No one really ever intends to join a cult. It’s not like we wake up one morning and say, “Huh, my life is missing something. I think I’ll go find a cult to join.” As human beings, we find ourselves in cults because we have absolutely no idea they’re cults until we’re way too far in to find an easy way out. Sometimes, we don’t even realize we were in a cult until long after we’re out. One day, we stumble upon a bit of truth, or put some pieces together, and go, “Holy crap. That was a cult. No wonder I’m so messed up.”

My family was no exception.

There are a lot of details surrounding how and why we wound up in a cult that I’m simply not at liberty to share. They’re for other people to tell. All I’ll say is, there are two kinds of people who join a cult: crazy (in the clinical sense) and desperate. The crazy ones either stay, or jump from one extreme lifestyle to another, but the desperate ones almost always find their way out, and back to some semblance of balanced living.

My family was the latter. My parents were not- and are not- crazy. While still Evangelical Christians, they’re as out of the cult as I am. They’re not desperate anymore. Thank God.

This desperation peaked the same summer I turned 13. A long series of very unfortunate events had befallen my family, and my parents somehow believed they were to blame. As a result, they sought a guarantee that I would not be collateral damage. And they found one. Or so they thought.

There was a family at our Presbyterian church (PCUSA) that was a bit different from the rest. They homeschooled their four kids throughout the 90s, when it was still very unusual. The girls mostly wore long skirts, and they didn’t believe in dating. Their kids, who ranged from about two to ten years older than me, were every parents’ dream. No teenage rebellion in that family.

My parents were actually good friends with the parents of this family, so when the dad introduced my parents to this amazing international homeschooling organization- The Advanced Training Institute (ATI)- my parents were open to listen. Within a short period of time, we were introduced to the teachings of the cult’s leader, Bill Gothard. On the surface, he simply taught Biblical living. In reality, he taught much, much worse.

Gothard pretty much guaranteed that if parents homeschooled their children, and raised them according to the Seven Basic Principles, those children would grow up to be part of a mighty, Godly generation. And they would turn around and raise their children the same way. This appealed to many parents who had lived through the sixties and seventies, and worried about their children growing up to experiment with drugs and sex. By the time we joined in 1996, ATI was in its heyday. Literally thousands of families were enrolled across the globe.

For over a decade, we had our annual conference in Knoxville, Tennessee, on the campus of the University of Tennessee. Ironic, given that allowing your child to enroll in college was an offense that could get you kicked out of ATI. For a week, we descended upon the campus and surrounding hotels. We completely filled Thompson-Bowling Arena. Everywhere the eye could see, large families with six, ten, fifteen children, swarmed the streets of Knoxville. The “Apprenticeship Students,” or, as any normal person would call, “the teenagers” were neatly dressed in our official uniform of navy pants for the boys or long, mostly ankle-length skirts, for the girls, and white button down shirts or blouses. Jeans and t-shirts were expressly forbidden. The closest anyone came to that was khakis and a polo.

The conference was a time that most families looked forward to. There were encouraging speakers, who talked about how to raise a dozen children without being overwhelmed, or how to guide your young adult daughter or son in their courtship, and how to decide whether you should allow your courting children to hold hands before they were married. How do you keep your children from listening to Christian rock music, or from wanting to go to college? Do your children really need to learn chemistry? Should you allow your adult daughter to get a job outside the home? How do you trust God for your family size when you really just don’t want any more children? All of these topics were popular topics of guest speakers at the Knoxville conference.

For the Apprenticeship crowd (generally ages 14 to…whenever someone got married), we usually separated into boys and girls only groups. The boys would listen to speakers on topics such as, how to support your family without a college education, or how to prepare to be the spiritual leader for your future family. Preparing to buy a car and a house without going into debt were also big topics. For the girls, we learned about how to serve our fathers while waiting for God’d timing in bringing us someone to court and marry, how to dress modestly and not defraud the men and boys in our lives, whether or not to build a hope chest, and how to cultivate a meek and quiet spirit.

We would leave the conference on a spiritual high, ready to take home our new insights and implement them into our lives.

While most ATI families didn’t go to a church that was largely comprised of other ATI families (there were only a few such churches in the entire country), our family left our old church and joined one shortly after getting involved in ATI. The pastor’s family had been very involved in ATI at one time, and most of our Elders were ATI fathers themselves. Only two families in our church didn’t homeschool, and about three quarters of those that did were in ATI. Returning from Knoxville was always exciting, because the families who wanted to go, but couldn’t, were eager to hear all about the new teachings from Mr. Gothard. The month of June was often devoted to sermons and Sunday school lessons from Knoxville.

Don’t be fooled- this wasn’t harmless zealousness for a particular brand of Christianity. Abuse ran rampant in ATI families, and the organization itself. Bill Gothard has been sued multiple times for sexual misconduct towards the girls who worked for him. When we joined ATI, my parents, who had stopped spanking me when I was 8 (what I’d call “normal” spanking for my generation- a few swats on the butt with the hand for the worst of offenses), decided they would start spanking me again, because it was “Biblical.” And this time, it was for nearly every offense. The Bible said that rebellion was as bad as witchcraft, and since disobedience was rebellion, every slight had to be punished by spanking with a switch from a tree. This continued until the summer I turned twenty. How and why they stopped is its own separate story.

There was no defending one’s self in ATI. If an authority decided someone was guilty of someone, then that was it. I can’t even begin to remember the number of times my mom decided I was guilty of something I hadn’t done. But if I argued, the problem just got worse. My church did nothing but facilitate the abuse. I remember one time, going to talk to the pastor after he announced he was going to start a Sunday School series on raising adult children. I was twenty-one at the time, and I told him that there were two things that were really hard to deal with as an adult child. I can only remember one, and that was “guilty until proven innocent.” I’ll never forget the way he looked at me when he said, “Yes, but as a child, it is your responsibility to obey.” Even though I agreed with him at the time, I remember feeling so completely dismissed. Now, I realize I was basically telling him my parents were abusing me, and he dismissed it.

This barely even begins to explain ATI and its beliefs, but as I write more on Elephant Journal about my experience, I thought a cursory overview of ATI would help. Perhaps I’ll write more about it later. If you’re really interested in more specifics about ATI, please let me know in the comments, and I will try to oblige.