Plugged In
Because Netflix and other streaming services have noticed a particular profit motive in driving “engagement” to shows related to true crime, religious extremism, and the occult (more on that at the end), I have naturally watched the series Dancing for the Devil, about becoming ensnared in a coercive religious environment in part due to one’s presence on TikTok.1 While there are a few observations to make about the church itself, this strikes me as somewhat less interesting than the explicit framing of the series itself: TikTok driving people into the arms of a highly-controlling prophet-figure! So much for being a lip sync and dance app! But I think this is exactly the point: what does it actually mean to be an “Internet cult?” Do these movements differ in tangible ways from pre-internet “cults?” Or are there ways in which the experience of being in a small, intense religious movement in our day and age becomes tinged with the influence of the various social media platforms we are all using all the time?
Required Caveat
I will do the necessary academic disclaimer here and acknowledge, of course, that “cult” is a polemical word to use in and of itself, and not particularly useful in understanding religious pathways in general.2 At its worst, it is used in a popular context to simply indicate “a religious movement which appears unsavory, coercive, or simply weird.” And for most people looking at certain particularist religious movements, maybe so. But, to make the equally obvious point, most major religions in their early stages would certainly have come across to the broader populace as a bit unsavory or weird, brainwashing their devoted acolytes into accepting a worldview diametrically opposed to the previously-accepted proper path. It may be rehashing Religion 101 discourse, but, e.g., Christianity and Islam could both very well have been accused by their contemporary critics as being “cults” in their early development for any variety of (again, by definition, polemical) reasons — reasons which the early followers would themselves have rejected as unfair or missing the point. It likely makes more sense to refer to movements, orders, expressions, which are not actually euphemisms — “cult” is the euphemism3 — but are an attempt to be intellectually consistent.
To get back to the main point: the question is the extent to which a religious movement kicking things off on the internet seems to affect the basic model it offers to your day-to-day homo religiosus. Not every Internet-based religious movement works from the same operational premises; there are limits to how many Zoom calls you might have to attend depending on which guru you choose. For a few examples of what I mean, I am sure that both the small cult (wait,—) of personality of Kat Torres and the Robert Shinn Tiktok church are new religious movements which took obvious advantage of the reach of the Internet, but there are also the almost-purely-online orders such as the Twin Flames Universe movement of Jeff and Shaleia Ayers. What I am curious about is what *unique* role the Internet is really playing in these, if any.
Troubled Guidance
Though the case of Kat Torres has been folded into the modern-day preoccupation with cults and the macabre, this is one of those cases where I get the feeling that the religious angle is somehow both essential and irrelevant to the story at hand.
The short version is that Torres leveraged her promotion of an aspirational and Instagram-ready version of a luxurious life to trap young Brazilian women into a life of servitude and exploitation. The long version is that our guru sold her own ascendance from a Brazilian favela to “part[ying] with Leonardo DiCaprio”4 to write a book titled A Voz (The Voice), “in which she claimed she could make predictions as a result of her spiritual powers.”5 In a not particularly surprising twist, certain former roommates of Torres have suggested that her spiritual awakening was driven by consumption of ayahuasca, at which point “she kind of…started going off the deep end…Luzer Twesrky, Torres’s former flatmate, said he believes the drug ayahuasca changed her.”
After apparently seeing through the veil of the unknown, Torres began seeking subscriptions for consultations for her to bestow advice on “love, money, and self-esteem,” while amassing a set of devotees to whom she referred as her “witch clan.” What takes the whimsy out of the coven is that her followers were largely desperate people who sought her out because of her aspirational lifestyle, and who were subsequently largely made to work as forced laborers to maintain said lifestyle. While this may have begun as housework, it escalated into Torres holding the passports and earnings of her acolytes, pressuring them to work in strip clubs or as escorts, having them dye their hair to match her blonde locks, and not letting them into the house if they hadn’t generated enough cash on any given day.
