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The Identity/Reality Model and the ICC (ICOC)
“The goal is that they need to feel like wretches.”
-- Maria Rogers; see full quote
To help further understand the psychological effects caused by cults and how to begin to recover from them, I propose a new model for understanding thought reform: the Identity/Reality model. I will discuss the Identity/Reality model in relation to the ICC.
The ideas of identity and reality pervade the literature about thought reform (popularly called “mind control”). Robert Jay Lifton, in his seminal book on thought reform in China, wrote of the “assault on identity” he observed in Chinese political re-education camps. (1) Later, Richard Ofshe and Margaret Singer wrote that modern thought reform programs increasingly attacked central aspects of people’s selves, including their “confidence in perception of reality.” (2) In a 1988 Milwaukee lecture, Singer summarized modern thought reform in terms of identity and reality, saying: "The current thought reform programs are an attack upon the total sense of self and an attack upon a person's total sense of reality." (3)
Building on this idea, we can assert that cults achieve thought reform – what is sometimes called "brainwashing" of members – by their assault on identity and assault on reality. Furthermore, cults seem to begin during recruitment by attacking their targets’ perception of identity/reality but often end up actually changing their identity/reality. For a diagram of the Identity/Reality model, see Figure 1.
Figure 1: The Identity/Reality Model
Cults wage an assault on identity in two ways: first, by trying to alter people’s perception of who they are, and second, by trying to actually change who they are.
A group like the International Churches of Christ begins its assault on a person’s perception of identity early in the recruitment process. The ICC offers to give the recruit a new standard for life: the Bible – and more insidiously, the group’s interpretation of the Bible. The ICC seeks to redefine the recruit’s status in eternity according to the group’s simple equation, disciple = Christian = saved. It attempts to convince the recruit that he or she is personally “lost” and “in darkness” unless salvation is obtained via the group.
The ICC puts recruits through a purging of sins and secrets to make them feel “Godly sorrow” about their entire previous life. ICC Women’s Geographic Sector Leader Maria Rogers once described this process in blunt terms:
"Very few people are just readily broken and humble before God, and we've gotta get them there – and I believe we leave a lot of women in that position, feeling kind of good about themselves, and okay, listen, that's not the goal. The goal is that they need to feel like wretches. They need to feel so bad about their lives and the way they’ve lived before God – I mean, I can think of countless studies and counting the cost sessions that I’ve had with women who really didn’t feel that bad about their lives, and felt that they’d lived a pretty good life. I think about one girl recently that just became a Christian. . . She had been involved in tons of immorality, in her mind, in her heart, in her actions. And yet she didn’t see it that bad, you better believe we had a talk. You better believe that I talked to her about the immorality – I made her feel like a prostitute, and gladly and rightly so. . ."
Rogers then asked her audience of ICC women’s leaders to say they were prostitutes:
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"Let me tell you, when I became a Christian, in my heart, I felt and knew I was a prostitute. And if you don’t, just read Ezekiel 16. And you think about what you are in your heart and in your mind to God, and what you’ve been like with him. We’re all prostitutes. Amen? I want us all to say that together. 'I am a prostitute.' [female audience repeats, 'I am a prostitute'] Okay, wait, again. 'I am a prostitute.' [audience repeats, 'I am a prostitute'] How does it feel? Well, that’s what you are without God, and don’t ever forget it. And don’t let the women you’re studying with ever get by without knowing that as well. That’s the kind of conviction that we need to help people have."
Maria Rogers (Geographic Sector Leader – Women), Producing Godly Sorrow, Boston World Missions Seminar, audio tape, September 2, 1988. (about audio clips)
The ICC doesn’t stop at altering a person’s sense of identity, it will likely seek to alter the person’s actual identity. ICC members truly may be expected to die to self – to subsume their identities. The expectation of a changed identity is exemplified in the ICC’s doctrine of “becoming a disciple” before baptism: recruits must demonstrate signs of an identity shift as a prerequisite to membership – or at least a willingness to “become a disciple” as the group defines one.
A new member’s behavior is influenced through day-to-day confession and "discipling" to conform to the group norm. The imitation of ICC disciplers and leaders helps this transformation:
"List the things you are specifically imitating in your discipling partner’s life. If it is a struggle to come up with a list here, then you are not focused on imitation. What do you need to do today to start obeying the Bible and imitating the leader that God has put in your life?"
