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Covid Cultishness Destroyed Their Fellowship

Readers on how friends cast them aside over mask-wearing and vaccine positivity
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Did you see Garth Brooks’s walk-off at yesterday’s Inaugural ceremony? The maskless Brooks hugged all the presidents gathered there. They were wearing masks; he wasn’t. If you’re like me, you thought, “Oh no, he wasn’t wearing a mask.” But you might have thought, “Good for him, not wearing a mask.”

It’s not a big deal, what happened yesterday. But it did bring to mind something I’ve been wanting to write about. I have been hearing for weeks now from conservative readers who report that this last Covid year has split their friend groups, and churches. Because I can’t remember who said I could use their letter or conversation, and who said I couldn’t, I am going to do a mash-up that captures the themes I’ve been hearing:

We were all so close, then the pandemic hit. Then some of my friends got into QAnon and related conspiracies, including believing that the Covid vaccine contains a microchip. They have been enraged about masks, and refuse to wear them. My child and I are seriously immunocompromised, so we can’t be around people who don’t take it seriously, because Covid could put us in the hospital. Some of our formerly close group of friends left our church in anger over mask requirements. Those who stayed ended up driving our pastor off because he insisted on masks to make it possible for elderly and immunocompromised people to come to church without fear. Our friends now treat our family like the enemy because we wear masks,  look forward to the vaccine, and in other ways violate what they have decided the correct Christian conservative narrative is. This year has shattered our family’s ability to trust the people with whom we were closest. I wonder if we will be friends after all this.

Again, that is not an actual letter, but a boiling-down of e-mails and conversations I’ve been having in the past couple of months. I know a pastor who was run out of his church over MAGA and mask policies, and was so traumatized by it that he left the ministry entirely.

Is this cult behavior? That seems like an extreme statement. But it did come to mind reading this Spectator piece by Mary Wakefield, about how culty people have gotten lately. Excerpt:

‘How are you? How’s it all been? I asked the owner as she passed a cappuccino across the COVID-secure takeaway table. ‘Yeah, you know these are crazy times,’ she replied. ‘But at least everything makes sense now.’ What did she mean? ‘It was all explained to me over the summer, and it’s just mad how much sense it makes! Capitalism, democracy… I just can’t understand how I ever fell for it. The patriarchy have deceived us all. But change will come!’ She laughed, and there it was: the knowing, elated look of the chosen. ‘I’m not sure communism did many people any favors,’ I said. She gave a tight smile, said ‘Yeah. You need to have your eyes opened’, and turned away. When I looked over the road at the estate opposite, the racing clouds made it appear as if the tower blocks were toppling.

If there’s more cult thinking about, the usual explanation for it is the internet. We live in information bubbles, it’s said, constantly reinforcing our own beliefs, each group member egging the others on to more extreme views. But I’m not sure the internet is the real villain here. In fact, it is often the way out of a cult. Steven Hassan, author of The Cult of Trump, is doing the talk show rounds right now, comparing Trump with Sun Myung Moon and David Koresh. Hassan was himself a Moonie for many years, and only escaped, he says, after Google gave him the means to question Mr Moon’s True Way.

The best cult recruiting tool, I think, is simply the terrible global sense of unease. Thanks to the virus, all our carefully constructed ideas of the future are crumbling. We crave certainty, and certainty is what cults do best. If there’s a distinction between a cult and a religion, it’s that certainty is not the same thing as faith. Faith acknowledges doubt and struggles on nonetheless. Certainty is madness.

For the gold-standard crazy cultic certainty, go to YouTube and search for a video made by the Scientologists starring Tom Cruise, in which Tom explains his religion to new recruits, with the Mission: Impossible music in the background. Towards the end of the nine-minute clip, Cruise begins to talk about Scientology’s critics, or Suppressive Persons. ‘SPs?’ Cruise laughs maniacally. ‘Wow. SPs, one day they’ll just read about them in the history books.’ The contempt in which he holds non-believers is astonishing.

And that’s why you can never crack a cultist with argument. The more you argue, the more you try to show them that their thinking might be awry, the more obvious it is to them that you’re part of the diabolical opposition — and that they’re being tested. Persecution only proves the point.

Read it all. 

None of my correspondents or interlocutors accused their friends of being culty about all this, but I do detect a feeling of shock and deep sorrow. One, a Christian, said that this past year has been an apocalypse in that she has been forced to learn that the people she thought would be with her through thick and thin actually pushed her out of their fellowship because she believes in mask-wearing.

Are you dealing with this in your life? If so, what are you doing about it?

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