This behavior exhibits all of the classical warning signs of human trafficking, and the authorities have rightly gotten involved. But I couldn’t help but also notice that Torres herself was quite derivative in her own proclamation about her leadership:
You choose to believe whatever you want to believe. I can tell you I’m Jesus. And you can see Jesus or you can see the devil, that’s it. It’s your choice. It’s your mind.
Aficionados of the Strange will recognize this as a stale riff on one of the more embarrassing Charles Manson statements (I realize this is a bit redundant), but such things seem to have staying power.6 Our BBC reporter transmits that following their interview with the now-imprisoned guru and witchy leader, her “parting threat” was that “[they] would soon find out if she had powers or not,” which is exactly the sort of threat one often sees leveled by the more coercive religious leaders — an implantation of uncertainty which is meant to sprout roots into the mind of the follower who, even if she is starting to have some doubts about this not-so-charismatic leader, was compelled by the initial spiritual claims.
Does this qualify as an “Instagram cult,” by means of the initial lure being a life of manifested luxury and self-actualization shared in that tidy 1:1 aspect ratio? The archetype of being drawn into a restrictive and coercive environment following the initial sell of being able to improve your life in terms of “love, money, and self-esteem” — but mostly money — is nothing new, sadly. Keith Raniere was an Amway/mid-level marketing guy in his early career, and NXIUM was happy to run “executive training programs” alongside the rest of the coercion and abuse. The Helzer brothers went through the self-help courses (including “GREATER SUCCESS AND SATISFACTION IN YOUR CAREER”) of Impact Trainings.7 The Torres racket strikes me as a particularly sad manifestation of a pre-existing pathway which took advantage of social media to find converts, but which could have existed in a pre-Instagram era through other means.
Coincidences keep mounting
So, to bounce from one social media platform to another: the “Tiktok Cult” of Robert Shinn and Shekinah Church. To speak directly to the Netflix series, the social media tie-in is that this particular church was not only a source of religious instruction and hopes for salvation, but also had a number of money-making ventures, one of which was a talent management company known as 7M. From a business perspective, there is something useful about having a front organization which sounds like a standard media marketing business rather than one of the attributes of Adonai. The short story is that with the help of the son of the patriarch, Isaiah Shinn — a videographer, of course — the church began a recruitment campaign of the people who were doing those sorts of uncanny social media dances you would see in the late 2010s and early 2020s.8 These dancers, who were (fairly!) trying to get any foothold into the industry they could possibly grab, would be brought into the Shinn universe, encouraged to recruit additional members, and, over time, be subject to an increasingly rigorous surveillance regime to ensure their compliance with church principles and encourage their disenfranchisement from their previous friends and family. It will likely not come as a surprise that the revivalist ministry of Shinn likewise had him arguing that his role in the church demanded that he have sexual access to female acolytes.
It makes sense why the story of the Shekinah Church under Robert Shinn would get the treatment of it being a “TikTok” movement in terms of trying to drive Netflix viewership, but the movement really isn’t particularly exceptional. So, we have: a highly charismatic Korean (relevant for the outreach among immigrant communities) Christian who has articulated a Christianity in which he has preternatural knowledge, sexual behaviors must be tightly proscribed, and the leader as the vessel of the Spirit exerts a high level of control among any and every follower while likewise wanting to maximize the exposure of the church among likely converts. Those familiar with the Unification Church will likely see the parallels immediately, but the Shekinah Church archetype is not only limited to the manifestations of Christianity led by Korean charismatics.
