How do you hold accountable a group of people so good at not existing?

If ever there was a church set up to explicitly avoid the pitfall of so many religions,

which is their downfall due to sex, money, and power, it was your church.

It didn't even have a name. It didn't even have a legal organizational structure.

It totally downplayed and then erased its founder.

So like, how could anything go wrong?

It was hard to imagine existing outside of two-by-toism.

Like, we couldn't picture what life outside would even look like.

It was too hard to imagine.

It was easier to imagine us just disappearing from life altogether. If it's so hard to leave this religion that death

seems like a reasonable way out, it's a cult. I thought the fact that I'm even here feeling

this right now is because I'm giving too much weight to something that's not giving me anything back.

When I really, really need something to lean on, there's nothing there. And that's not my fault. I can't say I was a doubting it. It's not what you do. It's who you are on a, on a molecular

level. It's your identity. It's your marriage. It's your family relationships. It's your community. It's

your worldview. Then, very well-known, highly respected overseer was found dead in a hotel room.

He was an abuser who abused women and children. It felt like the last good guy that we knew

was going down. Like it felt like if he has allegations, who doesn't? Like the whole thing is

corrupt, right? That's how it felt to us at the time. We started having people flooding to us

for information. Our group was just absolutely exploding because people were hearing about it because we were sharing public information.

And then word of mouth and everyone was like, where is the information coming from?

It's coming from the support group.

So we had a lot of ex-members who had been out for a long time just hearing about the group.

...