We’ve been pruning a poisonous tree and expecting safe fruit.
I wrote this late last year, obviously around the time of the Charlie Kirk murder and the release of the second season of Shiny Happy People. As I was reading over this in my “writing” folder, I decided to post it here. I still don’t know if I will ever publicize this blog, but this makes so much more sense to me now, only a few short months later, as the themes here have intensified. So I am posting it. I believe this even more today, and I think more people might even be thinking it because of current events involving the exposure of corruption and counterfeits in church and state. Today is February 26, 2026. Things are being revealed rapidly, so I’m sure next week there will be even more to point to, so this is just what I saw then and see more of now.
I just finished watching the third and final episode of Shiny Happy People, Season Two. I’ve watched both seasons over the last couple of months, and I don’t attribute this to anything other than the sovereignty of God that it would be in this time of the Charlie Kirk aftermath that I’d decide to watch them. I watched S1 before the shooting, and S2 after. Kirk is actually shown briefly in this second season. Here’s what is so disturbing about this series. They show dark and devastating examples of perverted doctrine and the misuse of the name of Jesus to deceive, abuse and control. Evil masquerading as light, as the Bible calls it. Unlike a tell-all book or an investigative article, these episodes have footage. Not just footage of the TV shows, events or teachings, but interviews of the human beings that share the trauma and lifelong impact these interactions with cults like Gothard and Teen Mania have left behind. It is hard to watch.
But were this just a show exposing some terrible people doing terrible things “out there”, I would feel anger and sadness over the harm done to these people who believed they were following God’s will when they were trained in movements led by evil men to manipulate, control and abuse people in the name of Jesus. Spiritual abuse such as this, which often also involved sexual and emotional torment, is a special kind of trauma that attacks the very core of a person’s identity as a child of God, and instills confusion and pain in our souls. I’ve become more familiar with this in the last few years, and it’s hard to put it into words. Words like “heartbreaking” and “devastating” seem to be used to describe almost anything these days. I think I will just say it disturbs me, and it grieves me.
What happened in these stories looks bad, no matter how biased you are toward a fundamental-christian-patriarchal-nationalist view of Christianity. You would have to be blind and cold-hearted not to see and feel the pain portrayed. No, what makes it so disturbing is the places these stories rub up against, and at times overlap with what WE believed, how we were trained as young Christians, in marriage roles, and in parenting. I have already been well on my way to abandoning my confidence in the stances we took and passed down, knowingly and unknowingly to the next generation. All of that can be addressed by repentance, honest and sincere conversations, and apologies. There’s an understanding of how to do that. However, the sickening part about it – and it is more overt in the second season – is the attachment of these movements to the system of political power, that I used to be very, very sure was righteous.
To be blunt, today, I am very, very sure that it is not only unrighteous, but demonically designed to serve as a counterfeit Christianity to deceive those who believe that following Jesus means a lot of things He never mentioned. I’ve seen it phrased as “both wings are on the same bird.” We feel uneasy believing we must choose a side on every single issue that is presented to us. This pressure forces us to choose one or the other, often against our internal conscience. Believing that one side is righteous and that joining that side is something of a holy allegiance, is something we would never be able to imagine Jesus advocating. What I am trying to say is that we are being forced to eat the rotten fruit of a diseased tree that we’ve nurtured with our allegiance and our witness.
I had already become pretty sure I could not become invested in a church that participated in any of the systems with similar roots. And I am getting pretty close to the point of labeling all of it as bad fruit from a bad tree. Curiosity about a couple of doctrinal stances, and personal experience in a toxic, narcissistic system that employs spiritual manipulation will eventually lead to some common roots. To prune a tree back, even to the stump, but continue to eat from the new branches that come up is folly. It’s something I’ve been engaged in for a long time, always believing that the pruning was adequate.
I’ve read research about how hearing your religious beliefs refuted causes a different neurological effect than hearing a challenge to something nonreligious you believe to be true. It turns out that our brains receive it as a threat to our sense of self identity. It seems we have a built-in defense mechanism that might prevent us from being able to process too many upsets of our spiritual beliefs at a time. Near the end of the final episode of the Teen Mania series, these quotes perfectly summarized what I personally have experienced, what several of my other “walk away” friends have felt, and what I see (on my good objective days) many others experiencing by choosing to stay in the face of obvious dysfunction and toxicity.
“The indoctrination is complete now. It’s inside of you and you’re doing it to yourself. And you’re doing it willingly.”
“It’s scary to leave. There’s such a feeling of belonging in that kind of environment. And community. That’s what keeps people there a lot. And it’s hard to lose that.”
“People construct an identity in that space of who they are. To leave is to separate from that identity. So to move on to a new space was to leave that sense of self behind. That makes it almost an impossible choice.”
One very haunting part of these shows are the interviews with the adults who were traumatized as children or teens in these environments. They clearly hold the pain and brokenness that happened to them in a place that pretended to be the Body of Christ. I wonder how many people have faded into the distance in the places where I have supported this system. I know there are many, because now that I’ve left, the pattern is very clear. And that is what was disturbing to me about the final moments of the episode.
Mica, one of the graduates of the program, started a blog and invited people to tell their stories. What happened after that, though more extreme and on a larger scale, followed the exact pattern that the established leaders in our context used to deal with the questioning, stepping down, confronting, and then leaving of several people. It was so gross. And so familiar. It’s really the final nail in the coffin for me. This is not even a corruption. It’s a full-blown fake. Not a messed-up church. Not the church at all. Continuing to think of it as a treatable disease is only hurting more people. It’s an imposter system that might house authentic believers, but they experience true faith in spite of the system, not because of it.