Brian Felushko (Toronto Church of Christ Elder), Discipling: A Study Guide, Leaders’ Resource Handbook, Volume One, DPI, Woburn, MA, 1998, p. 31.
Members may be told that “Becoming like our discipler is the first step in becoming like Jesus.” (4) Instead, people may end up becoming more like other group members – even though leadership’s emphasis on imitation seems to have lessened somewhat in recent years. Lifton’s theme of “doctrine over person” describes the tendency to remold people to fit a group’s ideology: “Rather than modify the myth in accordance with experience, the will to orthodoxy requires instead that men be modified in order to reaffirm the myth.” (5) Ironically, this church that uses the catch phrase “get out of yourself” often succeeds in getting members to do literally that: change their identities.
Cults wage an assault on reality in two ways: first, by trying to alter people’s perception of reality, and second, by actually attempting to change reality. Reality to cults is pliable – something to be shaped to serve the group’s aims.
ICC recruits’ perception of reality is attacked simultaneously with their identity in the ICC's First Principles Bible Studies. The ICC teaches that the church is the Kingdom of God, and seeks to shift recruits’ priorities toward the group’s. It introduces exclusivism into the recruit’s worldview, teaching that it alone is the "true church" and that all other religious groups are false. Before allowing recruits to become members, the ICC may first test to see that they have adopted the group’s view of reality.
To alter members’ perception of reality in any lasting way, cults must disengage their reality checks. The ICC may seek to diminish the role of members’ families in their lives. It discredits all people or viewpoints outside the group. It discourages contact with former members, and prohibits members from considering critical information about the group. In place of individual reality checks, the ICC advances its own view of reality to members via leaders, and through self-serving publicity that borders on propaganda.
Not satisfied to change peoples’ perception of reality, a cult seeks to change their actual reality. The ICC’s assault on reality begins during the recruitment process with the orchestration of events without recruits’ knowledge. Friendship is used as a lever to influence people to join. As members’ reality comes increasingly under the control of leadership, leaders may arrange for new members to move in with other members, or to break off preexisting dating relationships.
On a larger scale, the ICC orchestrates reality for its entire membership. Members are assigned specific discipling partners by leadership to “disciple” all aspects of their lives. Leadership may even steer members' career decisions, and exert control on their marriages.
More universally, ICC leadership has actually sought to change reality for the human race. Spurred on by Kip McKean’s call to complete the Great Commission in one generation, the organization planted churches around the world, permitting ethical lapses to help accomplish this goal. Reality was viewed to bend and warp to the needs of the ICC – Kip McKean actually depicted world events shifting to enable ICC church plantings.
Even past realities must buckle and break under a cult’s collective force of will. The ICC’s assault on reality encompasses events that have already occurred. Revising history, the ICC apparently claims that its year 2000 goal to plant a church in every nation was actually a 2001 goal from the beginning. The movement inaccurately claims that its schism from the mainline Churches of Christ resulted from changes in the mainline church, rather than its own changes. The role that outside influences once played in shaping the movement is now minimized or ignored.
ICC doctrinal “reality” has shifted radically as top leaders have minted new doctrines and practices ), all the while calling them “restorations” of “old truths”. New doctrines have been created seemingly to prove the group’s uniqueness, even when the new doctrines contradicted old ones. ICC leadership generally sidesteps the ramifications of having been wrong in the past – just as it skirts the likelihood that it is wrong on matters in the present. Ultimately, ICC leaders become stewards of reality, deciding what reality is and enforcing that reality on membership.
To see ICC recovery tips based on the Identity/Reality model, click the "next" button below...
(1) Robert J. Lifton, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of ‘Brainwashing’ in China, The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, NC, 1989, p. 67.
(2) Richard Ofshe and Margaret T. Singer, “Attacks on Peripheral versus Central Elements of Selfand the Impact of Thought Reforming Techniques,” Cultic Studies Journal, Volume 3, Issue 1, 1986.
(3) Margaret Singer, “Understanding Mind Control” transcribed by Carol Giambalvo, Coercive Persuasion Conference, Milwaukee, April 1988.
(4) Nadine Templer (Geographic Sector Leader – Women), “Wash One Another’s Feet,” Boston Church of Christ Bulletin, Vol IX, No 46, November 20, 1988.
(5) Robert J. Lifton, Thought Reform…, p. 432.
Copyright © 2001 Dave Anderson. All rights reserved.
