The Words of the Burton Family
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The Words of the Burton Family |
I was an American student preparing for graduate school in Munich, Germany when I decided to hang up my studies and join the Unification Church in October, 1975. Before joining the church I had been enjoying Oktoberfest in Munich. The weather was perfect, the girls were pretty and the beer was fabulous. True, joining an obscure little movement was an abrupt change of plans, especially a shock to my parents, who had bragged to friends and family about my scholarship from the German government. But to me, having grown weary of school after six years, it was time for adventure. No beer in the church, of course, but the weather was still pretty, as were the Unification sisters. I joined a traveling crusade of missionaries that set up shop in Paris a month later.
Mom and Dad were beyond shock. My mother, especially, was mortified. Having read scary stories about the Unification Church in the Dallas Morning News, she felt duty-bound to rescue me from the clutches of the earnest young lecturers and the pretty sisters who had captured my heart. Mom and my older sister hired an up-and-coming deprogrammer named Cynthia Slaughter, a blond, 20-something former debutante who had been in the church for about a year, before she was kidnapped and forcibly converted into the anti-cult movement. Mom had signed a contract worth several thousand dollars to get me out of the church and back onto a normal career path. Ms. Slaughter said she had been mentored by Mr. Ted Patrick, but she was new at the game -- you could tell by her swagger. I believe I was one of her first professional challenges.
Sis showed up unannounced at the door of our church center in Paris one evening and invited me to go with her for coffee. In a few moments three men forced me into a car and drove to a seedy hotel downtown. During the first 48 hours Cynthia and the team did all they could to break me down with sleep deprivation and very little food. (To be denied victuals in the food capital of the world was particularly uncouth.) The deprogramming team included a couple of long-haired young political leftists and a chain-smoking Catholic priest she had recruited to help her out. Cynthia and the young Marxists took turns ridiculing and insulting me, calling me "brainwashed Zombie, robot, automaton, tool of Satan, fool, simpleton, capitalist tool, cultist, lemming, blind follower," and more. Sis did her part by telling me over and over again that my behavior was killing Mom. (My private thought at the time was that their hysteria was pushing Mom to the brink of apoplexy.) They would ask me to explain my beliefs and as soon as I would attempt an explanation they would shower me in ridicule.
As I was rather exhausted after a full day of fundraising on the first day, I decided not to resist but to ask questions of my interlocutors then sit back and respectfully listen. It soon surfaced that the Marxists were militant atheists and hated all religion. The priest had to argue with them a little here, and he smoked all the more to make his points. Cynthia apparently subscribed to some sort of fundamentalist Christian theology, and she took umbrage at their atheistic bromides, but then again, she didn't fully agree with what the Catholic Church was doing. It was rather easy to prod them into arguing with each other, and this went on for about an hour before Sis noticed that they were neglecting me and called a halt to the debate within the deprogramming circle. It was obvious to me that they couldn't succeed at the task at hand because they had no unity, no principled hierarchy, no honored central figure, no overriding sense of purpose, no sense of subject-object relationships. Although I was new to the church, I felt morally superior to them. I could have been a better deprogrammer myself, I thought. In fact, I already had reservations about the church. I could have deprogrammed myself if they had shown me a little courtesy, but noooooooo. They had to play hardball. Folks back in West Texas would say, "They were just plain ignorant."
After five days of haranguing by Cynthia and her scruffy colleagues, I was able to convince them that I was thoroughly cleansed of my new-religionist beliefs. Mom and Sis shipped me off to stay with family friends in the South of France for six weeks where I read books about thought reform and psychological coercion. I didn't resist the rehabilitation. For me it was a vacation from fundraising in the cold in front of Paris Metro stations. The books on brainwashing techniques were fairly interesting, but they didn't break my faith. The books didn't persuade me that the educational methods of our church were any more manipulative than the fire-and-brimstone sermons I had listened to for years at the First Baptist Church in Midland, Texas. Those sermons used to scare my pants off.
After six weeks, I announced to my hosts that I wanted to return to the church, and they agreed to let me go. No, they didn't agree with my church, but they were proud and patriotic Texans who reckoned that I had as much right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as anyone else. They gave me a hundred dollars and a train ticket back to Paris, where more adventures, and an MFT, were waiting.