Cults on our College Campuses, a reality not a myth.

Walking back to my office I see a group of young women, or maybe a man standing alone, all with a bundle of quarter pages in their hands. Students walk by and one of them asks “do you have time for a survey?”. The first few questions are innocuous enough but soon the conversation turns to immortal souls, paradise and hell. I encounter this happening almost every week. At first I walked on by, then I stopped to listen, then I began to interrupt and disrupt the conversations.

The group is Faith Christian Church and their practices are insidious. The United Religious Council of the University of Arizona has compiled a set of safe practices for evangelizing on campus. These are tenets so basic that groups from overwhelmingly divergent faiths and theologies, Jewish, Buddhist, Later Day Saints, Unitarians Universalist, Roman Catholics, Para Church groups, and Main Line denominations, like my own, can all agree on them as basically a no brainer. This list can be found here. The issue I continually confront Faith Christian Church on was one of deception, specifically a refusal to state from the start that they were representing Faith Christian Church.

The difference is simple “Do you have time for a survey?” is a very different statement than “I am from Faith Christian Church, would you answer some questions?”. The first is a deceptive means to get a students contact information, the second is an authentic way to share one’s faith with students on campus. As far as we can tell Faith Christian Church does not stop in their problematic practices when it comes to recruitment.  They do their utmost to stay just under the bounds, not bending the rules so far to actually bring about accusations of abuse and entrapment while individuals are still students, but the use of the student body as a ready source of new members is becoming more an more obvious. The newest report of Faith Christian Church as a highly abusive and problematic cult are just now coming under public scrutiny.

Many University Students are in a vulnerable personal space. Away from home for the first time, readily isolated, in search of a place where they can belong. This is the reason why healthy campus ministries, and other programs, are so essential on our campuses. They offer the possibility of healthy support that can guide students to become healthy full-fledged individuals. The problem is that the same environment that make healthy organizations a crucial reality also makes it a ready place for abusing individuals, stinting their growth, and forcing them into places where they no longer have the capacity for knowing who they are and exercising basic freedoms.

Faith Christian Church is the reality that we have to deal with on the Campus of the University of Arizona, sadly it is not the only group with cult like characteristics that we are monitoring at this time.  These predatory entities are alive and well on campuses across our country, specifically targeting those individuals who are least likely to be noticed if they simply disappear from the healthy social networks. There is a lot of my work which is Episcopal focused, a lot of days when I just focus on getting my worship numbers up a bit, have more dynamic conversations at our Wednesday evening theology/atheology discussion group, etc. but then there is the reality that part of my work is simply striving to ensure that the campus in which I work is a safe place for the students to practice self discovery. A striving to ensure that individuals seeking a faith group find one in which they can build a healthy sense of self and develop fully into who they are in the most basic senses of the word.

University Campuses, even ones as large as the University of Arizona, are microclimates of culture. Small but active counter voices to prevailing thought can have a major impact on that culture. Small groups seeking to do harm can trap and capture the vulnerable. Small groups seeking to create spaces of transformation and growth for the vulnerable in our midst can bring about amazing effects, not only to those we impact directly and can name but also those whom simply hear us stating clearly that all can have a place in our midst. This voice, said loudly and clearly with no reservations, is essential for eradicating the work of predatory religious groups on our campuses and in the world.