May 8, 1993, Seattle Times - The Washington Post, Educated Idealists Drawn To Cults, Ex-Members Say -- They're Fleeing Ambiguity, Seeking `Truth' And Sacrifice, by Gustav Niebhur,

May 8, 1993, Seattle Times - The Washington Post, Educated Idealists Drawn To Cults, Ex-Members Say -- They're Fleeing Ambiguity, Seeking `Truth' And Sacrifice, by Gustav Niebhur, 

Why do good people join destructive cults?

Consider these observations by Marc Breault, former right-hand man to David Koresh:

Long before federal agents surrounded the Branch Davidians' compound near Waco, Texas, Koresh's followers liked to get together for bull sessions about the world outside. These were meetings of disappointed idealists.

Douglas Wayne Martin, a Harvard-trained lawyer and veteran of civil-rights and anti-Vietnam War marches, voiced frustration that society had not changed as he expected, Breault said.

Steve Schneider, a graduate of the University of Hawaii, felt deeply disappointed that his former denomination, the Seventh-day Adventist Church, had overlooked his desire to become an evangelist.

Then there was Breault himself, a computer programmer with bachelor's and master's degrees in religious studies, upset that apparent discrimination (he is legally blind) had thwarted his plans to become a minister. Also an Adventist, he complained that the church was stodgy and closed to "new ideas."

"I was looking for truth," said Breault, who quit the cult late in 1989 and now lives in Melbourne, Australia. "I felt that the church was sort of stultifying my quest for understanding."

That such educated and energetic people wind up in cults is not unusual, said Joe Szimhart, a cult "deprogrammer" in Pottstown, Pa., who noted that through the years he has attempted to talk about 150 people into leaving various authoritarian religious groups. "Most of those people have a college education with an above-average IQ," he said.

"Most people who are in cults are rather successful academically . . . so they feel they can't be fooled, " Szimhart said.

"They want meaning," said Timothy Stoen, an attorney in Ukiah, Calif. He and others say that for many, the problem is that mainstream society seems overbearingly hypocritical, too slow to change, dominated by compromisers who see the world colored in shades of gray.

These days, Stoen fully realizes that "ambiguity is part of human existence." But on New Year's Day 1970, as a Porsche-driving graduate of Stanford University law school with pin-striped suits and a Brooks Brothers briefcase, he joined Peoples Temple, led by the Rev. Jim Jones, who would become notorious when he led more than 900 followers to their deaths in a 1978 murder-suicide in the South American jungle. Stoen's son died with Jones.

Stoen recalls vividly the day he signed on - the church service's joyful music, the atmosphere of racial harmony, Jones' proclamation of religious socialism. "This is such a happy place, and this is the way society ought to be, and I'm going to join," Stoen said he told Jones, who in turn looked him in the eye and said, "You will never be sorry."

Inside a cult such as Peoples Temple, Stoen said, members carry a credo: "We are going to remake society, we're going to create the perfect social order." It is, he said, "intoxicating."

Likewise, Breault, early in his days with the Branch Davidians, found that he had a profound "sense of spiritual understanding - whether it was illusion or not, it seemed real at the time."

Stoen said that for members, the belief that their particular cult is unique and important increases the longer they stay with it. "It doesn't start out that you are the only ones that have the truth, but that you are the only ones making sacrifices for the truth," he said. "I didn't want anything cheap. I wanted something that cost me for my commitment."

Cost? At first blush, the word sounds jarring, out of place in a society awash in commercial messages that tell people to pursue material comforts. But even in a culture that lauds self-fulfillment, the idea of sacrifice remains alluring.

Anyone who has been to church likely has heard the biblical verse (Matthew 16:24) in which Jesus warns his disciples that the path to the Kingdom of God is strewn with hardships: "If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross and follow me."

That message is so ingrained that even secular society celebrates some who have gone down that road. Mother Teresa, one of the world's most respected figures, lives in poverty while caring for the sick and dying in India's slums. Half a century after his death, many people revere Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian who spoke out against Hitler and was hanged by the Gestapo.

But in the world of small, authoritarian religious groups, sacrifice can be badly misdirected.

In Waco, Koresh reportedly persuaded his male followers to make their wives and daughters available to him sexually.

"We ask ourselves, how can they give up their wives? How can they give up their children?" said Stephen Dunning, associate professor of religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania. "They're doing it because they embrace the sacrifice. . . . That's what gives meaning" to the experience of being in the cult.

Cult members "never intend to follow a psychopath" when they first join, Dunning said. "But once you've committed yourself to someone's authority, it becomes very difficult emotionally to separate yourself from that."

Breault began to suffer doubts about Koresh in 1988. The cult leader, for example, once told followers they were living in the 19th century, not the 20th, he says. Breault remembers wondering if this was some kind of divine "test of faith," a deliberate, intellectual challenge for cult members to think through and prove they were not "robots."

That was typical of how he tried to explain away Koresh's behavior, Breault said. "I'd always try to reconcile it or rationalize it, because the alternative was the whole thing was wrong and he was wrong.

Breault said he finally decided to quit the Branch Davidians when he could no longer explain away Koresh's "taking young girls" without their parents' knowledge. By late 1989, Breault came to a decisive theological conclusion: Koresh was no prophet, "he was just out for himself."

It took Stoen two years to break with Jones. He had become the lawyer for Peoples Temple, while also serving as a local government attorney during the day. He turned over his paychecks to the church. But around 1975, he remembers hearing Jones preach and thinking that the cult leader wasn't telling the truth. "I should have said, that's enough," Stoen said. But he told himself that Jones' overall message was good, even if the man himself was flawed.

Early in 1977, Stoen, then an official in the San Francisco district attorney's office, moved to Jonestown, the Peoples Temple commune in Guyana, where he ran a sawmill and lived with his 6-year-old son, John Victor. "I went down to give Utopia a second chance to work," he said. "I was happy there - the people in the Temple were so sweet and kind."

For personal reasons, Stoen returned to California that summer, where his ex-wife, Grace, a former Temple member whom he trusted, told him in detail that Jones had lied, beaten people and spied on Temple members. Shortly after, he broke with the cult. Jones refused to allow his son to leave Jonestown, though Grace Stoen had sued in California courts to have the boy returned.

"The upshot is, I made war on Jim Jones and he kept my son as a hostage," Stoen said.

Stoen helped form Concerned Relatives, a high-profile group representing families of cult members. He lobbied Congress to investigate Jonestown, filed lawsuits on behalf of Jonestown defectors, even contacted the Guyanese government about the cult.

The effort ended in November 1978, when Jones led his followers in the murder-suicide after cult members killed U.S. Rep. Leo J. Ryan, D-Calif., when he visited the commune to investigate charges of abuses there. Among the dead in Jonestown was the Stoens' son.

Only in the last five years has Stoen been able to talk about the experience. Talking helps, he said, enabling him to overcome the depression of losing his son.

Now a member of a Presbyterian church, Stoen has been reading the Christian writer C.S. Lewis and believes what led him into cult membership was an ancient affliction, the sin of pride: the belief that mere mortals can usurp God's role and change the world.

Since he left David Koresh, Breault, too, has had cause to meditate on that sort of impatience about the world. "In the 1930s, that same frustration manifested itself as fascism," he said. "We weren't political subversives. We tried to do it through (the Branch Davidians). But it's the same sort of thing."