of control so powerful that it overrides a parent’s most basic instinct: to protect their child at all costs.
And I won’t pretend this isn’t political, because it is. The same structures of control that made me sign that “no blood” waiver are at work today, stripping people of autonomy, knowledge, and choice.
I study these things now. And I will not stop.
The Hope Conclusion
Just as a monoculture field can be cared for, seed by seed, species by species, until the field is a tangle of life again, so too can a mind narrowed by control be returned to its own diversity. How? Through knowledge. Through community. Through learning the patterns of power well enough to note them when they begin to choke out life. I know, because it happened to me. The field of my mind reflourished, going slowly back to meadow one returning species at a time. I’m not singling out one group or one doctrine. I’m looking at the way control functions everywhere—in religion, in politics, in culture—and the way it always begins with a simplification: one truth, one authority, one permitted future. The remedy is the same everywhere too. More kinds of knowing. More people who catch us when we make our way out. More seeds than any single power can eradicate. Fear doesn’t have to be argued away; it dies back once there is somewhere more nourishing to stand.