Consider also if this resonates with The Children of God, the hippie-ish (well, “born-again hippie,” in their own words) Christian movement which was founded (pretty unsurprisingly) in 1968. Much of the movement is replaceable with other manifestations of 1960s religious ecstasy — a desire for “revolution and happiness” [sic!] alongside eschatological speculation and the leader figure assigning to his person the identity of major prophets, in this case, Moses and David. There are likely two avenues through which The Children of God, eventually re-titled The Family International, are widely known, both springing from the fact that they had a highly permissive attitude towards sexual behavior (“The Devil Hates Sex! — But God Loves It!," as their slogan went).9
The specific angle that is relevant for the comparison with the so-called TikTok church is the Family of God phenomenon of “flirty fishing,” which (as you can probably guess) is when you have your young, attractive members meet people out in bars or clubs, sleep with them, and gradually draw them into the church so as to offer them a chance at salvation. Setting aside the actual sex, what we have is a movement exploiting the passions — whether sexual, monetary, or fame-seeking — of potential converts to seek out people who otherwise would not be interested in hanging out in an evangelical church to convince them to convert and, ideally, overlook all of the less savory elements of that same church (notwithstanding the fact that such coercive religious movements typically have outspoken defectors). I am not sure the tedious TikTok dances themselves are as much of the major takeaway as the fundamental dynamics of evangelizing movements desperate for (attractive and charismatic) converts.
Love in the Breakout Room
Finally, the Twin Flames Universe (TFU) organization is an uncanny group not only because it relies on the charisma (as it were) of an extremely off-putting leader figure, but in the fact that it was based almost entirely on online platforms. If you have not seen the relevant documentary for this one, TFU was founded by a couple now styling themselves “Jeff and Shaleia Divine” who promised coaching courses which could put you in touch with your soulmate, your “twin flame,” to whom you are mystically bound and destined to find, provided you have the proper spiritual mindset. This is not a foreign concept in esoteric and New Age writings, and I would bet that Elizabeth Clare Prophet’s having written a book on the topic — in which “the Hindu belief in karma and the Buddhist concept of yin and yang” make an appearance alongside Evangelical Christian discourse — has something to do with its presence in American New Age spheres. As the linked Vox article does a decent job of discussing, TFU and other organizations fixated on the “twin flame” idea view finding this counterpart as key to one’s spiritual development, a sine qua non of personal enlightenment. There are also hamfisted attempts at incorporating apocalyptic signifiers into this belief system, e.g., believing that only 144,000 (i.e., the number of those redeemed from the earth in Revelation 14) twin flames exist. In other words, these are all good reasons for the lonely and spiritually-inclined seeker to find their twin flame at all costs, both financial and personal.
As you would guess based on the very existence of a Netflix documentary on the subject, all of this leads to the husband-and-wife pair at the head of TFU amassing followers based on their alleged ability to divine one’s twin flame, and leveraging this into a high standard of control over the fellowship. As you might also predict, the patriarch of the movement capriciously determines that couples are spiritually bonded based on one-off Facebook messages, leading people to feel that they are inextricably bound to people who come across as odd and unstable. Given that the founding couple feel that they bear the mystical gift of determining soul bindings, they brook no dissent, as with any tightly-bound and somewhat desperate new religious movement. The group discussion sections are largely struggle sessions, based on the premise that being upset by external stimuli is a reflection of turbulent inner states, with the organization explicitly telling followers to internalize outward conflict as an issue or failing with oneself. I had forgotten after the first watch that there is a claim to being a reincarnation of Jesus, which doesn’t even seem to be totally necessary to the other claims of the group, but hey, why not.
While much of the reporting has understandably focused on the grandiose claims of TFU, its teachings on gender and sexuality in general, and the abuse of its members, the thing that struck me most in learning about this group is that the events of the documentary happened almost entirely online. Sure, there were material-world effects to moving a few states over to partner up with someone you do not know, but these sorts of pairings were themselves the result of group Zoom calls. There is an uncharitable reading that this seems almost completely absurd: it is one thing to be on a compound out in the middle of the woods with no cell phone reception where you are being fed almost no protein10 and end up following the nonsensical advice of a mercurial Leader. Surely it is easier to break out of a group when you can turn off your computer and go for a walk.
