The Cult Next Door

The Brand, the Empire, and the Authoritarianism Hiding in Plain Sight

Photo by Tyler Milligan on Unsplash

When I say the word cult, what comes to mind?

For most of us, it’s a montage. David Koresh holed up in Waco with his rifles and his apocalypse. Heaven’s Gate in matching black Nikes, waiting for the Hale-Bopp comet. Jim Jones, Jonestown, and the Flavor-Aid. Or maybe something more medieval, white robes, stone halls, and candles. The root characteristic is a charismatic leader with crazy eyes promising the mothership is on its way.

That’s the picture we’ve inherited, fringe, exotic, easy to spot. When we hear about people we know participating in one, our knee-jerk reaction is, “how could they not see how weird that group is?” It always happens ‘out there,’ to other people, somewhere far away from Target, urban centers, and your favorite coffee shop.

But what if it isn’t?

Picture the warehouse, or old grocery store, on the edge of town with a one-word name, Elevation, Awaken, Refuge, or the really hubristic ones that start with The. Picture the dimmed lights, the projector with lyrics, and the eight-piece worship band. Picture the lobby that looks like an Apple Store, the espresso bar pulling shots better than the place down the street, the welcome team in coordinated apparel — and we can’t forget the lanyards. The senior pastor in $400 sneakers preaching from a six-figure LED stage. Picture the merch table. The leadership podcast. The Instagram reels.

What if the cult is American Evangelicalism, the religious tradition 80 million people in this country call their own?

This is the part where I’m supposed to soften the punch and say, of course, not every megachurch is a cult. I’m not going to do that, not because every congregation is past saving, but because “cult” isn’t a slur I’m tossing around. It’s a technical diagnosis. Sociologists like Janja Lalich and writers like Amanda Montell have spent careers documenting what a high-control system actually is, and they’re clear:

It isn’t defined by aesthetics. It’s defined by structure. How language is used. How power flows. How dissent is metabolized. What happens to the people who try to leave?

By that measure, a sizable slice of American Evangelicalism is hiding in plain sight. The robes have been swapped for a casual oxford shirt, jeans, and a Yeti tumbler. The compound has been replaced with a campus. The Kool-Aid has been rebranded as Kingdom work.

This piece is about three threads, braided together: the language, the empire, and the harm. How modern megachurches deploy linguistic stop-signs to short-circuit critical thinking. How they mirror imperial corporate structures to extract identity and labor from their members. And how they then export the whole machine, control mechanisms included, throughout the Global South under the banner of missions.

This isn’t a fringe problem. It’s a feature of one of the most powerful cultural-religious blocs on the planet. And once you can see it, you can’t unsee it.

Let me show you what I mean.

The Language of Accountability

Every high-control system has its vocabulary. Not jargon – vocabulary. The words sound ordinary on the surface. The acronyms either confirm you’re an outsider, or land as a pleasant affirmation that you’re an insider.. They belong to the cadence of regular church life. But run them through Amanda Montell’s framework in Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism and you start to see what they’re really doing: short-circuiting the listener’s ability to think.

Montell calls these phrases thought-terminating clichés:

linguistic stop-signs that cut off inquiry before it can become a question. You’ve heard them. If you grew up in this world, you’ve probably said them.

“It’s a heart issue.”

Try raising a concern about how a pastor handled an abuse allegation, or how the elder board ran a personnel decision, or how the building campaign somehow keeps overrunning the budget. Watch how fast it gets reframed as your heart issue. The institution didn’t fail. You did. You’re the one with bitterness, with pride, with an unteachable spirit, who doesn’t trust the leadership God has put over the church. The structural question evaporates and gets transformed into a personal character flaw.

“Obey your leaders and submit to them, for they are keeping watch over your souls.”

A verse from Hebrews, weaponized. In its original context, the verse cuts both directions, leaders “keep watch” precisely because, as the very next line specifies, they are “those who must give an account.” The trust is bounded. The submission is conditioned on the leader’s own answerability to God. Strip that second half away and you’ve got something else entirely: a unilateral demand on the member, with no corresponding constraint on the one being obeyed.

In the high-control system, that’s exactly what gets quoted. Submit to them travels everywhere. Those who must give an account get silently left out.

So when your gut tells you something is off, about the celebrity pastor, about the way money moves, about the way women are treated, about the lack of racial and social diversity — your gut is the problem. Your intuition is the enemy. Trust the system, not your perception of the system.

That’s the second move: re-lexicalization. Common words get quietly redefined to serve the structure.

