It was a humid Tuesday in July, and the silhouettes of trees were towering over my father and I as we walked our dog, Butters, through the park. It was nearly 11PM, and the moisture in the air was so thick that it began coating our skin the second we emerged from the car.
Butters has a bright caramel blonde coat, but as he dashed through the night, he was practically invisible. He ran forward, backward, and in erratic little circles, the grass rustling furiously with each leap and bound. He’s almost three, but his puppy spirit is still in full swing.
As we scampered through the darkness, there was hardly a sound to be heard besides the overbearing orchestra of crickets surrounding us in every direction. But beneath their chirping, I could faintly make out a chant.
“Do you hear that?” I asked my dad.
But with the ears of a septuagenarian who spent his life playing music, he didn’t. “The crickets?”
“No… it’s like a faint… tribal chant?”
“Hmm… I don’t hear anything.”
“I think we should put Butters back on the leash.”
As we continued trudging through the pitch black arboretum, the chorus of voices continued to crescendo. Soon, they were joined by the macabre glow of candles arranged into an eerie little circle.
“You see that, right??” I asked, reigning Butters in more closely.
“Hmm…” He still couldn’t make out the sound, but had trouble denying the fiery glow emerging from the darkness. “Maybe it’s some kind of ceremony,” he suggested, ever the optimist.
Butters, equally the optimist, began eagerly pulling toward the voices echoing through the trees. We allowed him to get close enough for us to begin making out the contours of the scene, but not close enough to risk being sacrificed on an altar. The chants continued with a forbidding fervor that was equal parts airy and purposeful.
“What… language is that?”
“I think it might be French,” my dad posited brightly.
We inched a few feet closer as I tried to listen more closely.
“EFVNIEGMPWEPKFKR JEESSUUUUS!” yelled one person throatily as their white dress billowed in the wind.
“GOOOGWJOEWWE AADAADDOOODAA IN JESUS’ NAME!!” added another. He, too, was wearing white. In fact, they all were.
“Dad, I think we got our answer.”
“What’s that?”
“They’re Christians. They’re speaking in tongues.”
It was unclear whether the chanting congregation was oblivious to their new spectators, or just too immersed in their divinely inspired chorus of gibberish to pay them any mind.
“AATOOTAA WEEEOOO GABOOBAA JEEESSUUUS!” belted another before a chorus of “Hallellujahs.”
Some of them briefly appeared to be speaking actual English, but were so thoroughly drowned out by their fellow tongue-speaking congregants that it was difficult to be sure.
“AND SO IT BE FOR HIS MIGHT — ”
“GAA DOOOO BWEJOFOPWF WOOTAAAKO”
“AND IN HIS NAAAYME — ” resounded one of the congregants, channeling the righteous fury of a southern baptist minister. Her words were nearly discernible through the jumble of prayer and what briefly resembled pig latin.
“ANDAY EIJOFFDWAY AAATTOGGGOOEAY”
“ — FOR YOUR SINS — GIBBERJAY FLOOPDWAY ZAAMMOTOOAY — SHALL RISE!!!”
“HALLELUJAH!” added a few more in unison. It was the one thing that they at least seemed to agree on.
We managed to leave the park without being sacrificed or converted. Whether they even knew that we were there was never clear.
But it was an interesting sight and telling demonstration of the way that the cult mentality can take refuge within religion. The specifics of what we saw in that park that night are something that few would ever excuse outside the context of religious faith.
A non-religious cult would never turn the arboretum beside our local dog park into their ritual grounds. They wouldn’t be able to hide behind the fact that the basic tenets of their belief are shared by two billion others. Even if Christians are ranting, raving, and speaking tongues in parks after dark, so many still struggle to see the telltale signs of a cult in action.
The world of religion is rife with double standards. Under the umbrella of accepted religious behavior, many things can slip unnoticed or even be embraced. From genital mutilation and foot binding to animal sacrifice, witch hunting and book burning, where religion is involved, reason takes a back seat.
Non-religious cults are typically outcasts for a reason. They can’t take shelter in the masses of other people who believe as they do. If a group with no affiliations to major religious doctrines started chanting in the park so late at night, it wouldn’t be long before authorities were called.
It’s easily forgotten by those who affiliate with religion that the main difference between them and the most notorious cults of history is the number of adherents. The detachment it requires to earnestly believe Jesus is the one true path to salvation is no different from the cult of David Koresh and Charlie Manson. The common factor is faith.
If the Manson cult numbered in the billions, we wouldn’t be calling it a cult at all. We’d be calling it a religion. We’d be passing laws around it, building temples devoted to it, and allotting time in school for it.
It’s plain to Christians how absurd the beliefs of the Rajneesh cult or the church of Scientology are, but they still fail to find fault in the inherent failings of their own belief system. It’s no greater leap of faith to believe that man descended from Adam and Eve, or that Christ was born of a virgin, than it is to believe that Jim Jones is god.
So often when people see footage of these cults in action, they wonder “How could people ever believe that? How could anyone ever be driven to do something so absurd?” But so often, the people asking that question are the ones wearing crucifixes around their necks. The makings of a cult are rooted in feelings innate to all of us. We fear death, and the unknown, and we all want to belong to something. We all want to be a part of a community.
I can’t fault Christians for believing what they do, I can only be confident in the knowledge that those beliefs should bear no role in secular society. Religion would be one thing if it were the unimposing belief in a life after death, and a pearly white gate to enter it, but it’s in religion’s very nature to impose. Exerting as much influence over society as it can manage is in Christianity’s blood, and converting as much of the world as possible into Christians is one of the primary agendas of the church.
Religion can’t be allowed the pass that it so often gets. Even in those moments when it isn’t causing conflicts and sticking its reach into unwanted places, it curtails critical thinking. It inspires otherwise normal people to skulk with candles and uniforms through suburban parks, and to sing songs in a made up language to appease their gay-hating God of eternal hellfire.