To this I would say, well, what happens after you turn off your computer? Many people sunk a great deal of time and money into TFU, often at the cost of their relationships outside of the order (with said external relationships being, naturally, discouraged by the leadership as distracting from the spiritual pursuit of the One True Twin Flame). Outsiders may also not be convinced about the worldview, but it does seem that a chunk of people in TFU really were convinced about the claims of Jeff and Shaleia — is it really easier to “just” abandon a core belief because you found out about it primarily on Facebook and Zoom?
Perhaps we have all fully internalized that what is online is fully “real” to the extent that it affects our personal relationships, that it is where a great deal of our work and conversation happen, and that there are social consequences to not being a part of the online conversation. But what is most interesting to me about the reporting on TFU is the fact that the online aspect is not harped-upon nearly as much as the lurid examples of religious coercion. This all happened online, but it happened online in ways uncannily similar to how things might have happened in a temple, retreat, or commune. In other words, is there an “Instagram cult,” a “Tiktok cult,” a “Zoom cult” — or have even our religious lives become so mediated through digital experience that the social media adjectives are meaningless, catchy as marketing tools but worthless in actually understanding the dynamics at play?
Excursus: The Genre of the Uncanny
An aside: as someone who enjoys reading and listening to reports on topics that are occult, macabre, or simply weird, I have nevertheless found it odd how our media platforms have a set genre of “strangeness.” Consider, for example, the quite popular Last Podcast on the Left — to which I happily listen, to be clear — which covers so-called cults, but also conspiracy theories, cryptozoology, UFO sightings, serial killers, charismatic historical figures, and anything else which falls into the category of the odd and unusual. This makes for a good podcast!11 The critical point, though, is that these things don’t seem, on the surface, to have much to do with each other, except that they are culturally-coded as “strange” — which is exactly the point. It would certainly be worthy of a podcast series, to say the least, if the CIA orchestrated the assassination of JFK, but this strikes me as a slightly different realm of knowledge of the psychological affectations of John Wayne Gacy, much less discussions of various alien races. In other words, what in the world do any of these things actually have to do with each other?
I suspect part of it is that the people willing to dig deeply into such things are also people who have a certain openness to seriously considering things which are coded as bizarre and unusual fringe cases. The challenge, then, of wanting to take the occult and the paranormal seriously is that by even identifying such things as occult and paranormal, you insert yourself into a predetermined paradigm in which these things are definitionally a bit out of the ordinary. This makes it difficult to then go back and make the valid case that many people believe in occult and paranormal topics, that respectable and rational individuals have reported experiences with the bizarre, and therefore, these things should really just be considered “normal” avenues of study.
I have noticed similar challenges in the academic study of the esoteric and the occult, as well. On the one hand, one wants to point out that yes, much of what we now consider the “occult” was once mainstream, considered carefully by plenty of “serious thinkers,” and that attitudes towards the occult are often swept up in a simplistic version of Enlightenment theory which creates dichotomies between what is “rational” and what is “irrational” (which then can get applied to religion and the occult in very crude and unsophisticated ways). On the other, I have sometimes sensed a certain effort to present the academic occult as itself a bit witchy and subversive, which reinforces the very paradigm it is meant to upend, and which thus strikes me as potentially self-defeating. But this will have to be a balance the academics decide.
