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I Can’t Hear God Anymore
Wendy Duncan
Rowlett, Texas: VM Life
Resources, LLC, 2006, 228 pages. ISBN: 0-977660-0-X.
Reviewed by
Lois V. Svoboda, M.D., L.M.F.T.
Ms. Duncan’s first person account of her seven-year
experience as a member of The Trinity Foundation of Dallas, Texas, an outwardly
reputable Christian organization set up to model Christian living at its best,
ranks along side of Hassan’s Combating Cult Mind Control and other first
person cult narratives. For years I have searched for a book that could clarify
from a Christian perspective both the scripture twisting and the theological
distortions that quasi-Christian cults inflict on their members. This book fits
such a niche. When I Can’t Hear God Anymore arrived in the mail I picked
it up curiously, intending to look it over. It proved to be a page turner, and
I finished it the day it arrived. I couldn’t put it down.
Duncan has done her homework. She has done a difficult
thing: made the process by which she was seduced into membership into a highly
authoritarian group with bizarre personal reinterpretations of scripture seem
both understandable and reasonable. She addresses her particular vulnerabilities
which blinded her to warning signs that all was not well in this group. She
spells out the promise that fired her imagination. After a couple of divorces,
causing her to be treated as an outsider in her own Christian denomination, she
welcomed input from other and supposedly wiser people in choosing her next
partner. She also balances the positives of group life (no more loneliness, a
ready made social system, a sense of community) with the negatives. What is
different about this book is the apparent “evangelical mainstreamness” of the
Trinity Foundation.
Duncan was no naive, idealistic teenager. She was adult, in
her forties, with a Master’s degree from a seminary and a stable job. She knew
about cults. She checked out the group she was considering in several ways
before joining. But in spite of her precautions, she still fell in and stayed in
seven years.
She writes in a clear, straightforward manner. She
organizes her material logically, including the theological distortions of her
group leader, Ole Anthony. Superficially, the language and doctrine of her
leader would be recognizable to any evangelical, although idiosyncratic. But the
idiosyncrasies can be rationalized by the intelligence and originality of its
leader. But also as in most cults, there was a discrepancy between the doctrine
and the behaviors of the group. She has organized her material into chapters
about her process of gradually being drawn into the group, the leader, his
theology—including both orthodoxy and distortions, the ways the leader used
scripture to systematically break down members’ egos, and her exiting the
group. She describes the multiple metastases within her system of the
pernicious doctrinal distortions, some of which took years to erase. Her
recovery, interestingly, was done with a minimum of professional help. She
details how she did that.
To someone unfamiliar with mainstream Christianity, the
great detail that she uses to describe the theological distortions and scripture
twisting that are part of the working credos of the Trinity Foundation may seem
drawn out and overdone; but for me, it’s the kind of detail I have felt some of
the testimonials of other pseudo Christian group former members have glossed
over or left out.
I would recommend this book without reservation to anyone
who is interested in understanding why the Christian church has always relied on
scripture and why the church through the ages has rested on orthodoxy. Families,
former high authority group members, pastors, students, could all benefit.
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