Let’s take submission, for example. In the early church, it described mutual service among equals. Today, it’s been transformed to mean unquestioning obedience to the senior leadership’s “vision.” Here’s another: accountability. In a healthy community, it means peer-to-peer honesty. Now it gets flipped vertically — where authority watches you but is never watched itself.

Scot McKnight, in A Church Called Tov, describes the predictable outcome: institutions begin to optimize for their own image and reputation rather than for the protection of the people inside them. The “culture of goodness” becomes a brand to defend, not a reality to live up to. When a member is harmed, the first instinct isn’t to ask what happened to her? It’s to ask what do we need to do to protect the church?

This is the architecture of a surveillance state dressed up as a church. The deception is that it looks like a community, but functions through control. And the giveaway is always in the language, because in a healthy environment, you’re allowed to ask the question. In a high-control system, the question is the institution’s most dangerous threat.

The Imperial Theology of the American Megachurch

Once you’ve built the language to suppress questions, you need a power structure that benefits from the silence. That’s where imperial theology comes in.

The modern megachurch runs on a simple piece of mythology: The Great Man and The Vision.

There is “the guy.” He’s very different from “the Dude” (Big Lebowski, IFYKYK). The guy is almost always a he who receives a vision from God. The vision is non-negotiable. Without the vision, church planting, missions, or any speaking role from the front of the church is off the table. The board exists to rubber-stamp the vision, the staff exists to execute the vision, and the congregation exists to fund and embody the vision. Anyone who questions said vision is, by definition, opposing what God is doing. The guy is always at least two levels removed from accountability — first the elder board, then God himself. The dissent isn’t a strategic disagreement. It’s spiritual rebellion. More often than not, the dissent gets transformed into a “sin” issue.

This is the charismatic authoritarian model, and it scales beautifully. It also breaks people.

Mark Driscoll, founder of Mars Hill in Seattle, told his leadership team in a now-infamous staff meeting:

“There’s a pile of dead bodies behind the Mars Hill bus, and by God’s grace, it’ll be a mountain by the time we’re done.”

That isn’t a quote from a critic. That’s a quote from the leader. The “dead bodies” were former staff and members who’d been chewed through and discarded by the institution. The bus was the metaphor for the vision rolling forward. The mountain of corpses was the goal.

Mars Hill collapsed in 2014. The blueprint did not.

Kristin Kobes Du Mez, in Jesus and John Wayne, traces how this archetype isn’t a deviation from American Evangelicalism — it’s the logical result of it. Decades of Evangelical media, books, and conferences have venerated a particular kind of male leader: aggressive, certain, command-and-control, willing to break things for the mission. The “warrior pastor” isn’t a bug. It’s the product. As one common ministry-leadership refrain has it: “No one wants to follow a pastor whose ass they feel like they could kick.”

That product needs an institution shaped to fit it. Enter the corporate colony.

The success of a modern megachurch is measured the way the success of a corporation is measured: square footage, weekly attendance, church expansion, social media reach, podcast downloads, brand awareness. Success is growth. The vocabulary borrows from Silicon Valley far more than Scripture — vision casting, alignment, scaling, platform, runway, capital campaigns. When a pastor talks about the church, he’s often using the language of a CEO talking about a company. That isn’t an accident. It’s the operating system.

Something that’s stuck with me from my time in ministry is how the majority of the books supervisors and pastors had me read for “pastoral development” were business books. The Effective Executive. The Advantage. Start with Why. Leading Change. For the handful of titles that were “ministry” focused, they were still written from a business standpoint, and they were usually written by Bill Hybels of Willow Creek — who resigned in 2018 amid multiple sexual misconduct allegations. The leadership pipeline of American Evangelicalism, in other words, ran through a man who turned out to be exactly what the structure produces.

And like any growth-obsessed corporation, the megachurch develops what I’ll call a theology of injustice. The patterns are familiar: staff burnout, silenced victims, leadership opportunities for women limited or prevented, the LGBTQ+ community welcomed only so long as they remain closeted, abuse cases settled quietly — all justified as the regrettable but acceptable cost of “the greater mission.” The mission is what God is doing. The casualties are what people made of God’s plan. It is the ultimate ends-justify-the-means mentality. Bodies get run over. The institution moves on.

This is empire mimicry, full stop. The early church — the one that met in homes and shared meals and pooled resources for widows and slaves — was structured precisely to prevent this kind of accumulation. What the modern American megachurch has built instead is a structure that mirrors the country it lives inside: imperial, corporate, growth-obsessed, hierarchical, and willing to absorb a lot of human damage in service of expansion.