The Future is Now
An odd thing about contemporary discussions of “transhumanism” is that we are largely already in the situation of a human experience so heavily mediated by technology that large portions of our waking lives are becoming hard to imagine as happening without screens. I am sure there are still people whose idea of transhumanism is having the data capture of your personal consciousness uploaded into a hard drive or cloud computing platform which allows you to live as long as that hard drive or cloud computing platform is maintained.12 I often have gotten the feeling that this variety of transhumanism is another expression of the human fear of transcendence and infinity — items for which we have terms, but which cannot fully (by definition) be processed by our brains. I also suppose the appeal only works in a worldview in which there is no God, and our voices cease forever when we shuffle off the mortal coil, so being trapped in a hard drive is somehow supposed to be better than joining in the long sleep of those who have passed through this life before.13
Even if you are a philosophical materialist, though, I am inclined to say that the transhumanist future is not completely detached from present that most of us live. Already our emotions, hopes, fears, personalities, are poured into the funnel of digital experience to be distributed out to others experiencing these effects almost exclusively through digital experience. A “future” of transhumanism — when we work with people we only know online, date only those who we see online, become furious or elated with opinions we see online? The counterpoint, fairly, is that the techno-futurist “transhuman” idea may be one where the individual has no more physical body, as opposed to our supposed “enhancement” of the physical experience — well taken, and perhaps our transhumanism will someday accelerate. But maybe transhumanism, as with our current understanding of sexuality, functions more as a spectrum: while our bodies have not been completely replaced with the pleasures of optimal memory usage, we have likely extended (per McLuhan) ever more and various portions of our sensory experience into digital vessels, with little hope of reversing this trend short of a world-destabilizing solar flare. Only time will tell.
Surely this is the social media platform which would most easily drive self-abnegation in service of an obscure church?
From the standpoint of the detached outside observer, that is, rather than the advocate for any particular religious belief system.
In fact, it is both a euphemism and a thought-killing device: it is a cult, thus it is weird/crazy/irrational, thus it requires no further thought. This is fundamentally antithetical to the processes of analogy and understanding which are at the root of the project of religious studies, as discussed in the classic essay, “The Devil in Mr. Jones,” by J.Z. Smith: Jonathan Z. Smith, Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 102-120.
Quotations and references to come from: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cydvj6951dyo.
Based on the Amazon page, there is a reference to seeing the working of Supreme Invisible Help, Suprema Ajuda Invisível, and the reviews confirm an interest in the ever-seductive Law of Attraction.
Maybe it is just me imagining how annoying someone must be who says, “look down at me and you see a fool, look up at me and you see a god, look straight at me and you see yourself,” but we all have our particular tastes in leadership.
Sure, “Children of Thunder” is a cool movement name and all, but their ruthlessness and foolishness both play a role in this Harper’s article about a professional detective and de-programmer.
You can watch the thing yourself, but for sourcing of the overall narrative, I am pulling from: https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/story/dancing-for-the-devil-7m-tiktok-cult-netflix-docuseries.
The dark side of this, and the one that led to a fair amount of notoriety, is that this attitude led to some highly-inappropriate relations between adults and minors. Per that same Wikipedia article, you never want to be in a situation where you are releasing a statement that, “due to the fact that our current zero-tolerance policy regarding sexual interaction between adults and underage minors was not in our literature published before 1986, we came to the realization that during a transitional stage of our movement, from 1978 until 1986, there were cases when some minors were subject to sexually inappropriate advances.” That is going to be pretty hard to come back from, no matter the follow up.
A classic coercive group technique, because it is hard to make decisions when you aren’t getting enough protein — such as the decision to up and leave — which explains some of the odd and irrationally-restrictive dietary restrictions of some of the more hostile religious movements.
In some sense, the genre also animates this Substack itself, so do with that what you will.
I will leave it up to people who are more technical than I am as to whether this would be an exhilarating, god-like existence, or if the excision of the intellect from the soul to be put on a hard drive might lead to a sort of Jaunt-like non-sensory eternity. I am not sure if this is better than dying and having your soul re-immersed once more in the Universal, spending an eternity in the Big Deli in the Sky (the soup isn’t bad, could be warmer, etc.).
This is less of a problem for the believers, in which reuniting with God means (re-?)submersion into the Eternal — each day (so to speak) by definition an unfolding of the Infinite One, in which the false human fear of a stale and boring infinity is merely an artifact of our having had to live in the mortal sphere — but who can speak definitively about the other side of the veil?