I Fired God: My Life Inside—and Escape From—the Secret World of the Independent Fundamental Baptist Cult

by Jocelyn R. Zichterman

The desire for social justice comes from an inward motivation to see right prevail.

Demonizing every other religious group—even mainstream Baptists—was a favorite tactic of the IFB to separate its members from outsiders and to instill distrust and fear.

IFB parents are fond of advising each other to “break the will of the child, but not the spirit.” But in my experience, no one knew how to distinguish between the two.

Many members of the IFB gravitate toward conspiracy theories and doomsday thinking, and their pastors encourage it.

The cult mind is so filled with misinformation, so deluded, that it’s easy to dupe, and extremists in the political sphere have played on this weakness successfully for decades now.

It didn’t matter which “curriculum” they favored, Christian schools and textbooks typically taught nothing but memorization and obedience.

it was hard to sort out what God might genuinely want us to do from what ordinary humans with strong wills and positions of power desired for us.

If the GOP is to have any long-term chance of survival, responsible Republican politicians will need to purge their party of the right-wing extremist fringe that has infiltrated it—the sooner the better.

by forcing victims to talk to their abusers before meeting with law enforcement, the abusers get a heads-up whenever a victim starts to break their silence.

The IFB ideology drove nonemotional members like Joseph toward perfectionism by instilling an irrational fear of an unreasonable God in them. Meanwhile, it drove emotional people like me to an irrational fear of people by filling our heads with guilt, shame, and fear.

we were both so consumed by the tortured, guilt-laden belief system our pastors had ingrained in us that we were like addicts, insecure and frightened without it.

sometimes we fail to get through to people because we don’t understand their background and culture and, by extension, their language triggers.

It’s one thing to have a personal moral belief based on a literal interpretation of the Bible. It’s something entirely different to demand that the rest of society adopt your beliefs.

there is simply no easy or amicable way to leave a cult.

Christian Dominionists want freedom for themselves, not all.