The Architecture of Harm & The Export of Empire

This is the part very few people are willing to talk about: what the system does to the people inside it, and where the blueprint goes once it’s been perfected.

The Internal Demolition

Marlene Winell is a psychologist who spent decades working with survivors of high-control religion. She coined the term Religious Trauma Syndrome in 2011 to describe a recognizable cluster of symptoms in people leaving authoritarian religious systems:

Chronic anxiety, hyper-vigilance, depression, a fractured sense of self, difficulty trusting their own perceptions, sleep disruption, and a pervasive baseline of fear. The symptoms map closely onto complex PTSD because the underlying mechanism is the same — sustained exposure to a system that punishes deviation and rewards compliance, with no exit that feels safe.

Inside a megachurch shaped by The Great Man and The Vision, belonging is performance-based. You belong so long as you’re aligned, useful, on-brand, and available. Question the institution and your in-group status is revoked — sometimes loudly, through formal “church discipline.” More often it happens quietly — through being ghosted, missed calls, and the slow social shunning of people who used to be your community. The nervous system learns. It learns that survival depends on monitoring the leader’s mood, anticipating expectations, and preemptively suppressing your own observations. Over years, that monitoring becomes the body’s baseline state. It isn’t a metaphor. It’s neurology.

There’s a second layer of harm, and survivors describe it as the hardest to name: moral injury. The phrase comes from military psychology — the wound caused when a person is forced, by an authority they trusted, to participate in something that violates their conscience.

In the high-control megachurch, God becomes the instrument of that violation. You were told that submission to this leader, this institution, this vision was submission to God. When you finally see the structure for what it is, the betrayal cuts in two directions at once. The institution lied. And the institution used the name of God to do it.

That isn’t “church hurt.” That’s a deep wound on the soul.

The Export

If we think this is just a local problem, we are dangerously mistaken.

The American megachurch isn’t a closed system. It exports. Through the missions industrial complex — short-term mission trips, church planting partnerships, leadership conferences, satellite campuses, translated curricula, and well-funded “global movements” — the blueprint travels to Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East. The aesthetic gets localized; the structure remains high control and imperialistic.

What gets exported isn’t just the gospel. It’s the whole package: the charismatic-authoritarian leadership model, the unquestioning-submission lexicon, the corporate-growth metrics, the theology of injustice that codes harm as acceptable cost. American Evangelicalism arrives with branded curriculum, stadium-sized conferences, and the implicit promise that this is what successful Christianity looks like. Local pastors get trained inside the model. Local congregations get taught to recognize the model as faithfulness.

And here’s the structural turn: the same religious software that demands “unquestioning submission to authority” in a Lagos church plant or a Manila satellite campus does not stay confined to Sundays. It teaches posture. That posture — defer to the leader, trust the system, treat dissent as rebellion — is exactly the posture that authoritarian governments and entrenched local elites want from a population. Evangelical mission work, in too many places, has functioned as soft infrastructure for political repression and neo-colonial economic interest. Not because every missionary intends it that way. Because the operating system was built that way at home, and shipping it overseas was always going to ship its logic with it.

This is the part of empire building that missions agencies don’t cover. The American megachurch hasn’t just built a high-control religious environment in the suburbs. It has built an export-grade authoritarian formation system, and it sends it everywhere it can plant a flag.

The Exit Ramp

If you’re reading this and recognizing the room you’re standing in: leaving isn’t rebellion. Leaving is reclamation.

The institution will call it “falling away.” It will call it “backsliding.” It will tell people you became bitter, prideful, and deceived. That’s the language doing the only work it knows how to do — converting your accurate perception of the structure into a defect of your character. It is, to the very last sentence, a thought-terminating cliché.

The exit starts with the lexicon. Strip it. Pull each word back to its actual meaning. Submission is mutual, or it is coercion. Accountability runs in both directions, or it is surveillance. Obedience to a leader is conditioned on the leader’s own answerability, or it is merely control dressed in a Bible verse t-shirt. When the words go back where they belong, the system loses the only mechanism it has for keeping you in the room.

Then trust your gut. The gut you were taught to distrust — the one that told you something was off about the celebrity pastor, the money, the way women are treated, the way the LGBTQ+ community quietly disappeared from the congregation — that gut was right the whole time. Reclaim it. It’s the most reliable defense you have against spiritual exploitation, and it was the first thing the system tried to take from you.

And one last thing, for anyone still inside who is wondering whether refusing to “submit to the vision” is somehow an act of unfaith:

If God is truly sovereign, He doesn’t need a thought-terminating cliché to protect His reputation. He doesn’t need a high-control institution to keep you faithful. He never did.