If you haven’t left an oppressive religious community, peeking inside one may seem novel, a curious poking of your nose into a weird upside-down world where everything mainstream culture takes for granted is swapped out for some alternate reality.If you have left such a community, though, stories of others who’ve also found their way out induce a mix of panic and relief. Critics try to stay neutral, but I can’t pretend One of Usdidn’t sock me in the solar plexus; the documentary about three young people trying to make their way outside of Hasidic Judaism is laden with a familiar sadness and longing.
My own background is much closer to an earlier film from One of Us co-directors Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady: the 2006 documentary Jesus Camp, which looked inside a charismatic Christian summer camp for young people that trained them in spiritual warfare (and to an extent, conservative political warfare). That film is hard to watch too.
Whereas Jesus Camp focused on the faithful, though, One of Us takes a different tack in its examination of an insular religious community (and one that’s more impenetrable to outsiders). Instead of talking to the true believers, Ewing and Grady follow the questioners. The film’s revelations are two-pronged: They uncover much about the Hasidic community, while also more broadly exposing how insular groups keep people in and everyone else out. It’s hard to leave, even when staying is impossible too. Excerpt from : In the moving Netflix documentary One of Us, 3 ex-Hasidic Jews struggle with secular life
Freedom to be, is the greatest blessing and the price one pays to leave the flock.
5 comments:
I can't help notice how secular society itself is becoming more and more like a abusive cult. Freedom of thought, speech and expression is increasingly being supressed by political correctness. Even Joe Biden, hardly a freedom lover, recently complained of the lack of freedom of debate at universities.
The disease is spreading.
I left LCG a few years ago, and now I only wish I had done so much sooner.
For me, what made all the difference is that I was able to run to something, not just away from LCG. I moved to a new city because of my work, and I had to make new friends, so I just made friends through work and some social organizations instead of through LCG.
At first I expected to be disappointed by "worldly" friends, but do you know what I found? My new non-LCG friends were almost without exception more loving, more supportive and more generous than any of my LCG friends. Even more surprising, I found, is that they were generally much more honest and trustworthy than my LCG friends. Even the ones who didn't call themselves Christians were "better Christians" than the "true Christians" of LCG. Furthermore, interacting with my new friends gave me the impetus to be a better friend and a better person than I ever was during my time in LCG.
That's no surprise. In a culture where people are critical and judgmental on each other, they are also fearful, and fear is the opposite of love. Inside judgemental churches, you should not expect to receive love. They can't give you what they don't have.
I understand what you mean I had a similar experience after leaving LCG, IN MY case I found my so called worldly family far more genuine than most of my friends in LCG even though I neglected relationships with them for what I thought was church family. I learnt the difference between real love and the love bombing you get from LCG and similar groups.
Before I jad left the old WCG, I had begun to hang out in bars a couple nights a week. Then I began to make new friends who accepted me as I was. They became my support group and helped me when I left. Some are still my friends. As for those who were my friends that still attend an ACOG? Few
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