Author Ben Appel found that he didn’t need to live in a religious commune to experience cult dynamics. He only needed to go to college.

Appel grew up in the Lamb of God, a patriarchal Christian covenant community. As he recounts in his newly released memoir, Cis White Gay: The Making of a Gender Heretic, members “pledge[d] fealty to a small group of self-appointed leaders,” men served as “coordinators,” women as “handmaids” (yes, that is what they were called), and wives were required to obey their “husband-masters.”

When he realized he was gay—something he was taught was spiritually contaminating and would not only condemn him but bring disaster upon his family—it drove him into compulsive, punishing rituals of prayer and self-surveillance.

Cult expert Janja Lalich describes the “bounded choice” of cult life as living in a system in which one’s entire reality is shaped by the group. “Members’ choices are limited by the structure and ideology of the group, which permeate their very sense of self.”

Cults Rely on Us-vs-Them Thinking

Cults isolate their members from competing ideas. The late cult psychologist Margaret Singer wrote that cults create “a polarized us-versus-them worldview,” in which the in-group is right and outsiders are wrong, insiders are enlightened and good and outsiders are backwards and evil.

In Appel’s childhood, the cult was the in-group and everyone else was an outsider. Secular humanism, feminism, and homosexuality were framed as morally dangerous. He was taught to fear the contamination of outsiders and that those who violated what the Lamb of God leadership saw as God’s order would “get sick and die and spend eternity in hell.”

Growing up terrified that even a single impure thought could condemn him, Appel experienced unrelenting psychological torment from guilt and fear. Consumed by obsessive, irrational, and........

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