I have often wondered why the Fates allowed me to be drawn into what became a destructive cult in the early 1970s, wasting too many years of my life trapped in a situation I did not enjoy but felt compelled to remain in for too long.

I was an honor graduate seminary student, joined with almost everyone else I knew in strongly opposing the war in Vietnam, had the courage in those days to come out of the closet and be what was a pioneering activist in the gay movement, stood for justice and equality and had my share of anti-authoritarian passions due to the tyrant-like behavior toward his family of my father.

But maybe the last few years with Trump around is beginning to give me insight into why I became a cultist at that point in my life. I became aligned, unbeknownst to me at the time, into something that was almost surely Moscow driven, a fifth column, you may say, in the U.S. in the form of an anti-establishment fringe movement replete with its veritably infallible leader, its alienation from mainstream society, its 24-7 demands for loyalty and long hours, compelled adherence to irrational, even outlandish, claims and ideas, and so forth. A classic cult,, when seen in that way. It took me far too long to break away from it, even though my heart had long since not been in it.

So when I look today and see that a third of America is trapped in a similar cult, the Cult of Trump, as evidenced by polls showing growing support for the Big Lie that the 2020 election was tainted and stolen from Trump or that Trump is now the almost-certain 2024 nominee for president of the GOP, I can only shake my head in disbelief because it all bears so much likeness to the environment and outlandish departures from reality that I had been subjected to many decades ago.

I am looking at it from the point of view of assessing if there is something that I learned from my cult experience of the 1970s that could contribute to helping society today break free from the Trump mania.
As I continue to grapple with this issue, a few ideas beyond just the obvious are coming to mind.
I’d say major hooks for falling into a cult are a combined false sense of entitlement, on the one hand, and outright fear on the other.

These days, all of Trump’s correspondence with his base supporters refer to them as “patriots.” as somehow superior to everyone else by virtue of this quality of so-called patriotism. The boss, the wife, and society in general may think of me as a loser, but here’s a place where the opposite is true. It has much less to do with actual economic status than the psychological notion that the follower is a loser to the outside world, but a big winner inside this cult. As for imperfections, Trump’s or his followers’, the saying goes that “In the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king.”

The second factor is fear, both existential and real. People can be afraid to break away from a cult out of fear they’ll be letting down the human race and that the consequences of that are unthinkable. On top of that, is the real fear associated with peer pressure. With everyone around one cheering on obedience to the cult, anyone in that environment can feel incredible pressure to conform even if part of them wants to disassociate. This factor is very, very real for those caught in a cult.

What is the remedy? The remedy is not a kid glove approach to the person caught in a cult, but harder doses of reality. The biggest thing that I was struck by when I finally broke away from my cult was learning how totally invisible it really was to the world when I was led to believe it was at the center of everything.

Truth is the biggest antidote, lots of it. Everything Biden is doing is in the right direction, but the bullhorns of reality and truth must become much louder.